Heiress Tamara Ecclestone is being mocked for not knowing what toast is. ‘Is it called bread or toast when it’s not toasted?’ she wonders. ‘So, before you toast it, toast is bread?’
Her questions come in a new fly-on-the-wall TV reality series (is a fly still a fly even when it’s not flying?) to be broadcast this month on the new channel ITVBe.
In a programme called Seven Days With . . ., Tamara is shown making her husband, Jay Rutland, a toasted bacon sandwich for breakfast.
Nice thing to do! A loving scenario replayed in millions of British households, every day of the week. Bacon, bread, brown sauce. Grill, toast, splodge. What is not to love or understand?
Quite a lot, it seems. It takes a special kind of girl to sprinkle a big pinch of stupid on something quite so simple. And Tamara is that girl.
In scenes that bring a whole new meaning to the term ‘thick-sliced’, the 30-year-old, privately educated daughter of billionaire F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone is shown struggling to understand the difference between toast and bread.
Even though husband Jay quietly explains that non-toasted toast is something (listen carefully, darling) called ‘bread’, Tamara can’t quite bring herself to believe him.
One of the richest women in the world, Tamara insists ‘bread’ is the stuff served in a ‘bread basket’ in restaurants. Sliced bread, according to the voices in her head, is what toast is — even when it’s not toasted.
‘Oh God. Are you seriously asking me if toast that is not toasted is still called toast?’ asks property developer Jay on screen.
‘Yes,’ says his wife.
‘This is what I have to deal with every day!’ sighs Jay, before running through the toasting process once more with feeling.
‘You are a buffoon, but you make a good bacon sandwich,’ he generously concludes.
Tamara then confides to the camera: ‘Apparently toast is only toast when it’s toasted. That is what Jay says, and I am going to Google it.’
Poor love. In that great big ball of unproven dough otherwise known as her mind, heaven knows what she might think if her husband announces that he fancies a roll instead.
Yet to be fair to Tamara, bread and assorted bread-related matters can be very confusing. They really can. Do you have to be a member to eat a club sandwich? Is brown bread just white bread with a tan? And why are hot cross buns so angry?
Presumably, Tamara thinks a French stick is a bit that has fallen from ‘un tree’ and that a baguette is a small handbag. Sourdough? The resentment people feel about her having all that money. Shortbread? The stuff leprechauns eat.
Of course, Seven Days With . . . Tamara And Jay is just the latest in a long line of TV reality shows to accidentally expose the bottomless stupidity of those who take part.
We have all been here before. Last year, on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity, reality star Joey Essex revealed that he was not a confrontational person because he didn’t like to ‘confrontate’ people. He also disclosed that he could tell the time when he was looking at a digital watch, but not if he was looking at ‘a watch with one of them circle things’.
Who could forget the intellectual travails of poor, doomed Jade Goody, the Big Brother contestant who died of cervical cancer in 2009? Among Jade’s howlers was her belief that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa and that East Angular was abroad.
She also thought Rio de Janeiro was a person, strawberries were a vegetable and once pronounced: ‘I am intelligent, but I let myself down because I can’t speak properly or spell.’
Then — and now — the state school system was blamed for turning out young people like them, wreathed in profound ignorance. Yet is Tamara any better? She is the beneficiary of the best education money can buy, including attending the private Francis Holland School in London, whose old girls include Joan Collins, Jemima Khan and the model Cara Delevingne. Didn’t they have any toast there?
The fact is that food seems to be a stumbling block on many reality shoes.
Starring in her own reality show in 2003, pop star Jessica Simpson famously got confused when eating a brand of tinned tuna called Chicken of the Sea. ‘Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish?’ she wondered. She also thought ‘buffalo wings’ really did come from buffalo with wings.
In a reality show in 2010, filthy rich heiress Paris Hilton and fellow socialite Nicole Richie experienced life through the eyes of an ordinary working class family. The family did their shopping at the low-cost U.S. supermarket chain Wal-Mart.
The girls were confused. What’s Wal-Mart? ‘I think they sell walls there, or something,’ said Paris.
Like perfumes and fashion lines, the reality show is a tempting opportunity for stars — when they are not busy demanding that their privacy is respected at all times, of course — to endear themselves even more to their fans. Despite the very real danger of humiliation, these shows remain a powerful money-spinning weapon in the celebrity armoury.
Tamara is not really a celebrity and she doesn’t need the money, but she desperately wants to be taken seriously. Three years ago, she starred in her very own reality show Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl on Channel 5.
‘People see me as a pointless, spoiled, empty human being,’ she said in the first episode, as minions fluttered around, massaging her feet, walking her dogs, counting her handbags and cooking her lunch.
Back then, just like any other socialite, underwear model and heiress, she wanted to be taken seriously as a businesswoman. Now she wants to be admired as a good wife and mother. She wants people to see how real she really is.
In a recent interview with Hello! magazine, new mum Tamara showed the depths of her ordinariness by revealing she did not employ a nanny.
‘People think I have everyone doing everything for me,’ she said.
‘I don’t. We don’t have a cook, I cook. We don’t have a nanny, we have me. I do absolutely everything with Sophia [her daughter].’
There are other intriguing insights in Seven Days With . . .. She calls a medium to her £60 million home in Kensington, West London, in a bid to explain why a picture of the couple hanging in a bathroom keeps moving slightly to the left.
Possibly because this is what pictures do if not hung correctly? Don’t be silly. The psychic suggests it is probably being moved telekinetically from beyond the grave by Jay’s late grandparents — an explanation Tamara finds entirely plausible.
Of course she does. She probably thinks that little silver box with the slots in the top in the corner of the kitchen is where the toast fairies live.
She says: ‘I believe in spirits and the after-life. I don’t think that when you are dead then that’s it. If that makes me gullible, fine. But I like to keep an open mind. I think it’s kind of cute that Jay’s granny is moving the picture.’
Bread or toast, toast or bread? Why on earth does Tamara put herself through the flour mill of public approbation, only to emerge at the other end as half-baked and flakier than ever?
One wonders whether she got enough attention when she was a child, or if all the baked goods in the world are ever going to be enough to heal the hole in her soul.
For with every reality show appearance, Tamara Ecclestone only confirms the widespread prejudice that she’s just another dizzy socialite who can’t see further than her next new pair of shoes and her baby’s pink diamante pram.
All this mum-lark, all this wife malarkey, all this having to go into the kitchen and make sandwiches and stuff? Crazy!
Marriage might be a great new adventure, Tamara. But use your loaf — enjoy it all in the privacy of your own home. Without the cameras who only come to mock. – Daily Mail