Mock the toffs - but they get the last laugh

Happy days: resident toff Jack Whitehall and Joe Thomas in the Channel 4 comedy on student life, Fresh Meat
12 April 2012

Only one group in society is still subject to a satirical free-for-all. While Frankie Boyle's jokes about the disabled are deemed disgraceful and "chav-baiting" has rightly been decried as classist, anyone can take a pop at the privileged.

These days, you have to be posh to be pilloried.
Take Fresh Meat, Channel 4's comedy on student life. The funniest character, whom we are definitely laughing at and not with, is resident toff JP. With the collar of his rugby shirt turned up, he is reminiscient of the brilliant Gap Yah sketches where Orlando tells of his exploits chundering around the developing world.

They are easy targets. The disguised snobbery of ITV2's The Only Way is Essex (where the intent seems to be to laugh at the vajazzled working classes) has always left me cold. But I have happily mocked the simpleton Sloanes in the IQ-eroding Made in Chelsea, one of whom - the brilliantly named Binky - thought Charles Dickens wrote Winnie-the-Pooh.

And then there is our PM. When he became Tory leader, a few commentators said it no longer mattered if a politician were posh. Now, Labour plays the Eton card whenever they want to suggest the Government is out of touch. Its hallowed playing fields are, of course, a byword for the top social stratum, which is why some newspapers have called George Osborne an Etonian, though he didn't actually go there.

But reverse snobbery isn't really any better than snobbery. In Freshers' Week, my token Old Etonian friend struck up a conversation with another student. When they discussed schools (not my friend's choice) and he confessed his dirty secret - five years at a penal colony for the privileged near Slough - the other student walked off, never to speak to him again.

Three years later, I cut out an article from our sister paper, The Independent, with the headline: "I have never met an Etonian who wasn't an untrustworthy, mendacious, conniving creep" and gave it to my kind-hearted OE friend as a joke. Would anyone - bar Frankie Boyle - dare write that about any other group?

You shouldn't have to bury a past that was determined by your parents when you were a pre-teen. And being privileged doesn't inherently make you an empathy-free zone, toffs are not universally smug and they don't all shop at Jack Wills, either. Just 98 per cent of them. Much as I laugh at Gah Yah and JP, they are symptomatic of Britain's bizarre fixation with class, when surely the ideal would be a class-blind society where politicians were judged on policy, not parental background. Not that being the butt of jokes has held them back: the Cabinet boasts five total toffs. The privileged may be mocked, but the last laugh is clearly theirs.

While I may have joined the dark side I'm really still a technophobe

CrackBerry junkies used to irk me. The way they would leave their little friend on the table at meetings, its red light flashing sporadically. Or the way their tip-tapping to reply to an email interrupted conversations. Then I joined them on the dark side.

When Luddites like me finally get hold of a technological device it is usually a sign that it is on the way out. Certainly, after BlackBerry users have spent three days in communications Siberia, the smug factor of already superior iPhone owners has hit astrononomical heights this week. It has been a PR fiasco for RIM, BlackBerry's maker, which has desperately been trying to prove it can keep up with ever more flashy rivals. One day I suspect the BlackBerry will sit in museums as a Noughties relic. But we shouldn't sound its death knell just yet: there are plenty like me who are too good at destroying technology and too scared of becoming an Angry Birds addict to want a glossy iPhone. Besides, you still see people with Nokia 3210s.

* Bang Bang Bang opened at the Royal Court this week. Though witty (Medecins Sans Frontières is nicknamed "nurses without knickers"), Stella Feehily's new play isn't cheery: it follows humanitarian workers on a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Julie Dray is particularly impressive as idealistic young Mathilde who accompanies the more seasoned and worldly Sadhbh.
Aid-bashing has become a popular sport. There are certainly flaws in NGO operations in the developing world - a lack of accountability above all - but Bang Bang Bang reminds us of the sacrifices aid workers make and the risks they face. Given the state of the world, we could do with more of Mathilde's youthful idealism too.

Use it or lose it - just don't bribe us to be organ donors

Organ donation has always struck me as a no-brainer. Since your need for a liver or a pair of kidneys or corneas has been exhausted, it is a dog-in-the-manger mentality not to offer your insides to someone else. Currently, all you have to do is fill in a form, so it is armchair altruism, charity for the lazy.

Which makes it particularly depressing that we should need to offer incentives to increase the number of donors, as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics is suggesting. The organisation argues that state-funded funerals would persuade more people to put their names on the register.

Perhaps, but it would be much cheaper to revive Gordon Brown's plan for an opt-out, rather than an opt-in system.

If only more people didn't need posthumous financial benefits or state-nannying to do something moral, though. What better send-off is there than to save a life?

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