Terence Blacker: British humour has always been in a class of its own

How those sophisticated folk at the Edinburgh Festival must have loved it when the celebrated Lotto Lout Michael Carroll took to the stage with his tattoos, ear-studs and amusing attitudes. Also known as the King of the Chavs, Carroll was there to discuss the effects of overnight fame, his fellow panellist being Rebecca Loos, who once masturbated a pig on a reality TV show. "I've been painted as something I'm not," Carroll told his audience, going on to admit: "I played up certain things but who don't?"

Who don't, indeed. The festival-goers will have laughed, perhaps a touch uneasily, as Carroll confided to them that he knew how to please a woman "in every way", adding that at the end of the day he was "just a loveable rogue". Because they were watching chav royalty, they will have known that amusement was permissible - it was almost irony, in fact - but they will also have been aware that their laughter was essentially snobbish. The Lotto Lout was funny because he so precisely fitted the cliché, being every bit as randy, boastful and inarticulate as they had hoped and expected.

British class consciousness, indisputably the best in the world, has a powerful, evolutionary capacity to survive, re-inventing itself every few years under a new name. Once there was U and non-U. Then there were plebs and oiks, Sloane Rangers and Hooray Henrys. Recently chavs have emerged as a new media-friendly social grouping. A changed label, mysteriously, has the effect of erasing guilt about snobbery and making class mockery acceptable for a while.

Even now, a few doughty comedy hacks are no doubt churning out jokes against a tight deadline for Christmas stocking-fillers called How to Be a Chav or The Complete Chav Handbook. When last month a couple of know-all teenagers posted their own chav etiquette guide on the web, it was so successful that they briefly achieved their own kind of overnight fame.

Class-based jokes sell. The British love them. They have been at the heart of many of our classic sitcoms - Dad's Army, The Good Life, Fawlty Towers, Keeping Up Appearances, Rab C Nesbitt - and have informed the best-loved routines in sketch shows from Monty Python to The Fast Show.

So when, also in Edinburgh, the writer Jimmy McGovern criticised "latte-drinking, pest-eating, middle-class" TV executives for making money out of chavs, it was difficult to see what was so shocking or new. Few will have been startled by his argument that the people running television have total contempt for their largely working-class audience; after all, TV executives, like their soulmates in advertising, have contempt for virtually everyone outside their own small circle.

A YouGov poll, commissioned for the Edinburgh Television Festival, confirmed this downright stupid industry bias against the poor old general public. A survey of those who work in TV revealed that a mind-boggling 70 per cent thought that Vicky Pollard, the thick, shiftless, rude, gum-chewing teenage mother of Little Britain, was a fairly typical reflection of modern youth.

It was the jokes of Little Britain, the drama of Shameless and the increasingly bizarre version of reality presented on programmes like Big Brother and Wife Swap that caused Jimmy McGovern to be so angry about the way the working classes are portrayed. "Normally, they would look to people on the left to speak up for them, but they haven't. Because they're not sexy. Unlike black lesbians, white, working-class men aren't sexy. So they are either ignored or patronised."

Yet it was only a few years ago when some commentators were welcoming reality shows and son-of-Springer daytime confessionals. Here at last, it was said, were opportunities for working-class voices and opinions to be heard. The people on these shows might not be well-educated or talk in the correct way but they were bright, funny and original.

As if to support this view, one of the most obviously ill-educated people ever to appear on Big Brother (and that's no mean claim) became its best-loved graduate. Today Jade Goody is too famous to have to explain herself at the Edinburgh Festival. If chavs are being patronised on TV, with its alleged working-class audience, it is a bit of a mystery why its most ruthlessly patronised character has become a hero and role-model.

Perhaps it is not class snobbery which is the virus infecting British television but something nastier and more universal - cynicism. As Selina Scott will be arguing this evening on channel Five's Why I Hate Television Today, there is an attitude of cruelty behind much of what is broadcast today. Ridicule, not of one particular class but of anyone who is unusually exhibitionistic, emotionally vulnerable or simply stupid, has become an easy, lazy way to win over viewers.

The effect is profoundly depressing: we view cynically. Anyone seen on TV - famous or obscure, politician or entertainer - is judged with a cold, mocking eye. The fact that, just now and then, someone like Jade Goody can turn public amusement to her own advantage merely confirms the general trend towards distrust and heartless laughter.

Snobbery is the least of British television's problems and, if a new spirit of class correctness swept through the industry, all that would be lost would be some rather good jokes.

The malaise goes far deeper, and it is not only chavs who are its victims.

terblacker@aol.com