Hugo Rifkind Are we the only nation in the world where nice, middle-class girls aspire to be concubines? Do you think it might be possible to plot a link between the apparently vast pool of girls who dream of sleeping with Wayne Rooney for cash, and how rubbish The Vicar of Dibley was? I’m keen that we should. In general, in fact, I feel the rubbishness of The Vicar of Dibley should be considered the cause of as many world evils as we can throw at it. Disease, war, earthquakes, whatever we’ve got. You know those teary-eyed socialists who loathe Tony Blair because they used to love him, but then he betrayed them over Iraq? I’m like that with Richard Curtis. When I was a teenager, the man was my god. He wrote Blackadder. And then, The Vicar of Bloody Dibley. Jesus Christ, what a thing to do. But I digress, for this is not a column about Dawn French, and how totally amusing it isn’t that she’s both a vicar and a woman the size of a vicarage. No. It’s about Jennifer Thompson, an apparently wellbrought-up private school girl, who could have wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or, I suppose, a vicar, but instead wanted to be somebody who earned £1,200 by sleeping with an ugly man who is quite good at kicking a ball around. According to MissThompson’s friends, she considered herself a ‘wannabe WAG’. I was reading, in the Observer at the weekend, about the Manchester club where she met Rooney,where, according to one girl,‘everyone wants to bag a footballer’ and become a WAG.A‘WAG’, for those of you who avoid salacious rags such as the News ofTheWorld and the Observer, is a footballer’s consort, derived from appellation ‘wives and girlfriends’. I suppose they could stick a silent H on there now, for ‘hookers’. Britain appears to be pretty much unique in its WAGs, in terms of this status being an aspiration in itself, as opposed to just an insult for people who marry footballers. And I think I’m starting to understand why. I watched an interview the other day with Stephen Frears, the director, which he’d done to promote his new film Tamara Drewe. He’s a very nice man, Frears, and once gave me a lift home from the airport, but I must confess that Tamara Drewe did not, initially, strike me as something I’d have the remotest interest in going to see. It’s a comedy, about a saucy writer type going to live in a sleepy village. The reviews have been quite good, and yet I still felt this hostility. ‘The British don’t make films about the middle classes,’ said Frears. And he’s right. British popular culture likes princesses and prostitutes, the very top and the very bottom. When I was a teenager, Richard Curtis was my god. He wrote Blackadder. Then he wrote The Vicar of Bloody Dibley It largely ignores the middle, where most of us live, and it does this because the middle, where it is examined at all, is colonised by ghastly, smug, unreflective dross like the people in The Vicar of Dibley. This means a) that most creative types are inclined to leave it well alone to avoid contamination, b) that people like me instinctively recoil in horror from films like Tamara Drewe, and c) that aspiration, even for a smart girl from a ‘And the army, and the air force. . .’ the spectator | 18 September 2010 | www.spectator.co.uk good home, can effectively mean‘wanting to become a footballer’s concubine’. Next time: why TheArchers causes global warming. Maybe. I had to look into Popemobiles once, in an early job. Now that we’ve actually got one of them here, buzzing around with a waving Pope in it, I think I finally have an excuse to share my favourite fact about them. Which is that, back in the early days, they nearly had gun ports. The Popemobile was developed post1981, after the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. The Pope had stood up out of cars before then, but nobody had ever made much of a fuss about it. When he visited Peru a few years later, though, Maoist guerillas declared they were going have a crack at him. The Vatican commissioned a local firm to modify a Toyota, and their design included not only Kevlar bodywork, two-inch, bullet-proof plexi-glass, but also, at the front, mountings for a couple of machine guns. These were eventually vetoed by the Vatican, a company spokesman told the Chicago Tribune, many years later, because ‘it was decided it wouldn’t look good for the Pope to fight back’. Last time we had a papal visit, in 1982, Land Rover modified a couple of Range Rovers especially. One turned up in a Scottish auction four years ago. Nobody seems quite sure what happened to the other, but it is thought to have been acquired by the leader of somewhere African. This time the Vatican has shipped over a couple of modified Mercedes-Benz M-Class SUVs. Oh, the shame. Then again, maybe the Pontiff just didn’t want to be overshadowed by his transport. Anecdotally, the last Pope hated the term ‘Popemobile’, and reckoned it invited mockery. It was easier for Batman, I suppose. He could shoot back just fine from the Batmobile. Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times. 31