As a child in a north-eastern town, you soon learn a very important lesson. No matter what you do, or where you go, people will always associate you with the Geordie idiots who somehow manage to worm their way onto the TV.
That's right. You, I, we, will always be tarnished with the same brush as those bastards. The frankly horrific female comedian and seemingly genuine misanthropist Sarah Millican, for example, whose sole purpose in life appears to be to emblazon the word 'gynaecologist' in a sing-song, Geordie accent onto the cerebrums of all who, unable to sleep at 4 o'clock one fateful Tuesday morning, have the misfortune of channel flicking and chancing upon a repeat of a Mock the Week episode that she guested on, where the 'Scenes We'd Like to See' round coughed up... well, probably nothing to do with vaginal health. Still, vaginas being Sarah's favourite topic, what with their associated lexicon lying amongst the most horrible words pronounceable in a high pitched north-eastern voice, she can, and does, find a way to link everything back to them. Just the kind of thing you want to be associated with every time you speak - va-jehy-nah-s.
For that matter, Byker Grove, the Geordie equivalent to Grange Hill, did nothing but terrible things for the north-east. Alright, it kept its near-squealed descriptions of female genitalia to a minimum, but it also advertised Byker as a wholesome, multicultural sort of place, full of mostly happy kids attending a youth club, where homosexuality and bird watching were widely accepted. As it happens? At the height of Byker Grove's success, one in three of Byker's adult residents were unemployed, and to this day, 97% of its residents are white. Imagine, please, how much I laughed when a friend from University told me that, aged 11, she had begged her mother to take her there. The BBC let Byker look too nice. People were always going to find out the truth.
Then we come to whichever token lad they've plucked from outside of Madame Koos, still trying to cram his kebab with chips-and-gravy-and-cheese-and-bolognaise into his mouth, and thrust into Big Brother for a couple of weeks, his penguin haircut and heinously waxed eyebrows doing all the talking when Felicity from Fulham can't understand a word he's saying. I remember seeing my mum's sad eyes as she watched Johnny from Big Brother Three slime and perv and creep his way into the semi finals, imprinting his weirdness and lack of intellect onto the accent that we used. 'He's from Durham,' she said despairingly. 'This is what people are going to think we're like.'
Yes, mum. You're absolutely right. And for years, that's exactly how it has been; you know, you'd open your mouth and someone would ask you to say 'Byker Grove' or 've-jehy-nah-s' or 'day forty four in the Big Brother house'. Until now. No, there hasn't been some kind of miraculous turn up for the books. What I mean to say is that what was once a grave situation has, unfortunately, worsened. Now, the television world is abuzz with a new strand of reality TV show, far more horrific than its predecessors, which maybe featured one, at the most two, Geordies. Those heavenly days are long gone. In May, 'Geordie Shore' first premiered on MTV. It is a reality TV show all about Geordies, basically established for the amusement of all of those people for whom The Only Way Is Essex was a bit too close to home.
My friends all thought this was hilarious, of course. 'Look at your people!' was the general sentiment, uttered whilst pointing and laughing at a scene where a woman who was about 85% breast implant simulated oral sex with a man who was too busy looking at his own, perfectly shaven chest to notice hers, or the fact that her head was a considerable way into his pants. In my misery I got up from the sofa and started tidying the sitting room. 'While you're down there,' came the hilarious response to my kneeling on the floor to pick up a kirby grip.
First my friends, albeit in jest, make the slut-by-geography connection. But now the rest of the country have decided to join in. Last week Newcastle came top of a poll entitled 'Best places for a one night stand' with thirty percent of the vote. That's twice as many votes as London. I started trying to calculate how much sluttier Geordies were perceived to be than their London counterparts, what with the population of Newcastle being 39 times smaller than that of London, and came to the immediate conclusion that Newcastle was perceived to be SEVENTY EIGHT TIMES SLUTTIER THAN LONDON?! I called in the heavies, or at least my friend Jeremy, a genius economist, who assured me, after looking over my statistics, that, 'total population isn't that instructive when looking at slut indexes. If you can find a more relevant stat,' he continued, 'like, for example, there are 5 x less 'people who could realistically be sluts', then saying the perceptions of Newcastle's sluttiness, considering its size, is 10x more than London's is more believable.'
10 x more slutty than London? STILL? Jeremy went on. 'There is a second thing to note; the problem with there being perceived to be more sluts, or just sluttier sluts. It's hard to conclude whether there is perceived to be 78x more sluts per capita - let us assume for the moment that 'sluts' form a distinct subset of the population - or each slut that there is in Newcastle is just SO MUCH SLUTTIER. Do fewer UBERSLUTS make somewhere sluttier than many SMALLTIMESLUTS?'
Obviously they do. In fact, the four ubersluts that make up the cast of Geordie Shore alone have probably boosted Newcastle's one night stand ranking by about 25%. So basically, we are dealing with a statistical minefield, which would take years that I don't have to draw a conclusion from (although Jeremy has already assured me that he will, from now on, be dedicating his life's work to doing exactly that.) It's fair to say though, that girls from my area are generally perceived to be an enormous amount sluttier than girls from anywhere else.
This got me thinking. I'm a northerner in the capital city. So where do I fit in? Do I get anti slut brownie points for getting out of there STD free? Do I lose 0.5 of a slut percentage per year spent in London? Of course I don't. As far as I understand it, sexual morality has absolutely nothing to do with geographical location, and everything to do with how you were brought up, in exactly the same way that the cast of Geordie Shore have absolutely nothing to do with Newcastle, and are sadly just pawns (sorry, PORN) in MTV's ratings game.
But... if you insist on pigeonholing us because of where we come from, which I have a feeling you do, listen up. I called home back in May, the night after the first episode of Geordie Shore aired. 'Who are they?' I asked plaintively. 'Why are they dooooing this?'
'Aww babes. I don't recognise any of them,' my best schoolfriend, and toast of the Newcastle club scene told me. 'Apparently,' her voice dropped to a confidential whisper, 'most of the lasses are from... Middlesborough.'
So there you have it boys. Middlesborough. To the untrained ear we may all sound the same, but you can leave the Tyne alone and head to Teesside when you're next out looking for ve-jehy-na. Not that I'm condoning geographical stereotyping of any kind, of course. I would never do that.