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for young people, I just thought no-one’s sitting around
waiting to hear from me in the adult world so let’s inflict
it on some other poor …”
Yes, but were you consciously writing in a different way?
“Oh yeah, yeah! You don’t have to try so hard do
you? There’s a certain reason why people who 20 years
ago would have been writing literary novels, like Gary,
like myself, aren’t doing it now. I think I’d fall at the
first hurdle. But my immediacy, my lack of education
which stop me from doing what Ian McEwan or [mutters
scornfully] Martin Amis do is part of what we love
about ourselves, and what suited a book like this … it
was very pleasurable and it felt very normal to do.”
Given your typically hard-line on paedophilia, did
you ever feel there was a tension in writing a lesbian
novel about 15-year-old girls? I’d heard there was more
sex scenes in it initially before they were cut out?
“Naaah there was never any real sex in it because
I thought that would be unbearably pervy and a total
contradiction of everything I stood for. Don’t go there.
Though for the TV show apparently she’s older, like
21 so they can make it a bit more hardcore. Is that a
horrible thing to say? No if it was kids it would be horrible
wouldn’t it? I’ve had no input whatsoever in the
programme so far but next week I’m going on-set. And
I’m looking forward to it.”
The drama is still to come but the documentary has
already been screened. Chavs was a classic Burchill
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
column brought to life; one-sided, contrary, mixing
pop culture and high sociological comment with
humour and venom. Its subject was the eponymous;
the baseball capped, Burberry clad, gold jewellery
bedecked folk devils that walk down every high street
in Britain. The butt of every middle-class sneery joke.
As per often Julie has bloody mindedly found a devilish
cause to defend; a hate-figure for snooty Telegraph
toffs, Mail paranoiac patio-sniffers and Guardian
liberal snoots alike.
Asked about why this issue was so close to her heart,
the full ferocity of her anger really takes off. The turbo
Bristol voice takes off, hard in vowels, soft in tone,
ruthless in content.
“Now, I’m a very idle person and I’m very relaxed,
and my ideal dream is just to lie on the sofa all day
eating chocolates. But when I do get agitated and when
I do get a bee in my bonnet I DO go all the fucking
way. When I was told about things like Chavscum [the
website dedicated to promoting hatred of all things
“chav”] which I hadn’t known about, and the abuse
they were putting out, I’m afraid I saw red. It seemed
to me that the kind of people who are doing things like
Chavscum ten years ago would have been racists, and
would have been that loathsome and that disgusting.
Now they can’t be racists because of the CRE and certain
laws that have been passed – quite rightly. But the
white working class are now the only people you can
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