The UK is producing its own Jersey Shore, called Geordie Shore, about chavs from Northeast England:
England’s always had a fine-grained taxonomy of working-class sub-cultures. Geordies — a term for people from the Tyneside region of Northeast England — may not have always existed in their current form, but the regional nickname stretches at least all the way back to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and certainly was in current usage by 1793. The stereotype Geordie Shore exploits is, as MSN TV Editor Lorna Cooper puts it in an email, that “all Geordies are thick, drink brown ale, say ‘why-aye-man’, have women that look like brick houses.”
Of course, this has driven Geordies who aren’t on TV crazy. Part of the problem, Cooper says, is that the show and its audience have conflated a regional stereotype with a class one: While “Geordie” refers to the many residents of a geographic area, the Geordie Shore stars are all working class people who engage in all sorts of hard-partying anti-social behavior. They’re considered chavs.
“Ordinary working class people abhor both the moniker and the association,” Cooper says. “For us, chavs are akin to a level of underclass we look down on; the type of people that go on The Jeremy Kyle Show (think a British equivalent of Maury) for DNA testing to discover who’s the father.”
My parents and children are Geordies and I have lived on Tyneside for more than 30 years.
The interesting things about Geordies is that the stereotype began in the late 19th century when Geordies were probably the wealthiest working men in the world — so wealthy that their wives did not need to work, they could dress up, and go out drinking and ‘having a laugh’ long before most other people.
But these men worked very hard and long hours in coal mining, ship building and other heavy industry; they also had a highly organized culture of trades unions, self-education lectures etc, and a range of fanatical hobbies such as growing food (especially leeks) on allotments, keeping pigeons, racing whippets (small greyhounds) etc. They were tough but had strong morals, and went to Nonconformist chapels.
The modern underclass chavs (or charvers as they are called on Tyneside) live on benefits and consume alcohol, drugs and the mass media. They are passive and dependent — their ‘culture’ bears near zero relationship to the working class Geordies of 100 years earlier.
This reminds me of The Classics in the Slums.