When I was about twenty I lived for a while in a large house, sharing student-style with five other people. As you can probably imagine, it was hard to get any real time to myself in this house, even in my own bedroom (one of my share-ees was also a friend; the kind of friend who'd think absolutely nothing of coming home at 2am after a night out, then clattering into my room and switching the light on with a slurred "Hey, I'm bored! Why don't you tell me about what you did today?" I'd have complained, but these frequent nocturnal interruptions were carried out in such a sweet and good-natured manner that I just put up with them most of the time.
Another of my share-ees was a languorous fifty year-old man called Stu. Stu was permanently attached to the sofa in the front room, with the telly constantly on. I don't know what, if anything, he actually did for a living. You could come in and just change the channel at any time, and he wouldn't care - or, in most cases, actually say anything to you. It took the paranoid and self-obsessed twenty year-old me a good few months to realise that his lack of general conversation didn't mean he hated me (or at least I don't think it did!)
Anyway, I was catching up on the news one Saturday afternoon, which featured a story about a man who had been mistakenly accused of being a paedophile. Noisy protest groups carrying placards had formed outside his house, and were doggedly continuing even after the mistake had been reported. There they all were, storming past his house in a circular, Technicolour parade of polyester shellsuits and dodgy haircuts (this was the Nineties).
"It doesn't make sense" I mused quietly, almost to myself, as Stu and I were the only people in the room. "Why are those people still there, when they know the man's innocent?"
At this, Stu turned to me and actually said something. "What you're forgetting..." he said "...is that you're not actually watching a protest. You're watching a celebration instead...those people have found someone who's lower in the pecking order of life than they are. They're grateful that such a thing exists, and that is why they're still there. The man himself makes no difference"
I promptly forgot Stu's words as life moved on, but I was reminded of them a little while ago, when my little niece practically forced me to watch 'The Only Way Is Essex' for the first time. The episode we watched featured a 'pub quiz' night, at which one of the questions was "What does a matador fight?"
This question, when asked in an Essex pub, seemed to transform itself into the equivalent of a University Challenge final-round conundrum. I've never seen so many Botox-ed brows attempting to arrange themselves into a knitted position. Eventually Amy Childs, leader of 'The Hairy Growlers' piped up with something along the lines of "I think a matador's sumfing to do with penguins, innit?"
Other flummoxing questions included "Complete the film title: 'Gone With The...'" and "What is the City of Love?"
Watching this quiz, and the rest of the double-episode, in which a hapless Joey Essex takes a girl (sorry, I can't remember her name) to a rubbish tip on their first date, made me recall Stu's words because they are the only reason I can think of to fully explain the popularity of this show. Regular viewers, presumably not from Essex, can probably consider themselves "higher in the pecking-order of life" than somebody who wears too much fake tan and who doesn't know what a matador is. As for me, I just found it slightly depressing. I tried desperately to search the show I was watching for a 'saving grace' of some kind, which seemed to be in the fact that the majority of the people in it seemed kind-hearted enough, and genuinely incapable of true malice.
What with this show, 'Gavin and Stacey' and the ghastly 'Educating Essex' it seems that, somewhat depressingly, coming from Essex these days grants you immediate "lower in the pecking-order of life" status. Recently I did a consulting job in North London. On walking into the room, the director I was going to be working with exclaimed: "Blimey, you're pale! I thought you were from Essex...aren't you all supposed to be thick and orange?"
That aside, we got on famously.
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