Brendan O’Neill is not impressed by a class of paranoid white-collar workers learning how to head-butt imaginary assailants and defend themselves with their laptops
Have you ever wanted to learn how to beat up a chav, those baseball-cap-wearing, bling-sporting youngsters who inhabit inner cities, drink copious amounts of cider, and say unintelligible things in ‘Blackney’ (a mixture of ‘blackspeak’ and Cockney)? Well, now’s your chance. Gymbox, a chain of in-your-face gyms in London, is offering lessons in ‘Chav Fighting’. ‘Don’t give moody, grunting chavs an ASBO, give them a kicking!’ invites the Gymbox website: ‘Welcome to Chav Fighting, a place where the punchbags gather dust and the world is put to rights.’
And lest there be any doubt about what Chav Fighting involves, the Gymbox site comes complete with a promo video showing a respectable young man and woman being set upon by trackie-wearing scum, only for the respectable man to fight back, kick said scum to the ground, and beat them to a pulp. Gymbox promises to teach you how to ‘take away a [chav’s] Bacardi’ and ‘turn his grunts into whines’. ‘Why hone your skills on punchbags and planks of wood when you can deck some chavs?’ asks its promo leaflet.
I decided to pop along to Chav Fighting to see what kind of person signs up for a class that teaches you how to use everyday objects — keys, umbrellas, laptops — to beat up what Gymbox describes as the ‘scourge of modern-day Britain’. Well, I tried.
‘We don’t do that class anymore,’ says the receptionist at the Holborn branch. ‘It proved a little controversial.’ That’s one way of putting it. The Advertising Standards Authority is now investigating Gymbox after receiving complaints from people in Holborn who had Gymbox leaflets thrust into their hands inviting them to learn how to floor scummy yoof.
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