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fucking hate with impunity, and I felt I just had to raise
my fucking voice.”
It should be stressed there is no editorial trickery
involved in Julie’s broadsides here. This is simply how
she talks. Very, very fast too. The only other person I
can think whose words race along as fast as they think
is Patrick Moore.
“It’s so tempting to be lured in by the defence of
humour and irony. One of the worst things you can say
to somebody is they’ve got no sense of humour. If you
look at the personal columns, you’ll often see people
admitting that they’re ugly or not bright or fat – no-one
will ever admit to having no sense of humour. It’s the
final insult, the final thing no-one will admit to. But I
didn’t want to get the fucking joke. If there was a joke
I didn’t want to get it, just like I didn’t want to get it
when my parents were watching Love Thy Neighbour
and thought it was funny to call someone “nig-nog.”
Instinctively, I just thought it was disgusting. To me
laughter and great humour comes from taking on people
above you on the social scale.”
The documentary featured an extremely ill-tempered
spat with TV “personality” Vanessa Feltz, who
opined that her very worthwhile existence should not
be sullied by having to pay her taxes in supporting
welfare payments to such dread creatures. Really
though Julie, you were great friends after the cameras
stopped weren’t you?
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
“I just wanted to punch her fucking face in! Listen,
I’ve got a friend who thinks al Quaeda have ‘got a
point’, I can sit with him and listen to that shit, I can
listen to taxi drivers being racist. But when I sit with
a middle-class person going on, I don’t care if it is a
kind of prejudice, I just wanna kill the fuckers and I
think you’ve got no right to say a fucking word, you
just don’t know fucking anything about anything. To
me, it’s not about race, there’s the middle class and
the working class; us against them. Well, there’s three
groups really but that’s the upper class who don’t count
cos they’re fucking retarded … but put a middle-class
person in front of me, I don’t care if they’re left-wing or
right-wing, talk to them for five minutes, and the filthy
fucking snob in them will come out.”
Even when angry she is increasingly at ease, and
warm in her demeanour. She doesn’t laugh much but
does grin mischievously from time to time. Possibly
libellous comments about La Feltz follow. But what
would you say to people who claim that chavs are only
a part of the working-class, and that criticising the
former is not criticising the latter?
“People say that to me trying to be nice, I always
say ‘Don’t do me any fucking favours!’ When someone
tries to differentiate between the deserving and
the undeserving working-class the black heart of me
cleaves towards the undeserving ones. My father was
a member of the deserving working-class, he ended
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