What is a chav? I ask a man called Paul. He's standing having a fag outside the Hare & Tortoise on Brentwood High Street, Essex, and he answers with absolutely no hesitation at all.
"A chav is someone who wears a tracksuit, has an earring, and a haircut which is grade zero on the sides, grade three on the top. A chav is someone who does his top button up. That gentleman over there," and he gestures down the pavement, "in the Ralph Lauren shirt? He's a chav."
Everybody knows what a chav is, it seems, but no one is a chav. But then it's a word unlike any other in current usage. Not just because no one is exactly sure what it means, or if they are sure, they all have a different answer, or even because it's still not entirely certain where it suddenly came from, although theories abound – from the Romany for child, as an acronym for "Council House And Violent" – but there's not even any agreement on whether or not it is or isn't a term of abuse. Whether it's snobbish. Or not. Is it a harmless bit of fun? Or a vicious class-based insult? A week ago a Liberal Democrat peer, Baroness Hussein-Ece, was forced to apologise after tweeting that she was "trapped in chav land", and this week sees the publication of a new book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by first-time author Owen Jones, which has thrown the word into the spotlight all over again.
A "chav", Jones argues, is basically a working class person. And to chav-bash is to laugh at, ridicule and despise working class people, a pastime which he claims has now become socially acceptable. His own lightbulb moment with the word came at a dinner party "in a gentrified part of east London" at the height of the credit crunch, when his host remarked: "It's sad that Woolworths is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?"
Here were educated, left-of-centre, open-minded people, Jones says, who wouldn't dream of using the word "Paki" or "poof" and yet the joke could easily have been rephrased as: "It's sad that Woolworths is closing. Where will the ghastly lower classes buy their Christmas presents?"
To Jones it represented a high-water mark. It showed that we had become a society in which the working classes had become either invisible or despised. "The 1980s saw a dramatic assault on all aspects of working class life, on unions, and council houses, and communities, and with it working class pride. It's been replaced by middle class pride, and the working classes have come to be seen as something to escape from."
The logic of this is that to be working class in this day and age is to seemingly refuse to better yourself; to be poor is your own fault; to be unemployed is to be feckless and lazy. What's more, Jones notes, it's a logic which, increasingly, is being reflected in our popular culture. Or not reflected. Because, it seems, the working classes have gone missing.
The lovable working class scamps of the early 70s, the Likely Lads and the Liver Birds, have vanished from the great mass-market medium, TV, and in their place are the "chavs" of the popular imagination: the ne'er-do-well benefit scroungers of Shameless, or, what Jones calls the "classic example": Vicky Pollard, a fictional character, who's been somehow taken to be true. A fantasy of a working class woman "created by two privately educated, middle class comedians".
And now there's Brentwood, the Essex dormitory town which is at the heart of the smash ITV2 hit, The Only Way is Essex. It's the show of the moment, the zeitgeist hit of 2011. Its characters have become a staple of the celeb magazines, almost every day the Daily Mail carries a new pap shot, a new storyline, and it's responsible for introducing an unsuspecting world to a hitherto little-known form of body art: the "vajazzle". What's more, it won the YouTube audience award at the Baftas. It's "scripted reality", a freshly minted genre, which has crossed reality TV with soap opera to create a format that uses dramatic structures and devices but whose subjects are "real people" rather than actors. Or, as the disclaimer at the start of every episode states: "This programme contains flash cars, big watches and false boobs. The tans you see might be fake but the people are all real although some of what they do has been set up purely for your entertainment."
Standing opposite the Sugar Hut, the nightclub which is the setting for much of the action in the show, I watch a steady stream of young women heading towards the entrance. They're like a flock of parakeets: beautifully dressed in spangly cocktail frocks and silky playsuits, their hair groomed, their lips glossed. "What's a chav?" I ask Holly, 21, and Sarah, 26.
"It's people from south London," says Sarah.
Would you call yourselves chavs? "Oh no. We're from south-east London."
The characters in The Only Way is Essex have money. They're successful. For much of the country, they're figures to aspire to. And for large swaths of the middle class, they're to be sneered at and ridiculed. Dominic Sandbrook, the historian, says it seems to represent an image of "working class people bettering themselves and still being tasteless". Or, as Owen Jones calls them, "grotesque caricatures of working class life".
Is it a coincidence that the show's set in Essex, home of Basildon man? He was a figure from the 80s, a new demographic said to embody how the old working classes had converted to the Thatcherite creed. Or is it an accident that at a moment of recession, and swingeing cuts in public spending, the show that has captured public imagination is about the glories of consumerism? That revels in displays of money, in flashy sports cars and expensive gyms; in overpriced champagne drunk in over-decorated nightclubs. Watching The Only Way is Essex is to observe a world in which there's no hint of unemployment, or repossessions, of benefit cuts, or money troubles, or the barest whiff of life as lived by most people.
"I'm sure the producers would say it's entertainment, and it gets the viewing figures," says Phil Redmond, the creator of Brookside and Grange Hill. "The problem is that there's no counter-balance. There's no drama which is dealing with what's happening in the rest of the country. There's no contextualisation. And that's a massive problem. Instead of sympathy for the unemployed, the big thing now is humiliation. The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, it's about seeing people hurt and humiliated. What's happened, I think, is that we've been completely desensitised."
If you're old enough to remember the 80s, you're probably old enough to remember the great Alan Bleasdale drama, Boys From the Black Stuff. It elicited a huge wave of public sympathy for the likes of Yosser Hughes, the working man beset by circumstances beyond his control. Even comedy dealt with the political fallout of the economic turmoil the country was undergoing. The heroes of Auf Wiedersehen Pet were unemployed builders who'd gone to Germany to find work.
