Tuesday 21st October, 2003 – The Girls A-Lout! Ho Ho!

In this week’s Trial of the Century, Girls Aloud’s Cheryl Tweedy has been found guilty of assault, and but cleared of a charge of racially aggravated ABH. The former verdict was greeted with barely contained glee in certain quarters of the media, the latter with muted disappointment. Even so, the assault charge was enough to go on, and the prurient, pinched-faced little right-wing hacks from the Telegraph, Mail, and Sun etc. set to work hammering home why Cheryl should be ashamed of herself, should be sacked from the band, and was –surely, readers, we knew this all along – an accident waiting to happen from the start.

In their unyielding pursuit of a populist ‘angle’ on the story, the lazy media fatheads have settled firmly on the position that the unpleasant toilet-based scuffle that put Cheryl in the dock was – rather than just one of hundreds of similarly ugly incidents that will have taken place in nightclubs the length and breadth of the country that January night – the result of a young, under-educated, and – most importantly – working class girl being thrust into a position she could not handle, and given more money that she could responsibly manage.

The Daily Telegraph sum it up best in their story, under the headline ‘Girl Who Allowed (see what they’ve done?) Fame To Go To Her Head’:

Cheryl Tweedy rose from modest beginnings to become a pop star, but yesterday's conviction for assault will tarnish her reputation…. Tweedy, 20, grew up in the Heaton district of Newcastle with her three siblings, mother Joan and father Gary, a painter and decorator.

Tweedy was, by her own admission, never academically gifted. "I was awful. They used to throw me out of class," she said…. She left Walker Comprehensive at 16, working in a cafe and touring the pub and club circuit before Pop Stars: The Rivals catapulted her into the public eye.

Interviewed shortly after winning the contest, she could hardly believe her luck. "I've wanted this for so long," she said. "Four months ago I was sitting in a council house drinking tea and watching Oprah Winfrey all day."

But in a more recent interview, following three Top 10 singles and incessant tabloid coverage, Tweedy admitted to having grown accustomed to "paparazzi and security everywhere". This love of the high life was identified during the trial as a key factor in her outburst at The Drink nightclub in Guildford, Surrey. In the words of Patricia Lees, prosecuting counsel, the singer had "allowed her relatively speedy success to go to her head that night".

GMTV followed much the same tack, solemnly debating whether Cheryl should be allowed to remain in the band, given the message her conduct is sending out to Girls Aloud’s young fans. A simplistic knee-jerk reaction this may be, but an understandable one. What was completely baffling was why presenter John Stapleton felt it necessary to repeat the words attributed to Cheryl in the Telegraph interview, saying that “By her own admission, less than a year ago, she was spending her days in her council house watching Oprah”. As if this in itself made her some ticking, formation-dancing timebomb, waiting to blow.

The underlying message is that here is a working class girl who got above herself, and is now paying the price for her unseemly, high-falutin’ ways. She has done nothing to ‘deserve’ her success and adulation – she was bad at school, she watched trash TV, she lived in a council house for God’s sake! By getting ideas above her station, she set herself up for a fall, and her nightclub ‘disgrace’ was the inevitable reversion to type that was waiting to happen.

It seems that snobbery is back in fashion. Not just snobbery masquerading as ‘intellectual snobbery’ (see HERE for angry diatribe on the ridiculous lie of ‘intellectual snobbery’), not even just the old-school, plus-fours-and-monocle snobbery that has long been the Telegraph’s stock-in-trade, but straightforward, snickering, ugly, class snobbery from people who at least give the impression that they should know better.

When Girls Aloud fizzle out within the year (as they inevitably would have done, court case or no court case), their only legacy is likely to be the insertion of the term ‘pram-face’ into the popular vernacular. A term coined on the Popbitch website to describe the Girls, it pertains to a certain type of young female who – according to the be-mulleted, Von Dutch cap-wearing, I-Pod fetishising, trust-fund draining, new-media jugheads behind the site – would look most at home pushing a pram through a council estate.

If only it was a handful of braying Nathans who were blithely throwing this phrase about, it wouldn’t matter, but I have heard the term used with increasing frequency and in surprising company over the past few months. Why is it OK to slate people because of their background now? What is it about seeing people from a working class environment doing well for themselves that upsets people so much?

This is the kind of attitude that fuels the semi-regular comment-page paroxysms about the lifestyles and conduct of the nation’s footballers, and the vile crowing when one of them falls by the wayside (Paul Gascoigne, for example). The recent stories about the sexual practices and attitudes of various footballers are undoubtedly shocking, and the young men involved beneath contempt, but the most pathetic thing is the way that a simple story about a group of disgusting little pricks praying on an unfortunate, terrified victim is dishonestly contextualised into a state-of-the-nation issue by the ‘too much too young’ brigade.

What is it that makes these lazy journo-goons think that their conduct is in some way linked to their working-class backgrounds? Could it be that they have all secretly conducted George Orwell-style social experiments by spending years on council estates and slums around the country, and have come to the irrefutable conclusion that the poor are, by their very nature, arseholes. Or could it be simple jealousy of all footballers, and a sense of outrage that these muscle-bound oafs – who probably bullied them at school, and made them look silly in front of the girls by nutmegging them on the one occasion they tried to join in on the soccer pitch – are earning more than them?

You might say that. I couldn’t possibly etc etc.