Inverse snobbery

[Hodge]

Pants... Phanerothyme beat me to the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen quote, lol. Here's the whole sketch script, anyway, just for a luagh or two...

 

Four well-dressed men sitting together at a vacation resort.

Michael Palin: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

Graham Chapman: Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier wine, eh Gessiah?

Terry Gilliam: You're right there Obediah.

Eric Idle: Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?

Palin: Aye. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

Chapman: A cup o' COLD tea.

Idle: Without milk or sugar.

Gilliam: OR tea!

Palin: In a filthy, cracked cup.

Idle: We never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

Chapman: The best WE could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

Gilliam: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

Palin: Aye. BECAUSE we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness."

Idle: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to live in this tiny old house, with great big holes in the roof.

Chapman: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

Gilliam: You were lucky to have a ROOM! *We* used to have to live in a corridor!

Palin: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

Idle: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.

Chapman: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

Gilliam: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

Palin: Cardboard box?

Gilliam: Aye.

Palin: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

Chapman: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

Gilliam: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

Idle: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

Palin: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

[Belle]

Interestingly, you can even change your class within your own lifetime.

 

I was born probably working class but aspiring middle class, to a young couple in a small starter home, who had both come from council house backgrounds. I then became middle class because my parents became professionals at work and bought more upmarket homes etc. Then I graduated from Poly (being that educated makes you middle class) then I married an unemployed not-working class man, who was probably a bit lower than working class and we went to live in a little terraced house (like Corrie). That moved me back to working class again, if you allow for the one-time definition of women taking the class of their spouse. Having been divorced many years and living in a nice home and having a professional job, I am back to being middle class again.

It is a heady old world

 

In answer to the original post, politicians often talk up their working class credentials, JP, the DPM for instance, who lives in a big flash house with lots of conspicuous consumption and has nice things round him and a great salary, pretends to be working class.

 

It is definitely about

a. street cred and

b. aiming for support by association "he is one of us"

c. aiming for support by being someone who has "made good".

 

JP is clearly middle class by any standards of definition, although of course you cant buy taste which is where some people get confused.

 

Louise