The Only Way is Essex, which first aired a decade ago this week. Thankfully, I don’t think too many people had the stamina.TOWIE had the potential to be my generation’s Birds of a Feather – the sitcom set in Chigwell, which ran from 1989 to 1998 and painted the town as a place filled with Sharons and Traceys, defining a stereotype that hung around for over a decade.
In 1997, the Oxford English Dictionary defined the Essex girl as ‘sexually promiscuous, materialistic and unintelligent’. Ouch.
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