What long-standing Brit soap EastEnders tells us about working-class Philly.

If you have any friends who've been to England lately—or if, like me, you are a ridiculous Anglophile so dorky that he actually finds BBC America not extensive enough to quell your needs for Brit TV—you may be aware of the budding and really-quite-woeful class name-tag "chavs." Chavs are cell-phone-by-the-minute-ing, fake-brand-self-enslaving, baby-out-of-wedlock-having, get-drunk-and-fight-in-the-street-ing, pub/working-class scum. There's even a Web site about them (www. chavscum.co.uk) that monitors the subtly evolving chav style, and if you look at it, you won't be wrong in thinking, "Holy shit, this is the English version of the people who ride the 25 bus from Spring Garden to Port Richmond."

And so are the people who populate EastEnders, the British soap that has been popping out at least two new episodes a week since 1985. (That's right, college student. We are talking about a television show that is older than you.) And like Lady Sovereign freaking out indecipherably in a track suit on stage at Silk City, like the whole of chav style, something about this working-class Brit phenom resonates as uniquely Philadelphian. And I, for one, have loved it, 'lo these many years. So has my mom.

But EastEnders, at least in the 215, has fallen on hard times. After various stints on sundry PBS outposts over the years, you're lucky if you can catch the show on WLVT 39 (that's the goddamned Lehigh Valley's PBS station!), which you would never know about anyway unless you were fucking dying to watch EastEnders. BBC America, perhaps ashamed of their long-standing chavs, seems not to show it at all. And yet something about the rough-hewn (sometimes hilariously so) soap strikes a chord. First of all, the whole show revolves around a corner bar. And everyone who goes to the bar thinks that the greatest thing in the world would be to one day own the bar. And when not at the bar, everyone in the town is busy pairing off, committing petty crime and having babies, unless you are already a parent, in which case you are worrying about your son/daughter committing petty crime and having babies. Over in the corner there's always the one guy from the 'hood who fancies himself a yuppie, but really, he's always just a guy who's graduated to crime you could actually do time for, and he's doing it partly for the thrill and partly to feed all the babies he sired when he was a young punk. The women, if they are over 50, all have that crazy, dyke-y Northeast Philly lady haircut and are painted up as if they've had their makeup done via air gun, and the men are schlubby to points beyond belief but they keep that whole cock-of-the-walk thing going anyway. And don't forget the dialect: Substitute "youse" for "you lot" and "gitbag" for "wanker" and you have just cosmically shifted yourself from the East End of London to the El platform at Allegheny. All that's missing are subplots about OxyContin and street hockey.

EastEnders airs Saturdays (5 p.m.), Sundays (11 and 11:30 p.m.) and Tuesdays (late night) on WLVT, Channel 39. Visit www.wlvt.org for times.

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