by Owen Jones
As the journalist Fiona Sturges was to later put it: 'Goody once again found herself vilified by the red-tops and held up as a terrible archetype of the white working class.' But when Jade Goody was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2008, there was genuine and wide spread sympathy for her. It was as if the media were trying to atone for their guilt. Well, parts of the media, anyway. When she was initially diagnosed, Spectator columnist Rod Liddle penned a column entitled: 'After J ade's cancer, what next? "I'm a tumour, get me out of here"?' Referring to Jade as 'the coarse, thick, Bermondsey chav', he suggested that the cancer had been invented by her publicist, Max Clifford.
Or again, it is not inconceivable, I suppose, that written into Goody's contract was a demand that at some point she be seen to be suffering from a potentially fatal illness, given that without one she isn't very interesting any more. A stroke would have made for more dramatic television, but cancer, you have to say, has a certain cachet."
Just days before Jade Goody's death, some journalists continued to take a pop at her as a proxy for those on the bottom rungs of society. 'A vulgar loudmouth, she initially appeared on the show as a kind of token Hogarthian lowlife; wrote Jan Moir, a Daily Mail columnist. 'First we have this godforsaken wedding, then the christening of her chil- dren, then an ungainly, Iickety-split spring to death and the ultimate chav state funeral.' Moir was not alone in attacking Jade's decision to allow television cameras to film her last weeks. When a figure such as celebrated journalist John Diamond recorded his own death from cancer through newspaper columns in The Times, he was applauded: but then again, he was a middle-class man writing for a middle-class newspaper.
What does the case of Jade Goody show us, other than the capacity of the British media for crassness and cruelty? Above all it demonstrated that it is possible to say practically anything about people from Jade's background. They are fair game.
Big Brother was not the only reality TV show to lift the lid off class hatred. Wifo Swap is a long-running Channel 4 programme where two wives with different backgrounds swap families for a couple of weeks. As Polly Toynhee has remarked, it should really be called 'Class Swap'. Invariably, one of the parties is portrayed as a 'dysfunctional' working- class family: feckless, unable to look after kids, bigoted, fag-smoking, beer-swilling and so on. One former fan complained in an internet review that it was guilty of 'soon deteriorating into fat uncouth working- class people slagging each other off between cigarettes and swigging canned lager, inviting a more sneering viewer to tune in.' The journal- ist Toby Young felt sorry for Becky Fairhurst, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three whose marriage fell apart following the programme. 'She's an uneducated, white, working-class woman, and the programme's makers left no stone untumed in their efforts to depict her as "council trash",' he wrote. He could not help but conclude that the programme'is designed to appeal to the snob in us. Here was a prime example of that urban known species the chav.
The Jeremy Kyle chatshow has a similar purpose. Week after week, dysfunctional individuals from overwhelmingly working-class back- grounds are served up as daytime entertainment fodder. vulnerable people with complex personal troubles are thrown in front of baying audiences: a 'human form of bear-baiting' , as one British judge was to describe it. Intensely emotional problems like suspicions of infidelity and 'who's the real father?' scenarios are exploited for the viewer's vicarious thrills. Little wonder it was lambasted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 'as a rather brutal form of entertainment that is based on derision of the lower-working-class population.' By portraying them as 'undeserving' it undermined support for anti-poverty initiatives, the Foundation claimed.
And then, of course, there are the comedy chav caricatures. None has caught the popular imagination like Little Britain's Vicky Pollard, created by comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Pollard is pre- sented as a grotesque working-class teenage single mother who is sexually promiscuous, unable to string a sentence together, and has a very bad attitude problem. In one sketch she swaps her baby for a Westlife CD. In another, when reminded to take her baby home she replies: 'oh no it's OK, you can keep it, I've got loads more at home anyway.' Johann Hari points out that we are laughing at two ex- private-school boys dressing up as working-class single mothers. Matt Lucas's old school, Haberdashers' Aske's, charges around £10,000 a year. 'But of course, when Jim Davidson dressed up as a black man to say all black people were thick, we quite rightly said how stupid and outrageous it was,' says Hari.
All of this might be explained away as a bit of harmless fun. But consider the fact that a YouGov poll at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2006 revealed that most people working in television thought Vicky Pollard was an accurate representation of Britain's white working class.31 Matt Lucas himself has attacked critics 'who resent the fact that he and David are white, middle-class men, implying that they shouldn't be allowed to create characters that are working-class single mums because they're not from that world.' His defence? 'But if the observation rings true and is funny, then why should it matter who is making the observation and what their background isr,18 It's OK for a privileged individual like him to mock working-class people-because working-class single mums really are like this.
