Totally Shameless: How TV Portrays the Working Class Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture

denigrate working-class people on television? To simply replace a

whole section of British society with ugly stereotypes? I suppose it

would have been about a decade ago, when the unapologetic shrillness in

the criticism of the poorer end of society really sank in. I remember

one particular judgment being delivered by an Oxford student, in a

crisp, well-spoken English accent: a young man loudly berating, quote,

"those Vicky Pollards "rampaging around council estates."

By then, Matt Lucas and David Walliams' comedy series Little

Britain had become a national TV phenomenon. It was a show laughed at

by people from all backgrounds. Its catchphrases yelled in the nation's

playgrounds. And yet, here was someone from a pampered background

treating a grotesque caricature of a single teenage mum on a council

estate as though she was a real person and not the comic stereotype

you saw just a moment ago. And that privileged Oxford undergraduate

wasn't alone. James Delingpole, a journalist who once argued he was a

member of the most discriminated against group in society, "the

white, middle-aged, public-school-and-Oxbridge-educated

"middle-class male" made a similar point in a Times newspaper article.

Under the headline, A Conspiracy Against Chavs? Count Me In, he noted

- "The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imagination is that she

"embodies, with such fearful accuracy, several of the great

"scourges of contemporary Britain. "Aggressive all-female gangs of

embittered, "hormonal teenagers. Gym-slip mums who choose to get

pregnant as a career option. Pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers

who'll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye." Strong meat

indeed, and with a side order of misogyny. For a moment, put aside

what the controversial term "chav" symbolises, something that would

later engross me. I was shocked at how a TV caricature - who,

hilariously, once swapped one of her kids for a Westlife CD - was no

longer being treated simply as a bit of a laugh and an absurd figure of

fun. Rather, here, apparently, was a real person who was emblematic of

hundreds of thousands of young British women of a certain class.

And, more shocking still was a YouGov poll conducted in 2006 at the

Edinburgh International Television Festival. Attended by the cream of

Britain's television producers, it transpired that over 70% of them

believed Vicky Pollard was an accurate representation of so-called

"white working-class youth". I mention this not as a statistical

cheap shot at all British television producers, many of whom I know are

intelligent, responsible programme-makers. But because, it

seems to me, that over the last couple years, such ludicrous

misunderstandings and, critically, a new era of austerity in modern

Britain, there has now grown a significant strain of malignant

programming. And these programmes, either consciously or unwittingly,

suggest that now, in 2013, on British television, it's open season

on millions of working-class people and some of the poorest people in

society. Take, for example, a recent three-part Channel five series. Each

episode is entitled as follows - Shoplifters And Proud, Pick Pockets

And Proud and, completing the seemingly criminal trilogy, On

Benefits And Proud. Big families on benefits need big

houses. Heather Frost and her 11 kids are no

excerption. You have dinners today. You have

packed lunches tomorrow. They're in line for this impressive

new home. But for now, two neighbouring

three-bed council houses are where you'll find Heather and all those

kids. Sophie.

Then Toby, Angel, Jay, Chloe, Paige, Emily, Beth, Ruby, Daisy, and stinky

Tilly! Here, the tried-and-tested formula

is to feature a handful of very extreme examples, such as unusually

large families on benefits. Some participants are likely sourced from

tabloid news stories or from earlier appearances on the Jeremy Kyle Show

and guaranteed to make the viewers' blood boil. And, of course, the

implicit suggestion is that all recipients of benefits are work-shy

scroungers living the high life at the taxpayers' expense. It would

seem that some viewers knew what to expect and had organised a petition

with around 3,000 names which were sent to Channel five in advance of

transmission, demanding that the episode not be screened. The root of

this phenomenon, I chronicled in my book, Chavs - The Demonization of

the Working Class. I wanted to challenge the mantra that dominated

the '90s and early noughties, that "we're all middle class now" - to

quote Tony Blair. And that the old working class had vanished and all

that was left was a feckless rump living on so-called "sink estates".

And it was the word "chav" which was supposed to sum this class up. The

term "chav" is itself heavily contested. Originating from the

Romani word for child, "chavi", there has also been a number of

"backronyms" invented to sum up its meaning, such as Council Housed And

Violent, Council Housed And Vulgar. And, of course, it is used

exclusively against people from a working-class background, with many

unpleasant connotations - fecklessness, tackiness, bigotry,

having multiple children with multiple partners, anti-social

behaviour, and so on. Disturbingly, a study in 2011 by polling company

BritainThinks, found that those people who identified themselves as

middle class increasingly used the term "working class" as a pejorative

word with the same connotations as "chav". I wanted to examine

everything from the poor-baiting of the tabloids to the obvious

political opportunism which resulted. And to look at the role

television played in stoking the chav myth. Obviously, early examples

of TV chav types were comedian Harry Enfield's Wayne and Waynetta Slob.

