While “researching” my forthcoming Sky One documentary In Defence of Chavs (trans: lying on sofa scoffing Turkish Delight and goggling at the Living channel and hanging out with fit boys from the wrong side of the “tracks” — it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it), it struck me that chavs are less real people than distorted reflections of the very people who seek to pillory them. That is, ambulatory archives of our own thwarted ambitions.
Think about it — if we’re not making as much moolah as we think we should be, we will pick on what we perceive as the more-money-than-sense chavs, such as footballers and their wives; if we’re not getting as much “action” as we think we should be, we will become unwholesomely interested in the sex-mad chavs who feature in programmes such as Ibiza Uncovered.
Sometimes we do both; there can be few sights more amusing and repulsive than the spectacle of sluttish, money-grubbing, middle-class hacks who started out with every chance in life and have been through their acquaintances like a dose of salts, sexually speaking, getting up on their high horse JUST ONE MORE TIME in order to denounce working-class kids for attempting to get the most out of Mammon and mammaries by their own efforts, having been dealt a pretty poor hand to start with.
But the funniest example of chav-envy comes from those who are obsessed with the idea that white, middle-class Britain — personified by the Selfish Career Girl — is failing to reproduce itself. Not so the council estate chav teenagers, of course — they’re popping out the puppies faster than you can say “Vicky Pollard”. And not the coffee-coloured relative newcomers to our islands, who are going forth and multiplying like good ’uns. No, it’s the all-important issue of whether the white middle class can replicate itself that is at stake here — nothing so simple as having a new generation to work hard and keep us putative pensioners in gin and Viagra.
Look, are we going to have enough people to keep us in the style to which we’re accustomed, or aren’t we? That’s all I want the doom- mongers of the Daily Hell to tell me. You can’t say we’re over-run with immigrants one minute and heading straight for extinction the next. And let’s face it, your sterile white bourgeoisie isn’t going to get major lead in its pencil any day soon. In fact, isn’t there just a little of the D. H. Lawrences about David Blunkett, all that passion seething away under that stoic Methodist exterior? That’ll be the same D. H. Lawrence who decided that the quality of orgasms that working-class men experienced was measurably better than those of their better-off brothers — and observing the Samson-style, majestic masculinity of Mr Blunkett, who can doubt it?
Nope, if we want to provide a future workforce while also keeping up white numbers, there’s only one sure-fire answer — bring on human cloning! Cue horrified hands thrown in the air by the Daily Hell, natch — though for people opposed to it on the grounds that scientists are “attempting to play God”, they do seem fond of pronouncing on just exactly who should and who shouldn’t breed.
This being such a weighty issue, it’s a shame really that Some People can’t find it in themselves to take it seriously, but instead would rather use it as a springboard from which to jump off into all sorts of wild accusations about other people’s fidelity. Thus when I asked my husband what he thought about human cloning, he rolled his eyes and then gave me evils: “Not that again!”
“What?!”
“All this crap about human cloning being for the good of mankind! It’s just about you having sex with your clone, and when you get caught, trying to wriggle out of it by saying it’s more like masturbation than adultery! We’ve been over this 50 times this year, every time you see a headline about it in the Daily Mail! Get over it!”
“What if I let you watch?”
“Now you just sound mad. Like when you fancied Jackie Clune only when she was meant to be you in that play. Even though, let’s face it, she looked a lot better as herself!”
I bet he wouldn’t have said that to Beyoncé, I reflected mutinously a while later while watching the video for the latest Destiny’s Child single, in which clones of all three of the girls get nasty with each other in some sort of dirty dance-off. I bet she’d be allowed to have as many clones made of herself as she liked, and Him Indoors would be positively pushing them into sex-offs, with his eyes coming out on stalks! Same with all those Kylie clones as featured in the Come into my World video; come on, what man — or woman worth her salt — is going to say no to six Kylies at once? If one is fun, stands to reason that half a dozen is six times better. And there’s the safety in numbers angle — if you committed adultery with six versions of somebody, wouldn’t they sort of cancel each other out?
The misery-goats among us always have to carp on about the downside of human cloning, as though it would be a sure thing that some sort of Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario would happen, and we’d end up with a world full of Jeffrey Archers and Janet Street-Porters. But the way I look at it, the good would far outweigh the bad, in so many arenas from the most vital to the most frivolous. For a start, we would be able to stop stealing doctors and nurses from the developing world — a nasty new habit of Whitey’s that some people believe will eventually have more Africans dying from Aids-related diseases than even lack of proper drugs.
Moving from people afflicted through no fault of their own in the Third World to those suffering self-inflicted ailments in the weird world, just think how useful a clone would come in for all those women who can’t get off through proper sex and instead demand that some poor sod goes South for six months in a Captain Oates-type I-may-be-some-time scenario. Not to mention the sort of seat-sniffers who go in for the preposterous no-sex “cuddle parties” which are apparently so popular among Manhattan’s sad singles that they’ll pay some prissy procurer twenty quid a throw for the pleasure.
Women across the Western world sit in rapidly cooling aromatherapy baths called things like “Sensuality” while their men download barnyard porn on their computers behind locked doors; we’re not going to make it across no man’s land alone, and we could use the clones to help us. I don’t know who it was that said — some Frenchie, probably — “A marriage is a heavy thing; it takes more than two people to carry it”; but we do know who came up with “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Not with a clone, it wouldn’t have been; the perfect compromise between being together and alone.
julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk
