TRAVELLING to Essex in a car with BBC Essex emblazoned on the side – it doesn't get any better than this.
Mark Syred, a BBC Essex radio researcher, has kindly picked me up at six in the morning to appear on the Ray Clark Show. It's as close as I'll ever get to feeling like a member of the cast from the The Only Way Is Essex. We're going to be discussing the 20th anniversary of Essex Man, inspired by an article I had written.
Inside the corridors of BBC Essex, Mark offers me coffee as Ray hosts the Breakfast Show. I'm ushered into the studio after an item with Professor King talking about Lord Hutton, ready to broach a subject of equal gravitas. Ray has many a question about whether the public are learning to love Essex Man. The station has a radio car travelling through Woodham Ferrers looking for Essex Men, filing in excited soundbites about a house with a Doberman and finding the odd builder called Steve who says people in Essex "get off their bum" and work.
Ray Clark says he lives in Burnham-on-Crouch and we get on to Ian Dury and so he finds a live version of Billericay Dickie for the airwaves.
After my stint fellow DJ Dave Monk comes in and laughs, "The council hate all that Essex man stuff. It has been trying for years to get rid of the image. Are we as culturally barren as Simon Heffer wrote? I've always been quite proud of that whole Essex thing, I think it's a slight compliment."
Monk then confesses that he fears Essex Man might be getting a bit soft as "Mark Wright has been known to moisturise", though he likes my suggestion that Wright should cover Billericay Dickie as a Christmas single.
After the radio slot there's an interview with Gareth George from BBC Look East. I tell him: "Whatever the origins of Essex Man, he's no longer seen as nasty, brutish and short. He's cuddlier today, no longer exclusively right wing, and a lot funnier."
By 10am the media scrum is over and I'm on the streets of Chelmsford.
Chelmsford was awarded city status by the Queen to mark her Diamond Jubilee in March 2012. Tellingly, the Queen dumped Reading in favour of her beloved Essex. The Sun called it "TOCIE: (The Only City In Essex)" and claimed it was famous for "stilettos and Bacardi Breezers". My pal Nigel Morris, a Brentwood man, commented on the news: "Seventy-four years after the football club was christened Chelmsford City and 98 years after it got a cathedral."
The Romans knew it was a proper city too. Chelmsford was originally called Caesaromagus, meaning "Caesar's market place" (where maybe he sold used chariots?) and has the distinction of being the only town ever to be named after Caesar.
In 2006 Simon Heffer, author of the original Essex Man feature, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph of the "increasingly charmless aspect of the towns of inland Essex, like Chelmsford, whose heart was ripped out by developers in the early 1970s".
That's a little unfair, although walking from the station to the town centre you do realise why Chelmsford was designated a "clone town" a few years ago. All the usual chains are present, plus two shopping malls and a bar called Decadence. Decadence, in Chelmsford?
My wife recently asked a Chelmsfordian where to go to find something exciting to do and the self-deprecating local replied, "Anywhere but Chelmsford!"
Although thankfully there's still the cathedral, the Shire Hall, the county cricket ground and a little touch of Essex directness in shops like Nosh and a hairdressers entitled Blow, which must make for some interesting phone bookings.
Moulsham Street shows more individuality and has some old-style Essex weather-boarded buildings.
There's a vintage shop with a small Goth section and even an Adult Discount Store. Although this being Essex even here there's a madly entrepreneurial air — an ad for the same sex shop in Chelmsford's The Edge fanzine offers "Over 2,000 dvds exchange old for new". You'd think Essex porn watchers might want to keep their viewing furtive, but no, they're doing busy deals on used razzle films as if it's the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill.
Way down Moulsham Street, past the college and suburban homes, the museum finally emerges in Oaklands Park. It's sited in the rather grand Victorian Oaklands house.
There's plenty on radio pioneers Marconi and a video of ball-bearings on a production line. Yes, the UK's first mass production of ball-bearings was at the Hoffmann factory in Chelmsford.
The city has a Roman temple too, only this being Essex it's under the roundabout.
In the museum's music section there's a picture of Keith Flint of the Prodigy, who grew up in Braintree, struggling to start a fire in his county town. While much is made of the Chelmsford Punk Festival in 1977. There's a picture of eight rather middle-class looking Chelmsford punks and a description of a wonderfully Spinal Tap-esque festival.
It rained all day, the crowds didn't turn up, the scaffolders started to dismantle the stage before the concert was over and The Damned refused to play. An inadvertent case of anarchy in the commuter belt.
But what's this? Apart from former Rod Stewart's missus Penny Lancaster and West Ham goalkeeper Mervyn Day, Chelmsford's most famous son is the dress-wearing artist Grayson Perry. A very unlikely Essex Man indeed.
In the museum's pottery room the cross-dressing sculptor has a vase on display entitled Chelmsford Sissies. On top of his vase is an upturned car crashing into a Chelmsford sign and on the side is a picture of a Barrett-style home and parked car.
It's proper art, and it's proper Essex, with motors and new houses on a bleeding great vase. The rest of the vase is covered in pictures of bearded men wearing skirts.
This is a reference to a mythical transvestite festival invented by Perry, based on a group of Civil War gentlemen who were forced to wear women's clothing and parade through Chelmsford. The adolescent Grayson must have spent days thinking up that one in his bedroom.
Cross-dressing in the commuter belt? That bar name was right — there really is Decadence in Chelmsford.
Shortly after my visit, Grayson is in the press declaring he gets most of his ideas "sitting in front of the telly with a beer, watching X Factor… I have a pot called Boring Cool People. It's decorated with pictures of the sort of people who go to contemporary art galleries."
Is he really that different to the Chelmsford Sissies he grew up with?
You can take the cross-dressing out of Essex, but you can't take Essex out of cross-dressers like Perry.
As Phill Jupitus tells me of Mr Perry, Chelmsford's finest son and daughter: "He's a man in a dress with a bear, but you hear him talking and it's like you've bumped into a bloke in the pub."
Caesar and Sissies – all can be found by the banks of the Chelmer.
