White noise

Fellow and author Michael Collins gives a personal reflection on why television continues to provide a distorted portrayal of the white working class  

During his brief reign as director-general of the BBC, Greg Dyke suggested the corporation was “hideously white”. It was one of those ill-judged moves that middle-aged men in the media make in a bid to be ‘relevant’. Rather like playing air guitar to rap.

It’s a half truth to describe the BBC as hideously white without slipping the words ‘middle class’ somewhere in there.  Despite the comedian Lenny Henry and the actress Meera Syal describing the broadcasting industry as overtly white in high places, or the call from a BBC insider for a Macpherson-style investigation into institutional racism within the corporation, it is class, not ethnicity, the BBC has an issue with. The relative absence of anyone from a working-class background within its commissioning teams (certainly BBC1 and BBC2) may account for its inability to portray the British working class in a manner relevant to the 21st century.

Never has this been more apparent than with the recent ‘White’ season focused on the disenfranchised white working class. Generally, television reports on trends after every other medium, and on this issue the BBC are the last on the block with the news. Even then, it manages to deliver a season of films that, just for a change, portrays the white working class solely as parochial, racist and redundant. That the season was trailblazed as controversial speaks more about the limitations of the creatives behind the commission than the subject itself. There was, of course, the obligatory trip to Essex in search of racism, where the BNP have clocked some votes in the past, and another drama depicting the experience of a disillusioned white girl who seeks solace in Islam.

But the season kicked off with an American filmmaker documenting a working men’s club on its last legs in Last Orders. Before the season had aired, critics mocked the line-up of programmes, for once taking the side of the white working class: the hideously white middle-class figures behind the project had made a stab at being relevant and failed, desperately. It was the air guitar and rap all over again.

So why does the BBC continue to get it so wrong on the working class? They are the very people who pay for the lion’s share of the lottery and the licence fee. Perhaps it’s partly the legacy of the self-proclaimed ‘father’ of the corporation, Lord Reith. The first director-general harboured a contempt for working-class culture, surpassed only by his hatred of commercial television, which he compared to the Black Death.

Apparently, Reith regretted never making it to either Cambridge or Oxford. Forsaking plans to build a bridge across the Amazon, he took a job in Kingsway with a little start-up that became the BBC. In his mission to ‘educate, inform, entertain’, Reith positively discriminated in favour of Oxbridge candidates when it came to recruitment. This pretty much became a policy that remained in place even during the so-called social revolution that was the 1960s. It was during that decade, under the helm of Hugh Carlton-Greene, that the BBC attempted to reflect social and cultural changes that were shaping the modern experience. The BBC set its in-house directors and playwrights the task of delivering dispatches from the frontline of working-class life. The Wednesday Play and Play For Today were the strands branded by issues relating to class.

These series broke new ground, shifting BBC drama from drawing room comedies and restoration plays that had simply been lifted from the stage to the screen. Ken Loach, a BBC staffer who made his directing debut on the BBC police series Z-Cars, provided the BBC with two of its most infamous plays in the history of these strands. For the making of Up the Junction, Loach didn’t work with a script but simply ripped pages from the original Nell Dunn novel about a rich Chelsea girl who crosses the bridge to work in a factory and live among the working class of Battersea.

The dialogue was a departure from much of what had been seen on screen before; its central characters echoed the experience of a generation of working-class men and women free of the rationing, austerity and conscription that had blighted their parents’ lives. But the play would owe its infamy to that abortion scene, and it opened up the debate that contributed to the change in the law, culminating in legalisation in 1967. Loach’s Cathy Come Home (written by Dunn’s then husband, Jeremy Sandford), also broadcast in 1965, put homelessness on the map, becoming the impetus for the birth of the housing charity Shelter.

