Anyone watching Prescott ? Did you know what CHAV stood for ?

[Lilyloo]

I have used the term and heard it used many times but never knew what it was an acronym for something ?

Oh sorry scummy, you got there first!

I like "backronyms"

Scummy, I agree with you about JP and that it wasn't her fault to a certain extent but at what point do we say she has to start taking responsibility for her own actions? How do we know the school system let her down? If she starts laying into her teacher what choice do school have but to exclude her?

When are we going to stand up and say this is damaging and unacceptable? School isn't to blame. Plenty of kids come from economically deprived backgrounds but try their best at school and don't think the answer to everything is to smack someone. Her deprivation comes from her parenting. If we don't do something to break the cycle then she wont parent any better and so it will go on.

I don't know what the answer is but I'm sure there are many people, cleverer than I who can come up with something.

Summing up that its just a slang word for well a chav.

Gosh, bit too heavy for a telly thread. Sorry!

Interesting though. Like the Cheltenham Average take on it.

Pikies or Townies was the term for 'ahem' erm, white trash when I was growing up.

I didn't say her specific school let her down. I agree that they were quite right to exclude her for attacking a teacher. And yes, she has to take responsibility. But children who are excluded should be offered alternative provision, not given up on. A shocking number of teenagers excluded from school never get another chance unless their parents push for it.

I was really very shocked that that girl did not know who Gordon Brown is (right now I wish I didn't but that's another story).

JP has self esteem issues. PP cracks me up as she so obviously wants him to go to the Lords just so she can be Lady Pauline. Most amusing.

I largely agree with Scummy's first post.

I was entranced with that young woman though, an loved the way they ate up the experience and readily agreed that it had changed them. And I couldn't help laughing when JP asked if she had left school because she wanted to get out into the world and work and sentence by sentence her answers revealed that she had had no choice but to leave...for violence...against a teacher...against the deputy head teacher.

Interesting programme..but I was shouting at the Lord for telling JP he had a 'chip' - surely the most provoking patroniong thing to say to anyone...and then at JP for going ahead and proving it in his railing at the school boy - when I was shouting 'well whose gvt presided over THAT???'

How could Blair and J work together as a team for 10 years and know so little of each other? They must have very odd working relationships, politicians.

Oh I agree we need to offer an alternative to being thrown into the adult world with no qualifications or references but I don't know what that is.

I know I keep posting this on various threads but if a non academic girl like her was offered a different path at 14, for example a hairdressing qualification she'd have had far more impetus to come to school. But instead we force her to sit through English, maths, French etc and for what? It is not as if by pummelling her with them for another two years she is suddenly going to become proficient in them,is it? Why don't we send these kids out into the world with something more useful? A qualification under their belt and a bit of direction?

Iwonder how JP and his wife get on really. She is so ready to embrace the middle class values that he feels so strongly about.Think he would have been better off marrying a toff 'class warrior' like Harriet Harman!

I felt a bit sorry for him, and agreed with him on a lot of the things he was saying but he just didn't follow them up, eg with the patronising earl (who was very pleasant, but nevertheless patronising), and the public schoolboys who seemed GENUINELY amazed that only 7%,or whatever, of people receive a private education and then get the best jobs. In a strange way they really didn't seem to realise how privledged they are.

It was also obvious that JP had never really come across the likes of those girls before!! That was a bit of an eye-opener to him I think.

I really enjoyed my programme but it did irritate me that when they had to produce a working class person it was an undeducated yob who was clueless about the world.

My dp and I both come from good working class stock and had nothing in common with that girl.

It doesn't matter what chav originally meant chav is a way of communicating the idea that everything we should aspire to is m/c and everything we should reject belongs to a working class subculture called chav.

It is interesting the way the media has pounced on the word chav. It gives them the chance to insinuate things they couldn't otherwise spell out.

Where I come from the word has always been part of our slang and no big deal. Now my mum has started saying it it does make me think, 'god, you sound so middle class'.

How can three girls who have grown up within a few miles of Houses of parliament/big ben/ buckingham palace etc and with free bus travel not have a clue about any of these places. It was the most depressing insight into inner london education. There is no excuse for this.

Agree with myredcardie - and then if such teenagers were to find something they are good at they would go out into the world feeling valued and less angry/ resentful/ insecure/ less likely to wallop authority figures.

Which bit of London were those girls from?

Mrs P is quite a Hyacinth Bucket type.

I think they were from Lewisham but i'm not sure.

I liked Mrs P and I can just see her putting the milk bottles in the dishwasher before she puts them out.

I agree about picking those girls as an example. But I suppose they were going to pick the worst because they wanted 'chavs' not just run of the mill 'working classes' who would have been perfectly pleasant and hard working etc. So, in a way, they were differentiating between general 'working class' and 'chavs'!

Having said that, I think it is such a shame, as another poster has said, that the education system/parents have failed them to such an extent that they were so ignorant of basic general knowledge.

One of the problems with the inner-city is that it can be immensely parochial / estate based and that young people do not look outwards to other options in their lives.

They have to be in school to be educated, and receptive, and many come from homes where no-one reads newspapers, goes on any trips other than cinema / pub /betting shop, where no adult has a job and / or lasting relationship of any kind. It WAS shocking that they didn't know about Big Ben etc - but schools can't do all the parenting. Poverty of culture and experience is a serious form of poverty. They recognised that, and appreciated what they had been enabled to glimpse through their encounter with JP of all things! I LOLed when they said they's like to socialise with him again. He was good at talking to them - esp from a starting point of him being ignorant of the existnce of the word 'chav'- which was actually perhaps as shocking as their respective ignorance!!

the way the bbc went on about chav and pikey wound me up.

the programme was very good though, loved john at the regatta with all those knobby toffs.

I thought Mr and Mrs Prescott were embarassingly aspirational. It was cringeworthy. Their house made me cry with laughter. The bit when Mr P was asked whether he would accept a seat in the Lords was very telling. Prezza would sell his own mother for a seat in the Lords.

I loved that Earl who said the Labour party had fucked up the constitution and fucked up fox hunting. I'd much rather have lunch with the Earl than Prezzer.

Just as those three girls were not representative of working class young women, those chaps at Henley were not representative of independently educated young men.

Pauline's Regency pelmet was brilliant.

I don't feel sorry for her - she gave up her four year old son for adoption when she married JP so he wouldn't be saddled with a kid that wasn't his - what a completely unlovely pair.

Yes and was very proud that he had turned into an army officer!

I felt sorry for JP being married to her, when he was going on about the class war, she just didn't get it.