ESSEX THINK AGAIN; IT'S NO JOKE, OUR MOST-MALIGNED COUNTY IS GETTING A MAKEOVER FROM THE ADMEN..

Byline: ROS WYNNE-JONES

THE cultural map of Essex, featuring white stilettos, white vans and white Ford Escort XR3i's, is finally being redrawn.

Its stereotypes, the naff Essex Man and bubble-headed Essex Girl, are to be replaced by the sons and daughters of "Real Essex".

These icons include England football skipper David Beckham, high-brow actress Helen Mirren and cricket legend Graham Gooch.

Reacting to a survey which showed that the county's reputation is still deterring tourists, investors and skilled workers, Essex County councillors are to launch a "cultural drive" in the coming months, rebranding arguably the most-maligned 1,400 square miles in Britain.

So we can look forward to a range of measures designed to raise the county's esteem...

The names Sharon and Meeee-chelle are likely to be played down, in favour of early Essex Girl, Boadicea.

Meanwhile, tinted-windscreen visors that once featured "Steve and Tracey" are more likely to read "Andy and Germaine", after Essex-raised Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and resident feminist Germaine Greer.

Further denting the Essex girl stereotype, the council may also like to play up Mary Whitehouse's roots, too.

It might sound like the sort of dirty job Big Brother 3's Essex model Alex Sibley would need his Marigolds for but defining the "new Essex" isn't quite as daunting a task as it seems.

Fallons - the advertising agency that successfully rebranded the once-hapless Skoda - didn't flinch when the Mirror challenged it to tart up the county's image.

WITHIN minutes, Michael Wall, managing partner and Skoda saviour, came up with two campaign strategies.

"I would emphasise the county's strong sporting vein," he said yesterday. "There's a tradition of great heroes from Essex - footballers David Beckham and Joe Cole, Tony Adams and Ray Parlour, to name a few.

"It also has a strong cricket team and three recent England captains - Keith Fletcher, Graham Gooch and Nasser Hussain - have played for the county. Former athlete Sally Gunnell is from Essex, too.

"I would brand the campaign Sport Essex... and make an Olympic bid. Imagine Romford 2008. Or, less ambitiously, a bid for the European football championships." A council spokesman points out that Romford has not been part of Essex since 1964 but if Barking 2006 is even more difficult to imagine, Michael also suggests an Essex renaissance with the theme County Britain.

"Essex has everything," he says. "It has England's oldest recorded town in Colchester, it has a lovely coastline, great links to the sea and the film industry is using it more and more for location shoots.

"Essex men were the only ones hard enough to beat back the Romans. And half the City of London is populated by Essex boys, contributing to the wealth of the nation.

"With all that, why would you need to go anywhere else?" asks Michael, with a zeal so convincing that you can already hear him packing his bags for Billericay. "Essex has everything that makes Britain great," he concludes.

The county council's website makes much of the Essex "independent spirit" as the cradle of the peasants' revolt and the English civil war.

But Michael says Fallons would play this down. "It doesn't really sound very welcoming," he says.

In any case, a slogan using the words "revolting" and "peasants" might tempt critics to make modern-day comparisons.

Meanwhile, the council's proud claim that the region boasts "small numbers of landed gentry" may be all very egalitarian but does beg the question of why posh people apparently don't want to live there, while Rod Stewart does.

Fallons prefers to play up the idea of Essex as a latter-day British Hollywood, where modern classics such as Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels are filmed.

Brentwood may not have quite the same ring as Hollywood but Michael insists that making a strong connection with the industry is a further step away from naffness.

"All these ideas are tongue-in-cheek," he says. "They show Essex has a sense of humour about itself and they ask people to think a little more widely than their preconceptions."

REBRANDING experts will no doubt emphasise lesser-known Essex boys - including Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, as well as better-known lads such as Jay Kay of Jamiroquai and mockney chef Jamie Oliver.

Home of the original Sharon and Tracey - Birds of Feather's Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke - the campaign is likely to play down local ladettes such as Denise Van Outen, who seems to have made it a personal responsibility to put the "sex" back in Essex.

But there are plenty of other choices - Alison Moyet is from Basildon and soul singer Sade grew up in Clacton-on-Sea.

The attractions and quirks of the county are many... Traditions include the annual Dunmow Flitch Trials - a kind of marital harmony pageant. It features five couples who must convince a court they have not exchanged a cross word in a year and a day. The most convincing pair win a "flitch" of bacon.

ESSEX also features Britain's longest pleasure pier - which may sound like something out of a bad Essex girl joke but is actually a reference to Southend-on-Sea's extension.

Far from being a cultural wilderness of car factories and tackily-named nightspots, the county boasts Britain's largest nature reserve and some of the its oldest forests, including Epping, Writtle and Hatfield, which date back to medieval times.

The county council's website understandably prefers to dwell on picturesque villages rather than the view into Essex from the A13, dominated by factory buildings silhouetted by industrial smog.

According to the Essex Tourist Board, it is also Britain's sunniest county and the home of the top-performing state school for A-levels, Colchester County High School.

Colchester itself has been in existence since the Iron Age, as Camulodunum, and after the Roman invasion became the capital of the province of Britain.

Londinium watch out.

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PAGE 6 DAILY MIRROR, Friday, August 30, 2002; ANOTHER COUNTY: Here are our tongue-in-cheek suggestions as to how the marketing experts could redefine Essex