If you judge the E! Channel by its programming, you can assume that their entire viewership consists of lame Reality TV-loving, Royal Family-grovelling, celebrity-obsessed, plastic surgery fiends. Thanks to the shows on this channel, the viewers at home have begun to respect falseness; you don’t need talent, you can be like the Kardashians, like Kendra, like Coco, or you can be “Married To Jonas”. You can strut your big arse around and marry some overrated Rapper or Baller and become famous for doing absolutely nothing. You can live off your daddy’s name or wealth without achieving anything yourself, and when that well runs dry, you can procreate with your filthy rich husband, play wifey for a while, and produce a few spoilt brats who will automatically become famous thanks to our society’s fondness for nepotism. As you age, you can staple your wrinkled skin behind your ears, lipo your cellulite, cut and pull your saggy tits back up to chest height in a last-ditch attempt to attract your rich husband as he cheats on you with some younger model. If all else fails, you can at least live happily ever after with your divorce settlement and your new gold-digging, toy-boy, as your daughter grows up and repeats the cycle. How fucking aspirational.

Thanks to E! Entertainment, we seem to be giving birth to a generation of people whose only goal in life is to be rich and famous. Forget talent, forget creativity, these days it’s all about sucking-up to the right people, marrying into the right families, and posing with your possessions. The entire schedule of this channel is created to reinforce the idea of classism, capitalism, and celebrity, and amidst all the vomit-inducing programmes, the biggest puke-fest of them all is “Rich Kids Of Beverly Hills”, a show dedicated to showing off the lifestyle of socialites whilst bragging about their overpriced material goods. This bastard child of the Rich Kids Of Instagram is a weird thing to air, especially these days. At a time of worldwide austerity, a rise in food banks, a greater divide between the haves and the have nots, we have E! Entertainment shoving these well-to-do toss-pots in our faces.

This tacky show is surprisingly back for a third season, despite being one of the most unwatchable shows on E! (and that’s saying something). The Rich Kids Of Beverly Hills is on May 24th in the US and June 4th in the UK, tune in if you want to watch a bunch of over-privileged dicks strutting around like they’re important. On this show you can bear witness to an accent which I thought died out toward the close of the noughties. If you want to hear this flock of opulent twats elongating the last syllable of their sentence, uttering la-di-da valley-girl slang at every opportunity, saying crap like “Oh my gaaaawd!” every two seconds, then this is the programme for you. If contemporary celeb-speak bothers you, then the title may bother you even more. I mean Rich, yes, but kids? …Only if we’re talking about these people’s mental age.

If you haven’t seen the show, then I’ll run through the “cast”. Like a typical E! programme, of course there’s a few white guys… there’s Brendan Fitzpatrick (the Real Estate Agent and the only one who seems to do any work) and there’s Jonny Drubel (the East Coast, gay, wannabe Singer). There’s a few white women too including Morgan Stewart (daughter of an Architect) and Taylor-Ann Hasselhoff (daughter of Actor David Hasselhoff). There’s also Dorothy Wang (the Asian one) Roxy Sowlaty (the Persian one) and Earvin “EJ” Johnson (son of Magic Johnson, the overweight, black, gay one – wow that’s three boxes ticked). With this varied line-up, I suppose we’re being conditioned to think of the affluent as multi-cultural and diverse? But hold up a second, this selection seems a little suspect to me; what is this show really saying? Is it trying to tell us that white men work hard, that blonde women are ditzy, are they trying to perpetuate the stereotype of rich Middle Easterners, are they trying to reinforce the newly created stereotype of the nouveau riche Asian business tycoon, or are they saying that the only way a black man can be rich is to be a Sportsman or the offspring of one? Either way The Rich Kids Of Beverly Hills seems to be more unpleasant the more you think about it, but I guess the creators of this show don’t want the viewers to think, do they?

Being born into a certain family, being born as a certain race or in a certain country isn’t anybody’s choice, and being born into wealth is a fluke of birth; how is this something to be proud of, so much so that it’s spawned three series of this appalling show? The fact that this type of content is on the rise is downright depressing, and the fact that pretty much everything that airs on E! is intent on promoting objectification and idol-worship is sickening. As a viewer it seems they want you to forget any pursuit unless it brings you money, and if you’re unsuccessful at making any, then sit the fuck back and feel bad about it for a couple of hours.

When I’ve watched parts of this show in the past (only because there was literally nothing on elsewhere) I’ve witnessed Roxy whinging about workers “not greeting” her when entering a hotel in Shanghai. I remember her bartering with poor store-owners in China like she couldn’t afford to buy stuff at full price. Roxy has to be the worst person on the show, she’s the very definition of a “rich bitch”, she so embodies the character of the spoilt princess that I can imagine her as a fetus demanding her amniotic fluid be replaced with champagne. Mockery aside, how convenient that the obvious go-to hate-figure of the show is of Arabic descent? But I digress.

I also remember a scene where Morgan said she wanted to spend $25-30 thousand dollars on a “re-launch” party for her blog. When watching, I didn’t know what was funnier; the vast sums of wasted money or the fact that this moron actually knew how to type, use a computer, or even how to run a frigging blog. The only reason a rich person can pump huge sums of cash to “re-launch” a blog or even have a reality show on E! in the first place, is because they’re rich and privileged. So yet again we’re supposed to respect people who squander money and we’re told to look up to someone with little or no education… Thanks E! Entertainment! According to celebritynetworth.com “In a recent interview Morgan described her temporary foray into college a “$150,000 vacation” and admitted that she did not pass a single class while in school”. Great, so these prosperous pricks can piss away masses of cash while most other people are saddled with debt after actually passing their degrees. Another worthwhile element of these amazing people and their astonishing Reality TV show.

On a side note, I also recall one of these million-dollar-morons referring to Jay-Z‘ Roc-A-Fella, Pyramidal-Illuminati hand-sign as a “Wu-Tang Sign”…like “hello”, maybe get a fucking clue (my attempt at a bit of Rich Kid speak). Whilst on the topic of Rap, Rich Kids Of Beverly Hills is the kind of contrived programme which has corny Hip-Hop playing in the background and during its transitions. Thanks to a generation (or two) of complete sell-outs within the genre, this show and many others like it illustrate what’s become of Rap. Forget the streets, you can now find Hip-Hop playing in a soccer mom’s SUV, you can hear it blaring out of some Lawyer’s drop-top, and you can hear it during a crappy show about these posh fuckers. The transformation of Hip-Hop from conscious to self-conscious means that you can now hear it playing in almost every godforsaken programme on TV. It’s the reason why you’ll catch corny-ass rappers yelling “Go get that gwap!” like money is the be all and end all of life. Bombarded with this pro-capitalist propaganda twenty fours a day, from music, film and television, it really seems like the media is goading the working classes into either uprising, accepting hierarchy, or to simply feel worthless about their own situation. And while Hip-Hop becomes the soundtrack for $hitty socialites rather than the oppressed, we have to endure a corrupted version of it from every sector of entertainment.

As a final thought, a few of these cast members’ parents are foreign (first or second generation) so despite the same mainstream media that constantly tells us immigrants only come to a country to leach off its resources, they fail to acknowledge all the occasions that foreigners come to the West and bring wealth with them. Taking into consideration that it’s these Rich Kids’ fathers or mothers who are responsible for making them “rich” in the first place, surely a less corrupt channel would focus on their parents’ businesses? But oh no, in our shit-stained contemporary society, we’ll glaze over how to make money, we’ll just show you how to worship it or waste it.

#ThatsRich