Hawk Toff
How do Jacob Rees Mogg, The Hawk Tuah Girl and the UK Television Industry Intersect?
At some point within the last month, at time of writing, a video was posted to the Tim and Dee TV social media channels (the exact date is hard to nail down, although your intrepid author has tried. I found a reference stating that it was posted in early June but the virality didn’t really catch on until July). Tim and Dee TV specialise in the kind of Vox Pop interview style that is endemic to social media spaces, especially TikTok. There’s a kind of Girls Gone Wild vibe to their content as they primarily ask young ladies in party environments risqué questions. In this particular video, the duo were in Nashville, Tennessee. Tim/Dee (I tired myself out trying to find the date of the original video and do not have the mental capacity to find out which is which) asked a pair of girls “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?”. What happened next became the new viral response of the moment.
From what little can be gleaned off of Google and the miasma of hot takes, parodies, political co-opting and shitposts, Hailey Welch is a blue collar factory worker (or schoolteacher depending on who you believe) from Belfast, Tennessee. Belfast Tennessee’s Wikipedia page is three paragraphs long. A whole sentence is dedicated to the opening of the post office in 1836. I am all but certain that this small town girl (I was unable to verify if she was living in a lonely world or not) did not anticipate becoming the Internet’s main character for the week/month. But that she did when she responded to Dee/Tim’s question with the now infamous phrase “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang,”
There’s a certain poetry to the way the words are arranged. The onomatopoeia of “Hawk Tuah” (you can almost hear the gob hitting the bottom of a spitoon) combined with the broadly southern American accent creates an almost alchemical reaction in the human brain. It’s hardly surprising it went viral really. It feels idiomatic in the same way “Damn Daniel” or “I can’t believe you’ve done this” are although with a slightly tighter use case being, as it is, a reference to fellatio of the sloppy kind. You can shout “WHAT ARE THOSE!?” at your grandmother’s Crocs but I imagine she would take a dim view of being encouraged to spit on that thang.
Anyway, what followed is pretty much the playbook of a new viral star: merchandising opportunities, acquisition by a talent management, a tour of the podcast circuits. It happens less often these days as algorithms have completely flattened discovery. This felt like the early days of Web2.0 where any old nonsense could organically garner millions of views and clicks. But the reason I brought Hailey Welch, The Hawk Tuah Girl, up is because I read (from TMZ so take this with piles of Maldon Salt) that there is interest in creating a reality television series about her life.
Park that in the back of your mind for a moment.
Jacob Rees-Mogg was elected as the Conservative member of parliament for North East Somerset in 2010. Prior to this he had amassed a fortune (we’re talking over £100 million) working in investment capital, most notably as the Chief Executive of Somerset Capital Management which was formed in 2007 and from which he divested himself when he became MP (although notably still drawing income from it as a partner in the business). Under the coalition government he was an MP of little renown. He sat broadly to the right of his Prime Minster, David Cameron, on most issues, economic and social. He often rebelled against the more liberal tinged proposals such as same sex marriage and was known to filibuster bills he was opposed to. Even so, outside of hardcore politics nerds, there wasn’t much to say about Jacob Rees Mogg. Just another Conservative backbencher.
On the 24th of May 2013, Jacob Rees Mogg was the partner of Paul Merton on the British comedy panel show Have I Got News For You. Under the watchful eye of actor and Pointless host Alexander Armstrong, Paul and Jacob Rees-Mogg won against the opposing team of Ian Hislop and Josie Long. Jacob Rees-Mogg was something of a marvel, if not a curiosity. Here was this extremely austere gentleman, tall and thin, with a sonorous voice and paternalistic tone who seemed to have been plucked straight out of the Victorian era, a secondary antagonist in a Dicken’s bildungsroman, on what was and still probably is the UK’s biggest panel show. It would be too much to suggest he captured the hearts and minds of the nation, but he was a “personality”, of a piece with then London mayor, future prime minster and current bastard Boris Johnson. He made two more appearances on Have I got News for You (in 2015 and 2016) winning both. So Jacob Rees-Mogg is 3/3 on Have I got News For You. Good for him.
Now that he was a “personality”, his stock artificially elevated by panel show comedy, news media started to pay more attention to this strange man, this Jacob Rees-Mogg. We learnt he was the beneficiary of the Eton-Oxford-Parliament pipeline that was very popular for Conservative MPs at the time. We learnt he was a committed Catholic, fundamentally dogmatic on social issues. We learnt he has a large family, six children as of 2017. There was a brief stir in the media when he named his sixth child Sixtus, which is a very old fashioned and strange thing to do, entirely in keeping with his character of Victorian gentleman. We learnt he was a committed Eurosceptic, part of the European Research Group which formed the ideological underpinning of what would one day be called Brexit. Normal stuff.
We also learned about some of the darker parts of his nature. His fundamental catholic dogma apparently did not extend to his business ventures. Despite referring to abortion as a “death cult” and his firm belief that a baby should be carried to term even in the event of rape or incest, his investment firm Somerset Capital Management was found to have invested in an Indonesian company called Kalbe Farma, whose pills were being used to trigger abortions. He explained this away in his usual paternalistic style, that he did not choose where the money the company went, which is fair enough, but he did still benefit materially from the dividends it produced. Perhaps more egregiously, after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, he was quick to pop on Nick Ferrari’s LBC radio show to say that the victims of the fire “did not use common sense” by failing to vacate the building despite a stay in place order from the fire officials. These two incidents, along with his illiberal views, what can charitably called “old fashioned” fashioned views of parenting (he self reported as having never changed a nappy and the continues to employ the Nanny who once changed his) and his obscene wealth paint the picture of a man completely disconnected from the life of the average working person, a man who got into politics not to act as a public servant but to further his own business interests and flatter his own sense of innate superiority. Sorry that this section was less funny than the Hawk Tuah Girl bit. It’s important context though. I also really don’t like Jacob Rees-Mogg.
