MetroMaaZa 1

In The Seven Sins of England, real-life hoodies, binge-drinkers and chavs deliver the authentic words of 11th century binge-drinkers, Edwardian yobs, Elizabethan xenophobes and 17th-century hooligans in this recreation of historical ‘chavvery’.

The seven sins were drinking, consumerism, hooliganism, slaggishness, rudeness, violence and bigotry, and none of them, unlike the documentary, was confined to Romford.It is not rare to see yobs behaving badly on TV but what was this?One suddenly turned his back on the two women he had just snogged in a nightclub and began reciting with utter confidence from a 17th-century pamphlet about licentiousness:“These young gypsies steal our hearts with such sly alluring hearts as that a man must be a stoic whose blood is not boiling to fermentation at the sight of them.”

The director Joseph Bullman’s inspired film made the simple points that the English working-class have always been yobs, that they have always been condemned, and that they always make us proud on the battlefield.A bovine skinhead replied to centuries of opprobrium: “You’ve got to step back and ask why people are like this and the simple answer is that it is our culture and we love it at the end of the day.”The insights were refreshing but what was beautiful was the craft with which the film’s dislocating conceit of articulacy was realised.

For a while I wondered if this was an art school put-on and that Bullman had recruited Rada students to befriend and betray the Romfordi-ans with lofty historical perspective but my doubts vanished when the most talented of the working-class recruits stopped acting and cried as he revealed that a CAT scan had determined he had received brain damage from a recent fight. Respect.

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Video Source: DVD
Host: Google
Chapters: 2

part 2