Where is Yosser Hughes today, I ask Phil Redmond? "Nowhere. There's nothing, is there? Brookside was born out of the same impulse. It was set amid the aftermath of the Thatcher revolution, dealing with the problems of post-industrialisation. There's really nothing comparable at all today."
What there is, instead, is what Lynsey Hanley, the author of Estates: An Intimate History, a memoir of growing up on a council estate just outside Birmingham, terms "a terrible crisis of representation". And what Laura Baker calls a "nobody-like-me" situation.
I meet Laura outside the Hare & Tortoise on Brentwood High Street, opposite the Sugar Hut. She's a 26-year-old insurance broker who works in Brentwood, studied geology at Manchester University, and, unlike most of the people I talk to, she's happy to describe herself as working class. The Only Way is Essex "is so not representative of Brentwood", she says. "If you go into the Sugar Hut, you'll see all the girls dolled up to the nines, but it's not what the rest of us are like." At university, "I used to say I was from East Anglia, because if you said you were from Essex, people would say, 'Where's your white stilettos?' Or, 'Do you dance around your handbag?' There was a really sneering attitude."
It's ridiculous, she says, that working class people are seen as chavs but she can't think of a single television programme that's currently on that shows the reality of working class life. "There's not, is there?" she says. "There's nothing! There's just these ridiculous people getting fake tans and boob jobs."
To find what used to be termed "the respectable working class" you need to drive 10 miles from Brentwood, and travel back 30 years in time, to the other side of the county, and the other side of Thatcherism: to the Dagenham of Made in Dagenham, the hit film that dramatised the struggle against sexual discrimination at the Ford Dagenham car plant in the late 1960s. It's only here, in the past, that you'll find a world of proud and happy working class folk; people who are empowered by trade unions and supported by friends and neighbours, who are diligent and law-abiding and happy to call themselves working class.
In 2011, Jones says, hardly anyone does. When I ask Tony Benn why that is, he says: "It's because there's this idea that somehow you've failed if you're poor." The idea of chavs as a semi-feral underclass has emerged, he suggests, because "the media are very hostile to these people. What they're doing is suggesting that if they're sacked it's in some way their fault. And if you blame unemployment on the victims, you are ignoring the logic of what has actually happened."
And it's not just the media, says Tim Horton, the research director of the Fabian Society. "Although the way that the media portrays poverty is a disgrace, politicians are worse. They're laying claim to these stereotypes to create an aggravated sense of tension which then allows them to destroy the welfare system."
It's happened before, he says. The idea of the feckless poor dates back to Elizabethan times, and the poor laws. It's why the Victorians invented the workhouse. "I have in front of me a Daily Mail from 1905 with a headline that rails against a luxury workhouse. This has always been with us. There were some very high-profile benefit fraud cases in 1976 which some people have claimed helped lay the groundwork for Thatcher's election."
Is that what we're doing now? Is the lack of three-dimensional, working class characters on television helping to create a climate in which politicians can take an axe to the welfare state? "It does seem like that. We're 'othering' the poor. There are both positive and negative images of rich people. Think of JK Rowling and Fred Goodwin. But there are no positive images of poor people. And that's a problem," says Horton.
Jones cites a YouGov poll from 2006 which asked professionals working in television whether Vicky Pollard was an accurate representation of the white working class. A mind-boggling 70% said yes. Possibly even more tellingly, David Cameron at one time claimed that Shameless was his favourite programme. "If that's true," says Horton, "then it's no wonder he's cutting the benefits of the most disadvantaged groups with such relish."
The problem with television drama, Jones says, is the same problem that has beset all areas of public life: it's come to be dominated by the middle classes. The same problem has afflicted the media and politics. He cites the case of Shannon Matthews: the newspaper reporters sent to cover it likened the council estate in Dewsbury to Afghanistan. It was so far out of their sphere of experience, they literally had no point of reference to understand it; unlike the other missing child of the moment, the middle class Madeleine McCann.
The great working class dramas of the late 60s, the emergence of the Northern realists who created the likes of Kes and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, coincided with the most socially mobile generation this country has ever seen: the grammar school boys, gifted a route out of working class life by the sudden expansion of university education. They simply reflected the world they came from. And now? "There's either a focus on middle class people or on the lifestyles of the wealthy, or distorted, exaggerated or one-sided views of working class people," says Jones who blames "our increasingly segregated society".
Lynsey Hanley goes even further. "Two or three times a week I get these flaming calls from someone at the BBC who wants to talk to me about these things and they're all really, really clueless, and they've all got these RP accents. There's really not even any regional diversity. Not even people from Scotland or Wales, let alone the north or the Midlands".
She sees not just an absence of working class people on the television but also what she calls "BBC prole hatred". Working class life has been reduced down to ridiculous caricatures, she says. "Eastenders is the template for BBC prole hatred: it's just a gross caricature of the problems that people face, although even worse is Waterloo Road. It's just so cynical. There's no tenderness or humour. Nothing."
Two years ago, the Fabian Society called for the word "chav" to be banned. "It betrays a deep and revealing level of class hatred," turning people, the report said, into "the kind of feral beast that exists only in tabloid headlines". But given the almost complete absence of ordinary working people on TV, and the consequent lack of public understanding of their problems, the problem seems to go far deeper than that.
"There's so little realisation about how little people are actually paid," says Dominic Sandbrook. "People routinely overestimate the median wage."
"Programmes like The Only Way is Essex, you know, you take them with a pinch of salt," says Phil Redmond. "But there's no counter-balance. Of the actual problems facing actual people, there's nothing. It's like they simply don't exist."
