MTV

Mick Hall has an excellent post, of which this gives a flavour:

British Television has gone back to the days of “gor blimy gov, thank you very kindly.” When working class people are portrayed on our screens, they are increasingly being played by middle class actors as either stupid chavs, layabouts, criminals, incompetent half wits or victims of their own class, in much the same way as black people used to be portrayed. There are a number of programmmes that epitomize the wretchedness and class prejudice that is so prevalent in the media today. Al Murray's Happy Hour stands out as the worst of many, yet actors musicians and journalists line up to appear on this infantile programme, oblivious that by doing so they are party to insulting a large section of the community they live amongst.

The ‘Landlord’ in the 'Happy Hour' is portrayed as a crude working-class bigot and is played by middle-class actor and ‘comedian’ Alastair "Al" Murray, the son of Lt.-Col. Ingram Bernard Hay Murray and his wife Juliet Anne Thackeray Ritchie, through whom he is a great-great-great-great-grandson of William Makepeace Thackeray, his grandfather was UK diplomat Sir Ralph Murray. Al Murray attended Bedford Public School and is a graduate of Oxford University. Yet on screen he masquerades as a half witted sexist lout who speaks with an estuary English accent, the likes of which has never been heard any where between Dagenham and Southend. What makes me puke is comics and actors like Murray when out of character portray themselves as 'right on' people who show respect to all, yet in their work they seem to believe they have a right to insult ordinary decent people for no better reason than these people are working-class.

Except of course that "the son of Lt.-Col. Ingram Bernard Hay Murray and his wife Juliet Anne Thackeray Ritchie", himself an old boy of Bedford and Oxford, is not in fact "middle-class" at all. His background is a very long way indeed from the £22,000 per annum that is the median wage for full-time work, the actual middle.