Watching Tom Zanetti On Made In Chelsea Reminded Me Why I Don’t Date Across The Class Divide

I remember one of my first experiences of blatant classism vividly. I was 17, on holiday in Turkey with my mum, explaining to a woman she had made friends with that I was interviewing for a job at New Look when we returned home. ‘You’re going to want to tone down your accent then,’ she told me. ‘You’ll never get a job talking like that.’

I have a scouse accent and to be honest, it’s not strong at all. The woman, who ironically worked as a HR executive in recruitment, later told my mum to advise me the same. It was then, and over the years later, I started to piece together all of the ways my interactions with so-called posh people had guided my perception of what it means to be from Liverpool.

My earliest memories of holidays abroad are littered with other families making jokes about mine stealing their cars - ‘Watch out the scousers are about’ was the running joke of every hotel function. It was thinly-veiled classism at its finest, but the ironic part is, I’m not even working class. Don’t get me wrong, much of my family are and my mum certainly was raised in a working class household – struggling financially herself after I was born with her divorce from my dad and the debt they’d amassed piling on the money woes.

But, having climbed up the career ladder at Liverpool City Council, she experienced upward social mobility by the time I was a teenager, raising me with a sense of financial stability working class families simply aren’t afforded. I’d be proud to be working class if I was, but it’s just not something I can claim to be anymore.

That’s something I have in common with Tom Zanetti, the DJ now dating Made In Chelsea’s Sophie Hermann. He was raised on a council estate in Leeds with his mum and two siblings, telling singer Jsky Chat on his podcast that after his mum and dad split up ‘we didn’t have anything really’.

Now, he’s a successful DJ, with an estimated net worth of £1.4million thanks to his music career and events company ‘Sleepin’ Is Cheatin’. With a son born when he was just 16, he’s worked countless jobs, beat homelessness and experienced bankruptcy and depression, but since his appearance on Celebs Go Dating the most common consensus on him is that he’s just a really nice guy.

That’s how he ended up with Sophie Hermann anyway, making his Made In Chelsea debut last week by surprising her on her birthday. But it was the conversation before he arrived that felt oddly familiar to me. ‘I’ve met this man, his name is Tom Zanetti, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him. He’s a DJ,’ Sophie tells Ollie Locke and his husband, Gareth.

‘This is your bit of rough?’ Ollie asks to which Sophie diplomatically responds, ‘He is such a lovely man and he makes me laugh.’

Now, Ollie was likely joking as he and the rest of the cast welcomed Tom with open arms when he arrived. But for me, watching that conversation play out on TV took me right back to all of the occasions I’ve been someone’s ‘bit of rough’.

I’ve had posh men assume I’m uneducated, detail how hilarious it would be to take me home to their even posher parents and act completely baffled by the fact I’ve never been in a physical altercation. According to them, the mere sound of my voice means I’m an aggressive, unintelligent criminal who wouldn’t know decorum if it slapped me in the face – or should I say, I slapped it in the face, since apparently being scouse means you’ll knife someone at the first sign of conflict.

I’m not alone, either.

‘I was once told by a very posh boy that I was a lovely girl until I opened my mouth,’ one reader told Grazia. ‘I’m a barrister from a working class background and my South London accent has sometimes baffled dates when I’ve told them what I do for a living,’ another added.

‘I was seeing one of the sons of the UK’s biggest property developers last year,’ a third woman told me on Twitter. ‘He saw me code switch in front of him and was so shocked that I didn’t always sound like “his friends”. He said I sounded “street and hood” and started speaking to me in slang out of nowhere.

A friend of mine also has endless stories. ‘The fella I dated from London last year thought scouse stereotyping was the height of comedy,’ she explained. ‘Every opportunity he got, he’d made a joke about me being rough, shoplifting, even jokes about my family being full of criminals. Suffice to say that “talking stage” did not last long.’

Other instances shared include friends of partners asking things like ‘Oh, they have theatres in Leeds?’ and assuming things about your childhood from living in a tiny house with tons of family to never going on trips abroad.

Now, much of this we can shrug off at the time, laugh and likely never go on that second date, but over the years, it all builds up. Last summer, I dated a relatively posh guy virtually. He was funny, emotionally mature (WTF) and seemed to have his life together, but watching his social circle through his Instagram, I couldn’t get rid of this uncomfortable feeling that we weren’t relationship potential.

Whenever I saw videos of him with his friends, my over-riding thought was ‘They’re going to be so funny with you.’ I had this strange, inner monologue acting out every scenario where I’d be part of his social life, envisioning all the ways I’d feel uncomfortable. After years of weird vibes, snarky comments and classist ‘jokes’, I didn’t want to put myself in situations to experience that again – surrounded by posh people who forever define you as ‘the scouser’.

But aside from putting me off a few second dates, where classist attitudes and ‘jokes’ have really affected me and so many of my friends is in education and work. I hear constant stories from friends of inappropriate comments from bosses and colleagues alike. One friend was even told she shouldn’t apply for a particular college at Oxford University because as a scouse woman, she couldn’t compete with ‘posh boys from Eton’.

My mum tells me of time she’s attended award ceremonies in London on behalf of Liverpool City Council, only for the host to tell the room of UK’s city councils ‘there are people from Liverpool in, watch your handbags and wallets everyone.’ Just this week, the same sentiment was repeated endlessly online when Primark reopened, and social media was awash with jokes like ‘don’t judge, it’s been a while since they went shoplifting!’.

Ultimately, what all of these jokes do is further ingrain classism in our society. They perpetuates stereotypes that allow the government to underfund our cities, staining our reputation for foreign investment and tourism too. They encourage further class discrimination in work, education and in social settings – ultimately impacting wealth and the ability of working class people to experience upward social mobility.

I’m sure Tom shrugged off Ollie’s joke when he saw it on TV, as I did so many times when surrounded by posh people. But ultimately, watching that play out on screen validated exactly why I don’t date across the class divide anymore – these comments might not seem like much to the average middle or upper class person, but knowing the countless ways they’ve affected my loves ones lives, not understanding their real impact is exactly why I don’t want to be around those people.

Anyone who watched Celebs Go Dating can see that Tom's character is his best quality, as Sophie clearly does too. After all he's been through, he shouldn't be deduced to Sophie's 'bit of rough' purely because he grew up working class. If Sophie can see him for more than where he came from, hopefully the rest of the Made in Chelsea cast will too.

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