Although these dramas focused on the working class, there was a desire to graft an agenda or an issue onto the proceedings. Documentary techniques such as voiceovers from authority figures, experts on the issues featured, further underlined the authenticity. Loach later recalled that, “we were very anxious for our plays not to be considered dramas but as continuations of the news”. However, it was not the BBC but ITV – Reith’s nemesis, even though it emerged two decades after he abandoned broadcasting – that first made the contemporary working-class experience a subject for television drama with Armchair Theatre, the strand that inspired the BBC’s Wednesday Play. It was the emphasis on the ordinary rather than the exceptional that made it pass as social realism. Or at least what Ted Willis, the scriptwriter for Dixon of Dock Green, referred to as “the marvellous world of the ordinary”.

The north was usually the subject of choice, with the south, and London in particular, being cast as the swinging capital stormed by the social revolution – a revolution, incidentally, that was in the minds of those working in the media and cocooned in central London.

In hindsight, the most authentic accounts of urban working-class life were to be found in documentaries that have no profile when television history celebrates itself, yet these leave the BBC’s 21st-century attempts on the working class at the starting post. The said documentaries emerged within current affairs strands. Among them: We Are All Together, a documentary from the 1950s detailing a family’s life in Bethnal Green when austerity was still in the air, and the word Stafford Cripps as close to their lips as spittle. South of the River, filmed in Bermondsey in 1964, caught the mood of the younger of the species, as rumours of that social revolution began to spread across the Thames. ITV’s We Was All One was filmed in Southwark in 1971 when the borough was in the throes of regeneration. The documentary’s subjects reveal their fears of a dystopian future on the expansive new housing estates. As one character points out: “Unless you’re from this community, between the docks, the market and the streets, you won’t understand why it matters to us.” These films neither imposed an agenda nor set out to confirm preconceptions about the working class. Equally, there was no attempt to caricature them, as was often the case elsewhere.

The playwright Alun Owen – author of the 1959 play No Trams To Lime Street – once recalled having an argument with a wardrobe mistress at the BBC, who simply lined up a play’s cast to be dressed in mufflers and caps. “My life!” he said. “Haven’t you heard about Burton’s? We dress differently nowadays.”

Eastenders’ take on the working class has stalled on the ‘muffler and cap’ model. In Albert Square the characters appear to have no connection to the outside world, apart from the rare occasions when they turn on the television to watch a black and white western. In terms of aspiration, the best it gets is when a character buys a suit because they’ve been given the keys to the video shop. Watching life in joyless Walford, it’s as though the 1980s never happened. Actually, it’s as though the 1940s never happened. At least on the Chatsworth Estate in Channel 4’s Shameless the characters are allowed some wit, intelligence and savvy, in spite of the drugs, incest and crime.

In the BBC’s current season on the white working class, the muffler and cap model has been replaced by racism and xenophobia, which has itself fossilised into tradition in documentary making. It’s a point I make in The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, first published in 2004. “[The working class] had always been the first port of call when a vox pop was needed on race and immigration.

“The camera would seek them out in the hope of coaxing something close to the N-word from their lips. Failing that, the choice would be a pensioner, often female, propped against an expanse of white woodchip and prodded off-camera by questions desired to cut to the chase… The camera scans the room for an image perfect for her voiceover; something indicative of her class, as a way of mocking her taste, a way of demeaning anything she might have to say – a novelty ornament, or an air freshener not quite concealed within the inner skeleton of a radiator.” The following summer I wrote and presented the documentary Working Class for Channel 4. Like the book, it attempted to attach an experience, an identity, a history and a culture to its subject in the 21st century.

In part the inspiration for this film was the BBC documentary Between Two Rivers, written and presented by Dennis Potter at the beginning of the 1960s. As with his book of the time, The Changing Forest, the programme was a means of gauging the state of working-class culture in the face of major social, political and technological change, using the author’s birthplace, the Forest of Dean, as an example. It was one of those rare occasions when the BBC made a film about the white working class and got it right. But then Potter himself was a rare breed at the Beeb: an Oxford-educated BBC trainee from the working class.

 

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