Why is essex so bad

Bid to erase 'Essex girl' from dictionary. The changing face of 'Essex Man'. Is this really what Essex is about? Image source, OED. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Essex girl. Image source, Terri Simpkin. Dr Terri Simpkin said Essex girl's negative meaning was developed in the s and 90s. Image source, Simon Fowler. Southend-on-Sea playwright Sadie Hasler says the Essex girl stereotype is "utterly moronic". Image source, Matthew Mallett. Essex is about more than just stereotypes, as this image of Landermere Wharf in the Tendring district shows.

Image source, Kika Mitchell. Juliet Thomas and Natasha Sawkins are campaigning to change or remove the dictionary definition of Essex girl. Image source, ITV. Shows like The Only Way is Essex were criticised for playing up to the stereotype.

Image source, Stuart Woodward. The Essex Way runs from Harwich pictured to Epping. None of them are likable, interesting or entertaining.

It's an anti-advert for Essex, worsening the county's already bad reputation. I've stopped watching now. Main issues are: 1. The Cast. One of these types is apparently "over the drama" - in which case, they should be on a spin-off show so that people can specifically opt to watch their mellow conversations, and or they can stay but take a supporting role.

Focus should turn to newer cast e. There's barely any drama. If they need ideas, they should watch MIC on Channel 4. Dull filming locations. Just-Being-Me 5 March I don't want this review to offend anyone as everyone has their own preferences but i am not surprised one bit that it has only got a rating of 3. I personally don't like the show and don't get why it is taking up space on TV.

I am also glad to see that i am not the only one that thinks this show is a total waste. I don't get why people would be interested in this programme. I think the programme itself makes the people of Essex look dumb i am not saying they are dumb, that is just how the show makes them look , the things they say and do just make you want to bang your head against a brick wall.

I personally only thought one of the people on the show was OK and that was the curvy one Gemma or something i think. I thought the shows on TV where already bad but then i watched this and i didn't get it at all. I'd much prefer to watch a blank screen. I mean OK if someone told me "hey, we will pay you if you stand in front of a camera doing nothing, just argue, look orange and act dumb" then yeah i would do it, who wouldn't, it be the easiest job ever so i do understand why they do it, i just don't understand how it got on the channel it is on etc.

Some people will love this show and OK to them, there is nothing wrong with you liking it, everyone has different preferences, the show just personally isn't for me and i wouldn't recommend it. Following the mould of MTV reality shows like "Jersey Shore" and "The Hills", "The Only Way is Essex" follows the supposed lives of a group of nouveau-riche twenty-somethings in Essex, adhering to the common stereotypes of the respective county - big yet tasteless houses, huge nightclubs and wild parties, tarty blondes coated in fake tan with a token gay friend at their side , manly men who enjoy doing manly things, and of course, a no-nonsense grandmother who's fiercer than an RAF division.

In a departure from a good number of British reality shows, the scenes are almost all evidently staged and cut, with a perfect level of soap-opera histrionics and bad acting thrown in for good measure. As such, the show comes across as a parade of cardboard cutouts devoid of any personality against a set of sterile backdrops.

It's little more than a piece of trash that makes everyone in Essex out to be superficial and stupid, but I have to question whether anyone thought it was going to be good in the first place.

This type of programme hooks the viewer in its knowing awfulness; it's so appalling that it becomes morbidly engaging. To TV executives, this means good ratings and the chance to make money off a cheap franchise. Yes, it's depressing that shows such as "The Only Way is Essex" exist, but it's ultimately simply worth just ignoring.

One of the worse programs on TV.. Watched it once Certainly not representative of any people in Essex that I know. LTPHarry 11 January In , MTV started airing Jersey Shore, a reality show about a bunch of unlikable junkies who yell, kiss and swear at each other.

It was a smash hit even though a lot of people hated it, and it came to be that other channels were willing to milk the same success as this show. Take ITV, who have made good and bad shows. They then made this show, which is basically got the same exact idea as Jersey Shore, you take a bunch of dopes and put them in Essex. Like with most Reality Shows of this genre, almost nothing is real and is all acted out which to me, put out why they even call these "reality shows" when almost nothing is real.

The characters are your usual "good-looking, unlikeable chicks" and they for some reason have strange characteristics as well. In fact from what i've seen, many of the cast members act like their characteristics are real, even when they leave the series. Joey Essex, one of the most well known cast members on the series alongside Chloe Sims and Gemma Collins still acts in his "braindead and stupid" persona that he had on the show to this day for some reason, why?

