Daddy’s Girls (for Channel 4)
This is the film that first brought you the It Girl on television.
Today it seems a young woman’s ideal is to become a celebrity, through appearing on television, and then enjoy the wealth and freedom it brings. And so the schedule is packed with programmes that hold out this promise. It wasn’t always so.
At Channel 4’s request, in the hot summer of 1996 we built a funny, stylish documentary around the lives of three beautiful babes in the Chelsea Set. They were Tamara Beckwith, a then unknown model named Caprice Bourret and her friend Charlotte. The film was Daddy’s Girls.
Why does this film from the age of negative equity seem like it was made last week ? Simple: at that time, television just did not film blondes with long, straight hair going to the gym, the hairdresser or polo - and trying on £7,000 dresses when shopping in Mayfair. That all changed with Daddy’s Girls. It explains why the film has since been watched by millions of people, from America to Australia – and continues to play on TV.
Soon after the first transmission of Daddy’s Girls we were surprised by Caprice. She suddenly became a celebrity. The surname fell by the way. She became known as the Wonderbra girl and as a supermodel. Journalists would ring up, probing.
This film contains the clue to how you can become famous through being on telly, which is what makes it so contemporary. It is almost the daddy of celebrity TV.
And the programme also reveals another way you can get to enjoy the lifestyle it portrays. You should ideally be born beautiful and rich. And that, as one of our cast says, is “just sort of the luck of the draw”.
