Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán at Pexels. 

Earlier in the year I was approached by Lars Backe Madsen, a Norwegian journalist and author who writes feature stories and documentaries for the newspaper DN – the Norwegian Business Daily. This paper is kind of like the Financial Times but less conservative. He said ‘The last months I have read a lot about the so called “chavs”, who seem to appear in every city in Great Britain, and I want to make a feature story about the phenomenon for DN. The “chavs”, or at least their look-a-likes also live in Norway, but they don’t know about the word “chav”. I want to describe the phenomenon also in Norway.

We arranged to meet up on the 7th March where I took him to a fine pub on the outskirts of Derby called The Dead Poets. We sat and discussed all things Chav and fleshed out the basic premises of the article. When you have written an article stating that Chavs are a media creation harbouring historical prejudices rather than an ontological fact, you have to be a little wary of someone who wants to find them. After the interview we asked a couple of the locals what they knew about Chavs. One man said ‘you won’t find any around here’ another said ‘they smoke fags and push prams and wear lots of gold’ – the good old British public, so eager to repeat what they read.

Lars has promised to forward me a copy of the article and I am intrigued to read it. He came across as thoughtful, but that might be because he was buying the drinks. Either way, posting my Chav article on a popular website has got more publicity than a journal article gathering dust in a university library. The Chav identity was invented, meaning it can be deconstructed and turned into something positive. At least that’s my hope…

If you missed it, my chav article can be found at http://www.chavworld.co.uk/new-identity/