I bring him up because after losing his seat in the 2024 general election, it felt like mere minutes of basking in the glory of that before the news broke that Discovery+ were planning to make a reality show about him and his family’s life.
Park that in the back of your mind for a moment.
On the 15th of May 2024, Ethan Lawrence, Large Actor, posted a Tiktok to his channel entitled “Thinking of Giving Up Acting”. I will now do away with the third person schtick. This is a Substack about me after all. At the time I was in the process of downsizing. My landlord had sold the property I was living in out from underneath me and I was moving to a smaller place. Costs were chewing into my meagre savings, vastly reduced from over a year out of work. The video was a way of getting the dark thoughts I had been having out. I spoke for just under five minutes with no script and no editing, expecting it to be of minor interest in my followers.
It blew up. It currently sits at around 660k views (which is viral by my standards) and was a human interest stories in several newspapers and also The Sun which is less a newspaper and more of the Mark of Cain in pulped tree form. I was interviewed about it for BBC Radio Essex where I elaborated on my central thesis: The UK TV industry is in serious trouble and no one seems to notice or care.
I have been having grim conversations with my agent. Stories of well respected casting agencies having enormous holes in their schedules. Conversations with channels where it’s been made clear that scripted comedy is not just a low priority, it’s barely being considered. The Netflixification of people’s viewing habits tearing chunks out of budgets and enthusiasms. Well respected and talented writers unable to even get their scripts seen let alone commissioned. I have had five auditions in seven months. Everyone in my industry, from cast to crew, are struggling. It’s a very scary time to be a creative.
I thought about this when I saw that Hailey Welch, the Hawk Tuah Girl, was in talks to have a reality show about her life made. “Good for her,” I thought “grab the bag while you can and ride the wave you generated talking about spitting on a willy as far as it could possibly go!”
But why are production companies tripping over themselves to produce content about someone, and I’m trying to be as respectful as I can here, whose brush with fame is likely to be a bit of a flash in the pan? This is America though. They’ll make reality shows about bloody anything, those yanks. Besides which, the Hawk Tuah Girl seems like a nice enough lady. She may blossom under the spotlight and become a household name. I stopped thinking about this.
I thought about this again when I saw that Jacob Rees-Mogg, the recently ousted Conservative MP, was in talks to have a reality show about his life made. “Oh piss off” I thought “do you not have enough money already having utilised your position as a person of power and influence to hand Britain over to disaster capitalists? Also, who cares about you and your sweaty family?”
But why did Discovery move faster than I have EVER seen a production company move in order to be the ones to produce content about someone, and I’m trying to be as respectful as I can here, who is a bigoted piece of shit? This is the UK. We aren’t supposed to be in the thrall of reality shows. We have a strong story telling tradition and the best film crews in the world. How come Jacob Rees-Mogg inks a contract to be on the telly when creatives, whose industry his party tried as hard as they could to destabilise and destroy, can’t even get a look in? I kept thinking about this,
We ARE in thrall to reality shows aren’t we? The prevailing wisdom of the industry at this point is that there’s no value to be extracted from cheap and cheerful comedies. The only things that can exist in this new epoch of streaming are frighteningly overbudgeted prestige shows or easily produced reality pablum. The rot set in when “personalities” could be inorganically made by Have I Got News For You and now “personalities” are virtually all we are fed. Snacky bites of easily recognisable archetypes to create enough space for Bridgteron to put it’s pretty hat on (it usually takes three years and tens of millions of pounds").
The rot is now so deep that the “reality” of reality shows are now becoming reality. Let me explain because that was a horrible sentence to write and read. Nigel Farage oiled his way onto the most recent series I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. He is now in parliament. Donald Trump became a household name on The Apprentice. He is poised to become a two time President of the United States of America, promising untold misery to millions. Matt Hancock also went on I’m a Celebrity but everyone hates him. Now Jacob Rees-Mogg is set to swing onto people’s screens, like the haunted pendulum he is, laundering his reputation that should be tarnished beyond repair after the bloodbath his party faced at the hands of Labour.
There are two flashpoints here. The first is that reality shows are threatening the very fabric of liberal democracy. The second and much more important is that reality shows are making it more difficult than ever for creatives to work and survive (dare we even suggest thrive?). When I started writing this article I didn’t know what conclusion I would reach. That’s what I do whenever I write these: I start with a basic idea and let the spirits take me. I wanted to talk about the unfairness of Jacob Rees-Mogg getting a tv show, make a deft comparison between him and the Hawk Tuah Girl because that amused me and finally remind people that since I put up my video things still aren't changing and we risk allowing the industry to sleepwalk off a cliff. I don’t know how we got to the “threat to liberal democracy” thing. But I hope it was at least amusing to read.
Support art you love. Reward it with your clicks, share it with people you love, make noise about wanting to see more. They won’t hear you unless you tell them.
Don’t support Jacob Rees-Mogg’s attempts to paint himself as a fun personality. Look at what that did for us with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. He probably isn’t going to go that far but we shouldn’t reward this behaviour.
You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang,
Bye.
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