Is a bogan exactly what you would be if you weren't constricted by the crushing grip of unspoken social constraints, the tut-tutting of the medical community and annoying things such as ethics?
Maybe, readers.
For a start, bogans smoke cigarettes, like almost everyone used to until they started to worry about the health messages they were constantly receiving.
Bogans drive cars a lot, mostly for fun, and spend a lot of time doing burnouts, worrying little about fossil fuel-driven climate change, and even less about the polluting effects of old tyres.
They dress badly, and give not a thought for how dignified and well-to-do they look, as readers of this column do.
Finally, they drink a lot of beer, with little thought for the consequences.
Sometimes, just sometimes, doesn't that sort of behaviour look strangely attractive?
NO! IT DOESN'T.
But in case you want to remind yourselves just how bad bogans are, TV2 is running a whole series about this societal sub-group.
Bogans, which premieres next Thursday, at 9pm, is a New Zealand on Air-funded series that follows Dr David Snell and his bogan mates.
Dr Snell, also known as Dr Bogan, is an interesting fellow, who has made a career out of studying ''Boganology''.
The PhD-toting University of Waikato graduate did his thesis on how bogans develop their identity and function in the community.
A self-proclaimed bogan himself, he describes his community as ''lovers of heavy metal music and music T-shirts, who all have a deep affinity with the working class''.
The show is set largely in Hamilton, said to be the bogan capital of New Zealand, and calls itself ''part documentary, part rumination on life as a bogan''.
It includes everything from a painful eight hours of tattooing to a concert featuring the high priests of metal, Judas Priest, to hog tying and bogan parties.
Episode one is titled Burnout.
As one bearded, mulleted bogan explains (from the bogan home of a well-tooled garage) bogans ''generally have a mullet or a skinhead - it's kind of one extreme to the other''.
Or as the narrator says, bogans are ''real''.
''They probably just fixed your plumbing, or your car.''
We find out about some fascinating bogan societal distinctions: Hamilton bogans feel Westies from Auckland look down on them, and are somehow different.
Hamilton bogans, meanwhile, look down on Australian bogans, as they always seem to have ''a missus named Shazza''.
There is much to learn in this sort-of documentary on the lives of those with no pretentions and little interest in what others think of them.
Isn't there something attractive in that?
NO! THERE ISN'T.
- Charles Loughrey
