paula245
11.04.06, 18:18
The news that Prince William has been dressing up as a member of the working
class shouldn't surprise us, says John Harris. From sneering comedy shows to
elitist politics, class snobbery is alive and well
Tuesday April 11, 2006
The Guardian
The headline inside was "Future Bling of England"; the strapline
screamed, "Wills wears Chav Gear in Army Snap." Over two pages built around a
snap of 30 trainee officers at Sandhurst, yesterday's Sun gleefully recounted
how the heir to the throne "joined in the fun as his platoon donned chav-
themed fancy dress to mark the completion of their first term". Wills, we
were told, "went to a lot of trouble thinking up what to wear" (white
baseball cap, sweatshirt, two gold chains), and was challenged to "put on a
chavvy accent and stop speaking like a royal". Apparently, he struggled to
sound quite as proletarian as required, though he was said to be "making hand
gestures and swaggering from side to side as he walked across the parade
square".
If the Sun's coverage of the wheeze suggested nothing more worrying than
innocuous hijinx, one might wonder how a fair share of their readership
responded not only to the news, but the way it was delivered. Within four
paragraphs, Wills's "working-class accent" had mutated into a "silly accent";
by way of hammering home the Sandhurst chaps' close resemblance to what the
Sun called "any bunch of lads from your neighbourhood street corner", they
printed a shot of Michael Carroll, a man from Norfolk who won the lottery but
is now serving nine months for affray - as if he were the typical
representative of the working class. The snobby tone of the coverage, in
fact, was much like the underlying spirit of the episode itself. An episode
in which the Eton-educated heir to the throne - along with some aristocratic
mates - has a right old laugh dressing up as a member of the working class
surely provided conclusive proof of the blatant, shameless return of snobbery.
There is a lot of this kind of stuff about, as proved by a conversation with
Matthew Holehouse, an 18-year-old A-level student from Harrogate and
occasional Times Education Supplement columnist. Last year, he found himself
dispatched by his state school to a debating seminar organised by the English
Speaking Union. It was staged at Oakham, a private school in Rutland, whose
website lays claim to "forward-looking educational thinking". The fact that
he was from a comprehensive put him in a noticeable minority, he tells me, a
sense of disorientation compounded by a set of pictures he found hanging on
one of the school's walls.
"There were various things on display," he says. "Pictures of rugby teams, of
parties and discos. But the one that really jumped out was of a chav-themed
school disco: all these rosy-cheeked, foppish-looking public schoolkids
dressed in baseball caps and Adidas tracksuits. It looked a bit pathetic; at
first I suppose I felt slight pity for them. But then I thought about it
another way: here were the most privileged kids in Britain pretending to be
poor people."
Holehouse is preparing to take up a place at Oxford University, where he will
study history. His perusal of the entertainment currently offered to
undergraduates has only confirmed that the so-called "chav bop" - a disco
where you dress up as a working-class person - is an immovable fixture not
only at public schools, but also throughout Oxford's colleges. Google the
phrase and you receive instant pictorial proof that such events have taken
place at Lady Margaret Hall, Trinity and St Peter's: predictable snaps of
well-bred young men, with captions like "Rock 'ard", mugging for the camera
using poses they have presumably learned from Goldie Lookin' Chain videos.
The chav phenomenon - the mass mockery of a certain kind of young, Burberry-
check wearing, borderline criminal, proletarian youth - has been with us for
more than three years. Its collision with public schools, military academies
and high-end universities, however, surely serves to confirm what some people
suspected all along: that the C-word actually denotes the mind-boggling
revival of privileged people revelling in looking down their noses at the
white working class, that social entity whose mere mention in certain company
can cause either a palpable frisson of unease or loud ridicule. In last
year's Christmas bestseller, Is It Me or Is Everything Shit?, Steve Lowe and
Alan McArthur crystallised this sea change as "Nu snobbery": the belief
that "the poor are a right laugh. But there's a downside, too - they
sometimes have bad skin because they don't use the correct sea salt-based
exfoliant scrubs, and they can be violent." They went on: "It's clearly
enormously liberating to rant on about single mothers and lazy workers like
some gout-ridden Victorian bishop. Let's hope that soon there are just two
words on everyone's lips: 'work' and 'house'."
To illustrate their point, the authors made reference to an often-quoted
passage from the Daily Mail, bemoaning the kind of women who "pull their
shoddily dyed hair back in that ultra-tight bun known as the 'council house
facelift'". In fact, they could have drawn on any number of examples of Nu
Snobbery, going back to the notion's genesis in the mid-1990s. In retrospect,
the germ of the idea was evident in the press's gleeful response to Wayne and
Waynetta Slob, the degenerate, perma-smoking welfare claimants who became a
fixture of Harry Enfield's BBC1 show. You could also detect its beginnings in
some of the supposed social comment associated with Britpop - not least the
snide songs about forlorn proletarian lives that were briefly the calling
card of Blur's Damon Albarn, who affected a mewling "Essex" accent, but was
in fact raised in one of that county's more upscale corners. "The strange
thing about Damon's songs," said the critic Jim Shelley, "is that, unlike a
writer such as Morrissey or Ian Dury, he has no sympathy for his
characters ... Albarn's attitude is totally uncharitable, a kind of snide
contempt."
From there, it was a short hop to the repopularisation of the kind of
archetypes that, in the 80s, were the preserve of boneheaded Tory MPs - not
least that of the "Pram Face", defined on the website Urban Dictionary as "a
girl who is a little rough round the edges and wouldn't look at all out of
place at 14 years of age pushing a newborn through a council estate". In
turn, the duty to combine haughtiness with supposed humour duly fell away,
and the acceptable voice of snobbery started to sound uncomfortably sharp: in
Tourism, the much-hyped new novel by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, a rather clumsy
attempt to come up with a voice that might shine light on modern Britain with
the same odorous scorn you find in Michel Houllebecq presents a principal
character nicknamed Puppy. "I hate poor white people," runs one of his more
unpleasant lines. "No one is more stupid or useless."
That said, comedy remains Nu Snobbery's most influential vehicle - and in
2003, its decisive arrival was proved by the most successful British comedy
programme since The Office. Little Britain (along with the inexplicably
popular comedian Jimmy Carr - sample joke: "The male gypsy moth can smell the
female gypsy moth up to seven miles away - and that fact also works if you
remove the word 'moth'") was emblematic of that post-PC nihilism whereby a
little misogyny or homophobia was all part of the fun, but its fondness for
laughing at the people now fashionably termed "the disadvantaged" was surely
its most insidious aspect. It is hard to cry foul at these things without
sounding hopelessly po-faced, but still: somewhere in the characterisation of
Lou and Andy, the hapless carer and his wheelchair-using charge, there surely
lurks the whiff not only o
