Diary – 13 March 2004

I see that the papers have finally given a name — ‘chavs’ — to the new working class. They are the type of people I have been drawing for years: trailer trash covered in bling bling, wearing Burberry baseball hats, white tracksuit bottoms and white trainers. They couldn’t be more different from the docile ‘pint-of-mild-please’ working class of the 1930s. I remember Mass Observation and the films by Humphrey Jennings, which collated their behaviour as if they were animals in a wildlife documentary. Try doing that now: ‘Wot you looking at?’ ‘Er …nothing. I was just observing you drinking a large Jack Daniel’s and Coke so as to understand the sociological dynamic of the prole …Ow! For God’s sake, don’t hit me!’

They’ve taken down the wonderful turnstiles that used to let you into the London Zoo with a click-click sound, and replaced them with boring PC turnstiles that can take a wheelchair, an elephant — perhaps even an obese child. The original turnstiles will always remind me of Carol Reed’s 1948 film The Fallen Idol. The scene lasts only about five seconds but it has remained with me. The boy in the drama is taken to the zoo by the caretaker of the French Embassy in London so that the caretaker can meet his French lover. I think they just manage to hold hands. On the way out the boy stops the turnstiles for a moment, jamming in some old codger in a dirty mac who becomes very irate. The boy offers him a peanut by way of apology. That’s all! I don’t know why I love this scene, but I like to think that it may have been an ad-lib, slipped in by Carol Reed without anyone noticing. Nowadays the kid would have ‘done ’im’. Know what I mean?

Every now and then some poor person makes a joke to an official in an airport.