Chav-bashing

It’s freaking cold here! The temperature dropped dramatically on Monday, ending what had been a very mild weather streak the past few weeks. I was actually lulled into thinking that was going to be how it was all the time. I had read that the average temperature here in January is 5 C (42 F), but this week it’s been consistently 0 C (32 F). I guess it snowed overnight because there’s snow on everything this morning.

Whenever the temperature changes I get a cold, so of course I’m now sick. Although this may have something to do with the ridiculous amount of alcohol I drank Saturday night in Cologne. It was fun but made for a miserable plane ride back.

I thought I would write today about this really interesting idea here of “the chav,” a concept which doesn’t have any direct translation in American English but has some close relatives based on regions. Chavs are sort of a euphemism for “the great unwashed,” low-income, ignorant people preoccupied with tacky designer fashions. The defining features of the stereotype include clothing in the Burberry pattern (notably a now-discontinued baseball cap) and other things such as tracksuits, hoodies and sweatpants. Ali G was a caricature of this type of person. Vicky Pollard from Little Britain is another example of such a caricature.

I suppose our analogous terms might be a “Guido,” or in New York, the “bridge and tunnel” crowd. However these terms only apply to people in specific regions of the Northeast. “White trash” might be another comparable example, but this term tends to be applied more to rural populations in the US, rather than chavs who are typically more urban.

British reality TV

It’s strange, who would have guessed that Celebrity Big Brother, which I became so curious about when I first arrived here, would spark a major international incident! The proportions of this have really gotten huge. Could the end result of all this be, finally, the death of trashy reality TV? I do so want to believe that, but my natural skepticism doubts it.

I’m not sure how much play this is getting in the states, so I’ll briefly recap for you. Big Brother is a huge phenomenon here, with a live TV feed and the inane details of the show plastered across the front pages of the tabloids every morning. This seasons Celebrity Big Brother invited on Jade Goody, a woman who became a “celebrity” (the term is used loosely here) through her appearance on a previous Big Brother. Basically, she became well-known for her outrageous stupidity.

Controversy erupted when Jade and two other contestants started picking on Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood star from India. They said some things that were vaguely racist, such as saying Shilpa should “fuck off home” and saying Shilpa “wants to be white” because she bleaches her upper lip hair. Basically the things that were said were more stupid and ignorant than overtly racist. Well she did call Shilpa “Poppadom,” but I have no idea what that means.

Shilpa shenanigans

Well I would be remiss if I didn’t give you an update on the Big Brother situation. It’s big news here after all! Yesterday's big news (plastered on the front pages of all the papers and leading the news broadcasts) was that there has been a public outcry and allegations of racism against some of the Celebrity Big Brother housemates. Viewers are apparently complaining that three of the British housemates are engaged in “racist bullying” of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.

Now I don’t have a TV at the moment, but I watched some YouTube clips of the incidents in question and it’s clear no one is being overtly racist, they’re just being stupid, making dumb comments about India, etc. The thing is Shilpa comes off as a saint, and these other girls just look like nasty idiots (the group is led, by the way, by the very Jade Goody I was mentioning in an earlier post). Anyway everyone from Gordon Brown to the head of channel 4 has had some kind of comment on it, and there have been calls for channel 4 to intervene. It’s leading all the Indian newspapers as well apparently. It’s all pretty silly. Shilpa is stunningly attractive and wildly successful in India, so it’s natural that these D-list British celebrities surrounding her are going to be jealous. Still, it’s an interesting phenomenon, this public reaction. And it should be noted that although the show’s ratings were sagging before, they’ve now shot up, leading to even more allegations that channel 4 is “profiting off racism.”

Observing pop culture

I’ve arrived here in the UK just at the start of the fifth season of “Big Brother,” a wildly popular reality series here in the UK which I believe existed in some form at some point in the US but never really caught on.

I’ve written about the show before, me and Pierce were perplexed by it when we visited London two years ago. The premise to the series is similar to many of our reality shows, a group of people is selected to live in a house and have every moment of their lives recorded. Each week the British public decides who they would like to “save” in the house. Whoever gets the least amount of votes has to leave. And the person who’s left wins some sort of cash prize.

Sounds fairly standard right? But here’s where it gets weird. There are not one, but two “live feeds” from the house, two channels that provide two different live broadcasts of whatever is going on in the house at that exact moment, which is usually people sitting around eating or sleeping. And people actually sit around and watch this, riveted!

London Visit

So after a very long hiatus from blog-writing I have returned. Since I was writing so much for work last quarter the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was write blog entries. But now I'm back to doing broadcast so I'll be starved for opportunities to write, so you'll once again be blessed with my pearls of wisdom.

I just got back to Chicago from being all over the place, I took 6 airplanes in 2 weeks, I never want to get on another plane again. But it was worth it.

I flew to Connecticut and spent a few days with my family, then went into New York and hung out with my friends there before flying to London for a week with my friend Pierce to stay with our British friend Aaron in London. Then I flew back to New York, hung out with the New Yorkies again, and then back home to the fam before flying back to Chicago.