No wonder Vicky Pollard has caught the imagination of right-wing class warriors. According to Richard Littlejohn, 'Matt Lucas and David Walliams' Burberried chavs captured perfectly the gruesome reality of so much of our modern landscape.t" James Delingpole-who farcically argued that he was a member of the most discriminated-against group in society, 'the white, middle-aged, public-school-and-Oxhridgeeducated middle-class male'-was satisfied that 'the Vicky Pollards and the Waynes and Waynettas of our world have got it coming to them. If they weren't quite so repellent, we wouldn't need to make jokes about them, would we?' Indeed, Little Britain was funny because it was true:
The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imagination is that she embodies with such fearful accuracy several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive all-female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who'll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye; dismal ineducables who may not know much about English or History, but can damn well argue their rights with a devious fluency that would shame a barrister from Matrix Chambers.
Above all, 'these people do exist and are every bit as ripe and just a target for social satire as were, say, the raddled working-class drunks set up by Hogarth in Gin Lane.' So It was all right for privileged people like James Delingpole to stick itto working-class girls, because they really were ugly, thick and sluttish.
It is not just right-wing pundits who think working-class Britain is populated by Vicky Pollards: even the Beeb is guilty. An online news feature entitled 'What is working class?' was illustrated with a photo of Vicky Pollard and some of her friends. Below was the caption: 'Does Vicky Pollard sum up the working class?' The article did not answer the question, leaving the possibility open for the reader. As LSE researcher Deborah Finding says, 'in laughing at Vicky Pollard - a fat, chain~smoking, single mother-we are expressing our fear and hatred of a group by projecting onto her stereotypical body the perceived qualities of all working-class single mothers--feckless, stupid and promiscuous.
The problem is not always that TV programmes deliberately set out to smear working-class people. Take Shameless, the long-running Channel 4 series focusing on the chaotic Gallagher family, which lives on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester. The dad is a drunken layabout who has fathered eight kids with two women. Their lives revolve around sex, benefits, crime and drugs. And yet the creator of Shameless is Paul Abbott. He is not some bigot from a pampered back- ground who thinks it is funny to point and laugh at the' oiks'. In fact, he bases the series on his own experiences as a working-class boy growing up in Burnley. In the programme, one of the children ends up going to university; another is in the gifted and talented stream at school.
The pr
oblem with the series is that it fails to address how the charac- ters ended up in their situation, or what impact the destruction of industry has had on working-class communities in Manchester. Class becomes a lifestyle choice, and poverty becomes a bit of a joke-not something that imprisons people and shatters their life chances. The series gives a middle-class viewer who has had no real contact with people from different backgrounds little opportunity to understand the broader context behind the issues raised. When I asked journalist Rachel Johnson who she thought the 'underclass' were, she immedi- ately suggested Shameless. 'But aren't they fun! Doesn't their life look more fun than our life?' But why is it fun? 'They're just always having a great bigpaaaaarty!' (For the last bit, she puts on a Mancunian accent).
Paul Abbott's original plan for the series was rather different to how it actually panned out. According to George Faber, the co-founder of Company Pictures which produces Shameless, Abbott's original idea 'was substantially autobiographical, and he wanted to write it as a single film for television. He wrote about half of it, The tone was very downbeat and grim and he said, "This isn't right, is it?" , So Abbott reworked the script so that, instead of being a gritty adaptation of his experiences, its main purpose was to make people laugh. 'He was able to return to that period of his life and view it through a comedic prism,' says Faber. "And in so doing, Shameless was born.' The danger with the finished version is that the viewer is encouraged to laugh at, rather than understand, the lives of the characters.
You can see the confusion that arises among its middle-class viewers. 'Do the real working-class people of this country watch Shameless?' asks Kate Wreford on Channel 4's Shameless website. 'I am sort of middle class, but I wonder what the real working classes think of it?, On a student forum, one contributor asks if the series is 'an accurate representation of British working-class people today?' One of the replies was straight to the point. 'Yes, many wc [working-class] scum. Many drink too much, smoke, steal and lack amhition: Little wonder that when Robin Nelson, a professor of theatre and TV drama, interviewed working-class viewers of the series, they 'declared their discomfort in watching Shameless because they feel they are being invited to laugh at their own class."
But modem entertainment does not encourage us only to laugh at the chavs. It also wants us to be afraid of them. There is no more extreme example of this than the film Eden Lake. The plot is fairly simple. An affluent, photogenic couple from London flee to the countryside for a romantic weekend holiday break. When they see that the idyllic Eden Lake is being transformed into gated communities, they make some right-on comments, wondering whom they are trying to keep out. They find out the hard way why the middle classes have every reason to fear the lower orders.
After the couple stand up to some local, semi-feral, aggressive dogowning kids, they are mercilessly hunted down and tortured. Under the direction of a psychopathic ringleader, the kids use their mobile phones to film the boyfriend being slashed with knives before his body is burned. But perhaps most disturbing is the role of the parentswaitresses, painters and decorators and so on-who routinely swear and slap their kids about. In a shocking finale, it is they who apparently torture the girlfriend to death after she kills a couple of the 'chavs' in revenge.
