Chavs, comedians, Jewish Humour and the Estuary accent.

chav!!!!

Since being back here I look for new things, things that have come in to vogue since I lived here in 1994 and somehow, at the back of my mind, I knew one thing would still he here; the class system.

That will always be here; in the USA if you have a lot of money you are considered upper class. Here, most of the upper classes are broke. They can't even afford to heat their stately homes and have had to give them or sell them or whatever to the national trust.

Notice I said 'most' – there are still the men in the grey suits who run the place.

But class doesn't stop there; I know of people who live in council houses who's house is on the end who look down on the people who's houses are in the middle of the block. They are all renting houses from the same authority and the ones on the end think they are superior.

If you make a lot of money here you are considered, by the upper classes, as being nouveau riche – or in the USA new money. Now they have invented another word, and this word has been invented by the dreaded middle class and that word is chav. If you look up chav in the dictionary it will give it's meaning as a young working class person with appalling, if expensive, taste.

Chav, by the way is traced back all the way to 2004 and probably comes from a Romany word Chavy, I think; the middle class had to come up with some word to put down people with different taste from theirs.

The middle class taste is awful – they hold their knives like pencils, they have fitted carpets, dark clothes, dainty little cars and they are just like Mrs Bucket in the well known TV sit-com; the title has slipped my mind. They don't swear, they don't show any passion and don't have any idea about politics and these people are allowed to vote!!!!

I jest of course and I'm generalising and – well you know all that but some of it is true.

And the names of their children!!!! A slight miss-spelling of the regular name and I'm sure you've heard them. Billy Connelly noticed they were naming their kids with surnames such as Crawford!!!!

If you go to Los Angeles Tattoos are very popular – if you have a tattoo here you're a chav. In Los Angeles a lot of people wear baseball hats – some pubs here will not allow people in wearing hats. I have also seen 'no white socks' at a pub entrance – no white socks!!!! Whatever could they mean?

But the big thing about being back is the Television; all the garbage that British TV has exported to America – Pop Idol (American Idol), Big Brother, Survivor, The X Factor is still on TV here.

They do have quality drama, mainly on the BBC, but the big thing they don't have and which I miss is Jewish Humour and hardly any Jewish slang. Some people started to use the word Schlep a few years ago but it disappeared in a wave of retentiveness years ago.There are loads of Jewish comedians over here but they are really comedians who are Jewish.

Woody Allen

Larry David.

There is no Woody Allen, no Jerry Seinfeld and no Larry David but they have the same, maybe, 10 comedians who are on TV 3 or 4 times a week. The are on mock quiz shows and laugh – at each other.

A team of 2 comedians sit on one side of the studio opposite another team of 2, separated by the quiz master, who is also a comedian, then they make each other laugh.

The audience, and there is an audience, laugh as if they are canned – it's unbelievable and crass.

Apart from Stephen Fry, who speaks like a toff, they have either the red nosed comedian's northern accent or the estuary accent – yes that one again. The Estuary accent, they think, makes them classless so they can fit in with everybody else and their favourite thing to do on these shows is to show a photo from a newspaper and think of a funny phrase.

Come back Jack Benny; Les Dawson; Tommy Cooper. Let's have some comedians who are comedians and not smart arses laughing at themselves in fact – let's have a Chav Comedian!!!!

I heard on the radio this morning that one of the actors in Little Britain, who is Jewish, is starting a Jewish comedy series here. It's about a middle aged man who gets divorced from his wife and is taken for every penny he has which means he has to move in with his son; also he cannot afford to keep his mother in a home any more so she moves in too. So you have 3 generations of Jews living together which sounds promising.

Tommy Cooper.
25 years after his death people still tell 'Tommy Cooper' jokes.

The Estuary Accent.

Off to London in the morning; I always look forward to it but I'm really living in denial.

We are due to leave home at 6.45 am and due into London at 7.55 am their time on Friday; that's almost midnight Los Angeles time so no matter which way you look at it we will be travelling for seventeen and a quarter hours. This includes the three hour wait at LAX and the change of planes in Chicago.

Apart from the extreme change in climate in London there is an extreme change in accents. One thing about an Englishman is that as soon as he opens his mouth you know nearly everything about him; you will know how educated he is, where he is from and what class he is. They try to say the class system has gone in Britain but it hasn't.

People in America tend to use the word 'Brit' when they are really referring to English; if someone wanted a British accent in their movie and I went along and used a broad Scottish accent it probably wouldn't be what they wanted. But what Americans don't always realise is that there are literally hundreds of English dialects and that's not including the very many Scottish and Welsh ones not to mention the people in the north of Ireland who consider themselves British too – but I won't go into that as it's a sore point.

There was some kind of discussion on line when someone from Britain used the word arse and an American wrote in and said it was rather snooty for him to use that way of spelling it when they should have used ass; well in Britain an ass is a donkey as a kid is the offspring of a goat.

What they didn't realise was that the roughest cut throat from the back streets of Liverpool, Birmingham or London would spell it that way and those people would jump on your head if you suggested such a thing to their faces; snooty? I don't think so.

Of course the people of England sometimes try to hide their background by changing their accents too but there are certain words that the upper classes would never use and a certain pronouncing of other words that would give the game away. For example an upper class person would never ever use the word toilet or lounge (as a room); they would sooner their children call it a shit-house than a toilet; shit-house is course but toilet is vulgar and a no no. They also have their own way of pronouncing deteriorate, scone and many other secret words they won't always tell us – see "HOW TO GET ON IN SOCIETY" (1958), BY JOHN BETJEMAN in my post on September 26th.

Clive James said that when he first arrived in England many years ago he thought that if you woke an Englishman up suddenly in the middle of the night he would be talking normal. I was having breakfast a few weeks ago with my friend Jim and he said the same joke. Now if you think about it what normal would it be? The Australian normal for Clive James or the American one for Jim? In fact Jim is Canadian but he doesn't have much of a Canadian accent; he doesn't say eh much and I don't think he rhymes about with oat or boat.

There is a TV show that started in Britain called The Antiques Road Show; it is very successful in America too but if you get used to the one in America it comes as a bit of a shock to see the British version; on the British one they seem to be battling to see which one of them speaks the poshest. It's ironic that one of the original appraisers who made the show very popular was Arthur Negus who spoke with a broad west country accent. His accent and voice were so familiar and interesting that the impersonators made a good living impersonating him.

Lately, because people in England tend to give the game away when they speak, a new accent was formed; this is called the estuary accent. Nothing to do with the Thames Estuary, although it sounds very Londonish, but estuary meaning a little bit of two accents neither posh nor common; I think it started as a mix of London, received pronunciation (BBC English) and a home counties accent; those are the counties that surround London.

It's a fairly recent phenomenon but I think it started with David Frost or Eric Idle – listen to them; neither common nor posh.

So I will try and write this from London if I can stop listening to accents.

One thing I won't find there will be the crazy things that happen in Los Angeles – I mean look at this photo – would that happen anywhere else??