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The sentiment sucks; the website is wank. But the extreme behaviour described - utterly wank. The problem is the extrapolation of characteristics beyond this. Trisha and Kilroy acquire voyeuristic status as windows on what the working class are like rather than windows on a peculiarly 'touched' part of the underclass. It's also ultimately a shutting down of empathy, which is the conveyor belt of a better world. This is also seen in working class attitudes too - the teenage mother is either too stupid to get proper contraception (mc) or a slag or after a council flat (wc) rather than someone who you must try and enter the mind of someone who sees their entire life as a mother being the only horizon she's been offered, the only world she's ever been brought up to see had any meaning or possibility to her.
There are, then, cunts whereever you go. I think middle-class cuntishness towards the proles is getting worse though - and at the risk, I see Loaded culutre to blame, where politics got taken out of things, and anything was good for a laugh, and woe-betide the po-faced cunt who raises an objection (porn is cool and rocks, and don't fucking spoil it by reminding us of E. Europe human traffickers, you po-faced cunts). There was a quiet reserve which whilst looking down on the lower orders, wouldn't have laughed at them; it wasn't needed. The middle-class had won. The working class were for manual labour and for being repositories of all that was wrong, but not comic material; comedy is interesting as I think for most of the 20th C, most of British humour has been resolutely working-class in nature. Maybe the alternative comedy broke that back perhaps? Unintended consequence of lefty-gagmerchants being denigration of working class?
(cf debate about middle-clas left and rootedness in politics of reason, rather than empathy; vulnerable to sudden shifts (witness the Hitchens boys))
― Dave B (daveb), Friday, 30 April 2004 14:48 (twenty years ago) link
As usual I agree with Dave. And also with Norman. I think we should hold hands and run through the Ferrier Estate together, and then go and establish a humorous website called www.sloanetwats.com
I think council estate residents, chavs, pramfaces, dole scroungers, whatever the condescending nu-media working class chooses to call them, represent a level of "acceptable poverty" that makes them fair game - I can't imagine a similar level of barbed humour being considered acceptable when talking about, say, the homeless, or pensioners living in squalour, or even asylum seekers (although the latter is becoming regrettably less so).
I could expand on this and say it possibly has something to do with the British welfare state but I am hungover and it would probably be bollocks anyway.
― Matt DC (Matt DC), Friday, 30 April 2004 15:13 (twenty years ago) link