Lastly, this show gives a bad reputation to Essex alone, much like how Jersey Shore gives Jersey a bad reputation.

You can ask actual people who live in the county and they'll likely say something on what I said. Anyways, this show sucks. Nothing else to say. Why on earth people watch this rubbish is beyond me. It's so bad. In what way, shape or form is this entertainment?

Sheer inane, dross. It looks like towie has ran its course now. Most of the original and interesting cast have gone, left the sinking ship most probably. And it now seems to evolve around the Sims and Gatsby, who all have zero personality. Never thought I'd waste my time watching rubbish like this,but after having taken a look at "Jersey Shore" and seeing how bad it was I thought there could be nothing worse than that! I was wrong. A friend mentioned it can get worse and told me about this show.

The Only Way is Essex has got to be the most retarded TV series ever made and that is why you gotta take a look if only for five minutes and then never go back. I don't know why MTV waste their time,but I suppose if you can't be the best you might as well be the worst!

At the wake in Kensington, to cheer everyone up, Heffer told the story about the bloke on the train. Do it, do it! But it was Essex man that would last. B y now, Essex was no longer just a county in south-east England. It was a shorthand for the way the whole country seemed to be changing, for the emergence of a brash and crass new individualism — and soon, it would become a shorthand for the discomfort with those changes, for a fear about what Essex man and his pushy girlfriend threatened to reveal about the true nature of Englishness.

While Birds of a Feather was a warmer and more subtle commentary on class than many remember, the sitcom helped give the world the female counterpart to Essex man, Essex girl.

Over time, the names of its lead characters, Sharon and Tracey, came to represent sexually promiscuous and somewhat dim women from the south of the county. Essex girl was permitted even fewer redeeming features than her male counterpart. By the mid 90s, the threat of Essex girl was everywhere. The Sharonisation panic peaked when it was reported later that year that Volkswagen had dropped the name for the British version of its new people carrier, Sharan, because it sounded too much like the Birds of a Feather character.

In typical tabloid fashion, alongside all the stories poking fun at Essex types, there came the occasional story that relied on the opposite premise: that people from Essex were good-hearted strivers cruelly judged by the old establishment elites.

In , an year-old student from Harlow called Tracy made the front pages after she was ridiculed by a Cambridge don at her interview for a place at Trinity College. When I spoke to her recently, Playle remembered the incident well.

In the end, Playle secured a place at Warwick university — while it came out in the press that Griffiths, who died recently, was the son of a Liverpool docker. In , the Essex Chronicle commissioned an Anglia University academic to write a report about the way people from Essex were portrayed in the press. And so a new sub-species was born: Basildon man, who was really just Essex man under a new name.

But Basildon is where the Essex myth collides with reality. What it offered instead was an illusory promise. Look how Basildon has changed. Today, Basildon is a poster child of inequality. It contains a quarter of the most deprived areas of Essex, despite housing an eighth of its total population, and is the sixth most unequal town in the country. Pitched against such evidence, the myth of Essex as the great Thatcherite success story says more about the will of the Conservative commentariat than anything else.

A microclimate of inequality existed on our street, separating homeowners from council tenants. No one seemed any richer, just further apart. History, after all, is written by the victors. Local elections in early June resulted in Labour capturing Southend council for the first time in its history, and Basildon council now also has a Labour leader.

But the spectre of Essex man is still haunting our politics — now as a gung-ho hard Brexiteer. If Essex man has ever inhabited a physical form, it is surely Mark Francois, the arch-Brexiter MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, who grew up in Basildon and worked in the City before entering politics. His star has risen in line with an increasing demand for polarising soundbites on Brexit: infamous moments include Francois angrily quoting Tennyson behind a picture of Margaret Thatcher, angrily ripping up a letter from the German CEO of Airbus about Brexit on live TV and angrily making a throat-slitting gesture as Theresa May spoke in the Commons.

In , after Francois had become an MP, David Cameron promoted him to the shadow cabinet as a sop to the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party. The persistent rhetorical power of this invented Essex — as a land of a million Marks Francois, ready to die for No Deal — requires that we continue to overlook the reality of the actual place.

Parts of Essex, James says, are more diverse than is widely acknowledged: there were 50 mother tongues among the students at the Southend primary school her youngest daughter attended. And there is the small matter of the Windrush, the ship that carried about migrants from the Caribbean and docked in Tilbury in Essex is not part of the metropolitan bubble … People have got their feet on the ground.

If Essex did not exist, they would need to invent it. Canvey Island, The invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature — podcast. Read more. Topics The long read features.