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Channel 4 must have fallen on Trewley Precious and his family with great gratitude. A well-known, charismatic gift to the cameraman who is also a member of the crowd that the broadcaster has been very interested in. Jackpot!! I like to think of him standing there, in all his round, curvy, shiny and full glory, patting the filmmakers on the head with the satisfaction of knowing that his time has truly come.
Trewley Precious, if you haven’t had what I suspect will soon be an inescapable entertainment, is an Internet favorite (almost a million people follow her on TikTok) and a member of the group of Travelers who now stars – along with her four brothers and their bossy mother Tina – in the new series Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives. Trewley describes the couple as “like the Kardashians if they were broke! If the Kardashians were fat and rich!” Good comment, but they are also like the Kardashians if Kris pod people had a sense of humor, boundless energy, charm and a lot of love for each other. I can’t imagine Khloé answering questions from Kim about what she did in preparation for their mother’s birthday with a cheerful “More than you did, fat!” as Trewley does to his brother Jamie.
Trewley, Jamie, Honey, Ruby-Anne and Pearlygirl grew up as part of a traditional Traveler family – ruled by a patriarch, women expected to cook, clean and bear children, daughters expected to grow up and do the same – on a council estate, where they painted their house pink. Tina, not a Wanderer, grew up in poverty and without a permanent home so she insisted to her husband that, despite being a wanderer by nature, they would stay in one place and raise their family. She has now lived there for 40 years. Ruby-Anne lives with her, Trewley lives in the pink room in the garden and the rest of the girls are married young and live near their families. Jamie – much to the chagrin of his father, Sidney – ran away from the business world to become a real estate agent and remains as close to his family in every way as anyone.
Sidney died less than three years ago and both are still reeling from the loss. “I can’t speak,” says Trewley, as he begins to explain. “I feel like I’m in another world.” He still buys Tina presents on her birthday. “To My Young One,” runs Trewley’s next message. “Happy birthday, old girl. Thank you for taking care of our children. I love you in this life and the next.” The whole family is silent for a moment in their grief. “That’s beautiful, Trew,” his brother says approvingly. Then, I shake my head at the mother, who is clearly crying, “You’ve wasted the whole day.” The family explodes again. Life goes on.
Even in the midst of his grief, Trewley begins to see that his father’s absence may lead to more freedom to pursue his unconventional ambitions. For Trewley – she is only 25 – she does not want, however, to be a wife or a mother. “I want an empire.” Brand partnerships are starting to come in and money is being made, though he, appropriately, won’t say how much.
They also want to get a belly piercing, but this – along with the female drawings – is a no-go. “Your mother will take you away,” says Trewley’s friend, Robyn, whom Tina has grown fond of as she has many others who have come and gone as needed over the years. Just a slight exaggeration – Tina just kept him out of the house until the piercing was removed. Trewley is still on the road to empire.
Beneath the glitz and glamor of a dark reality, a lot of pain can be seen. The fact that they sit on the dinner table is evident as Trewley fondly remembers, “When my father died, everyone (at home) was waiting for their profits to arrive so they could buy us milk.” That there are limits to the value of comradeship itself is also evident. “You’re either going to stay there and die slowly or you’re going to jail,” Trewley said, no doubt, during a one-on-one on-camera interview where the scenes of a bad family come together: “And I don’t want my life.”
Trewley’s star is on the rise, you hope. You hope they get everything they want, and they learn to want more. If the dark British vision that underpins his family’s story can continue, however, we’ll have strong hopes.
