Diamond Dealers and Cockney Geezers review – bling kings don't make for TV gold

With a flashy, showgirl name like Diamond Dealers and Cockney Geezers (Channel 4) this one-off documentary was always going to be a bit of frivolous fun. Trotters, on Bethnal Green Road in east London, is a small independent jewellery shop that likes to think big. The business was founded by Judd Green’s father in 1991, and passed down to his son, who now runs the shop with his best friends from school, Kallum and Alex. This rapid-fire hour, narrated by Dani Dyer, is an attempt to showcase the trio’s cheeky chappy charm as much as it is about the art of selling spectacularly expensive watches and chains.

Trotters has a big following on Instagram, and a customer base all over the UK, with people making the trip to Bethnal Green from as far afield as Bradford, much to the amusement of Dyer’s voiceover. Their patrons haggle and often pay in cash, and the shop is certainly a lively kind of place. While recent documentaries about pet food and chocolate factories seemed little more than glorified ads, this at least tries to get to the heart of what makes Trotters tick. Judd, Kallum and Alex are keen to make the point that the people shopping with them are people like them. “We get a lot more working-class than we do posh people,” explains Judd.

We see a lot of the customers who come through, each showing off their own form of British eccentricity. There’s Grizz, referred to euphemistically as a “local amateur horticulturalist”, who wants his sparkly union jack pendant to be “iced up” before he takes a trip to California to explore the cannabis industry there. There’s a lot of double-speak here, and though I was desperate to know more about the people who appeared, it never scratched much more than the surface. Ashley and Ashley, a couple from Essex, popped in so male Ashley could buy female Ashley a diamond crucifix. “We had a little breakup a few weeks ago,” explains male Ashley. “Had to butter her up a little bit.” When female Ashley reappears a few weeks later, all that butter has melted away (demonstrating the true cost of a relationship when she cannot get the full cost of the make-up necklace refunded).

The best customer is Charlotte, who comes to look at angel-wing pendants. Now, perhaps the arrival of a very eccentric customer when cameras were in the shop was a coincidence; let’s not be cynical. Charlotte turns out to be a psychic and clairvoyant who can read the tarot. Naturally, she offers to show off her skills, and by reading Alex’s palms she deduces that he is a bit anaemic, and has irritable bowel syndrome. Even if they did bus her in for a bit of drama, it was delightful, and possibly the most English of psychic consultations that has ever taken place: “Tell me what the future holds.” “You’ll have a dicky tummy if you keep eating pastry.”

As a film, though, this can’t contain the big characters within it, and never sufficiently trusts that the “nowt so queer as folk” approach will sustain it, even though it would. Instead, it falls back on contrivances (if it is one) like the psychic. They also pop up to Sheffield to meet the boxer Charlie Edwards, who has just FaceTimed them, to chat about a special commission, and do little to improve north-south relations when they say it’s “like going back in time” and “proper Billy Elliot” as they drive into the city. There’s a semi-tortured explanation given for a quick trip to New York that seems to take place just so Dyer gets to say: “From the East End to the east coast.” They’re there, I think, to look at the kind of watch worn by DJ Khaled in an Instagram video, called “the chandelier”, a blinding piece of bling, literally; it’s so shiny it should come with a warning to never look directly at it. They go for dinner in an empty restaurant with the rapper Casanova 2X, who thinks the watch is over the top, so they don’t bring one home with them. End of the New York segment. That’s it. We get the setup, but nothing delivers. It leaves you with the post-junk food feeling, like you’ve eaten, and you’re sort of full, but you’re also nowhere near satisfied.

Actually, the boys do decide to get a chandelier made in the end, but they order it from Hong Kong, and the rest of the episode is concerned with whether they can shift a watch for £120,000 or not. Spoiler alert: everyone thinks a watch that costs more than four times the average annual UK salary is a bit too showy. Like the wares Trotter is peddling, this documentary is flashy and never understated, but unlike the contents of the shop, it has little to offer in the way of value.