When I asked the director, James Watkins, for an interview, Iwas told that he was 'very flattered ... but he doesn't want to impose any authorial interpretations on Eden Lake, preferring instead the widely divergent reactions tothe film.' But it is difficult to imagine any other interpretation than that of the Sun's movie critic, who condemned Watkins's 'nasty suggestion that all working-class people are thugs' . Or, for that matter, the Telegraph's conclusion that 'this ugly, witless film expresses fear and loathing of ordinary English people.' Here was a film arguing that the middle classes could no longer live alongside the quasi-bestial lower orders. Icannot put it better than Stephen Pound, one of the few Labour MPs with a background in manual work, who told me:
I genuinely think that there are people out there in the middle classes, in the church and the judiciary and politics and the media, who actually fear, physically [ear the idea of this great, gold bling-dripping, lumpenproletariat that might one day kick their front door in and eat their au pair.
It may not come as a surprise that the Daily Mail treated Eden Lake as though it was some sort of drama-documentary, quavering that it was 'all too real' and urging every politician to watch it. One reader of Time Out commented that the film 'hits too close to home and will only grow and spread the anger that society holds for the lower classes. I myself and many of my friends have felt the violence from ignorant "children" ... I have to say this without an ounce of regret if the death penalty ever carne to this country ... Iwould support it.'46 If you have a society as segregated along class lines as our own, and you show films portraying the working class as a bunch of psychopaths, do not be surprised if middle-class people start believing it.
When I asked Stephen Frears ifhe thought there was a lack of accurate working-class portrayals on our screens, he replied: 'No, because isn't that what soap operas do:' But the soaps have travelled a long way from their origins. Rather than realistically showing how most people live their lives-with drama thrown in, of course-they have become sensationalized and caricatural. Already in the early 1990s, former EastEnders scriptwriter David Yallop savaged the show, arguing that it was 'created by middle-class people with a middle-class view of the working class which is patronizing, idealistic and untruthful, It is a dreary show run by dreary people/"
Has it really changed since then? What relationship is there between EastEnders--or Coronation Street for that matter-and the lives of millions of people working in shops, call centres and offices? Indeed, both soaps have a disproportionate number of small business people, like pub landlords, cafe owners, market stallholders and shopkeepers. The soaps compete with each other over frankly ludicrous plots: take the effective resurrection of Dirty Den in EastEnders, for example.
The film director Ken Loach thinks that, although soaps are set in working-class communities,
there's a patronizing view of it in that here are people who are quaint and a bit raw and a bit rough and a bit funny. But you sense there is-and I don't think this was the original intention of CoronationStreetbut there's now a kind of implied middle-class norm which views them and their antics and their fallings out and their failings in love ... as, well, 'characters'. It's like they're the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream when there's always an implied other set of characters who look down on them. The working class might not get a proper look-in on relly, but the wealthy are spoilt for choice. Switch on Britain s Dream Homes or I Own Britain s Best Home and watch Melissa Porter and Rhodri Owen saunter
round rural Britain ogling country mansions; watch grand properties being restored in Country House Rescue; zap over to A Place in the Sun and let Amanda Lamb give you a guided tour of wealthy Britons fleeing to buy up in Greece or Crete. Indeed, property programmes like Relocation, Relocation and Property Ladder are two-a-penny. Above all, posh is mostly certainly in. Watch Old Etonian chef Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall rustle up an organic treat; be dazzled by the public-school charm of other TV chefs like Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers; then enjoy the aristocratic Kirstie Allsopp encouraging you to gaze starry-eyed at unaffordable homes.
Too much of our television consists of promotional spiel for the lifestyles, desires and exclusive opportunities of the rich and powerful. It is all part of the redefining of aspiration, persuading us that life is about getting up that ladder, buying a bigger house and car and living it up in some private tropical paradise. It is not just that ordinary people watching these shows are made to feel inadequate. Those who do not strive for such dreams are thought of as 'non-aspirational' or, more bluntly, failures. The hopes and fears of working-class people, their surroundings, their communities, how they earn their living-this does not exist as far as TV is concerned. Where working-class people do appear, it is generally as caricat
ures invented by wealthy producers and comedians that are then, in tum, appropriated by middle-class journalists for political purposes.
Chav-hate has even trickled into the popular music scene. From the Beatles onwards, working-class bands once dominated rock, and indie music in particular: the Stone Roses, the Smiths, Happy Mondays and the Verve, to take a few popular examples. But it is difficult to name any prominent working-class bands since the heyday of Oasis in the mid 1990s: it is middle-class bands like Coldplay or Keane that now rule the roost in music. 'There has been a noticeable drift towards middle-class values in the music business,' says Mark Chadwick, the lead singer of rock band the Levellers. 'Working-class bands seemtobe few and far between.' Instead there's an abundance of middle-class impersonations of working-class caricatures, such as the 'mockney' style of artists like Damon Albarn and Lily Allen.