And, of course, programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show, where the

dysfunctional, troubled lives of people from largely poor backgrounds

were served up as "aren't they awful" entertainment. Here is a

brief, and not untypical, excerpt from Kyle's programme displaying

what one judge described as "human bear-baiting".

Are you close to your daughter? No. You didn't bring her up, did you?

No. Auntie Dawn brought you up. This

story gets more concerning. Dawn's on The Jeremy Kyle Show! You're a

liar! I've done everything for that baby.

You've brought nothing. You've brought nothing. It's a lie. I told

you to buy a bottle. Don't swear it.

A blue bottle for a boy and pink for a girl.

I went away for five days, and what do you do?

And you were jumping in bed... I'm a tramp? We're trying to bring

them kids up. I couldn't care less! I brought ten kids up. I don't give

two huffs by the end of it, Jason! Unsurprisingly, many - myself

included - have questioned the cynical agenda of this series. The

reason I'm addressing you tonight is I feel there has recently been a

step change. That on television, not only have these similar chav

caricatures increased but they have now replaced accurate

representations of everyday working-class people. And these

working people are becoming invisible. This should be a cause

for concern not just for programme-makers, but for all of us

who believe that no viewers deserve to have their - supposed lives

marginalised or singled out for public ridicule. So, I ask you this

- why is it increasingly difficult to find honest portrayals of

working-class people on television? What has encouraged this

increasingly toxic atmosphere which seems to surround vast swathes of

Britain's population? While previous Labour governments have not been

blameless, since the Coalition came to power in 2010, there has been a

more determined effort to slash the welfare state. Benefits that go to

working people, disabled people and unemployed people alike have been

cut back. Politicians of the right and left have casually spoken about

skivers and strivers, of the work-shy hiding behind curtains, of

the unemployed getting more benefits than people in work. Little of it is

based in fact. But it seems to me that this offers a licence to

programme-makers who may wish to make more sensationalist programmes.

There has been an accompanying barrage of media coverage,

intentionally hunting down the most extreme, shocking examples of

so-called "scroungers", passing them off as though they are just the tip

of the iceberg. Most damaging has been television's recent wave of

so-called "poverty porn" documentaries. Curiously, the term

seems first to have become prevalent in 2009 when describing the

beautifully filmed squalor of the Mumbai slums in Danny Boyle's

award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. Nearer home, the term

seems to be shorthand for documentaries which airbrush out the

tough realities of the poor, to substitute them with sensationalist,

extreme caricatures. I assume the "porn" element is supposed to

suggest the guilty pleasures to be had from viewers looking down on

these "entertaining" figures of ridicule. Channel 4's Skint is a

case in point. It was sold as an observational documentary centred on

a community living on the Westcliff estate in Scunthorpe as they

attempted to get by on benefits. It turned out to be a particularly

unpleasant piece of voyeurism. From the chummily patronising commentary

delivered in a Northern accent by Finchy from the comedy The Office,

the stereotypes come thick and fast. 'If you're unemployed and want

money, it comes from one of two places, 'the Social or a bit on the

side.' Most people just sign on or are on the dole or sell drugs.

People get roped into it, don't they?

It's an easy thing to do. If you sign on and haven't got money, if

you sell drugs, it's an easy way out. It's just sitting on your cars

and selling. 'If you're not into selling drugs,

phones or shoplifting, there's just your benefits to get by on.

'There's people think you're loaded if you're claiming for a big family.

'The more kids you have, the more money you get, that's for sure. 'But

it still don't go very far.' Skint...

Predictably, the series' bleak mix of crime, broken homes and drugs

earned it the title "The Real Shameless". Here, once again,

exaggerated, fictional television characters are portrayed as

apparently real stereotypes by lazy, tabloid media. Channel 4's long

running series Shameless is not, like Skint, some straightforward

case of the privileged mocking those without power. Its creator, Paul

Abbott, had a turbulent childhood as a working-class boy in Burnley, and

originally intended the series to be a gritty, semi-autobiographical

drama. It was transformed into a comedy with larger-than-life

characters. For example, one of the main characters develops into a

bright university student. But with each successive series, it has

become cruder in portrayal, especially when the spotlight falls

on the notorious antihero of the series, Frank Gallagher.

Tickets this way for the Chatsworth Express Come and watch pikeys making

a mess Of the lives they were given by him upstairs And kids they're

convinced aren't actually theirs What sounds on Earth could ever

replace Kids needing money, or wives in your face?

Cos this, people reckon, and me included Is why pubs and drugs were

kindly invented To calm us all down, stop us going mental.

These are Chatsworth Estate's basic essentials.

Me, I'm worth every penny for grinding your axes.

You sheet on our heads, but you pay the taxes!

Amusing? Perhaps. But the Frank Gallagher character has been used by

various newspapers as the poster boy for Britain's feckless poor. Abbott

would be appalled, but Gallagher has probably been quite effective in

influencing public support for recent welfare cuts. It seems to me

that some TV producers, perhaps unthinkingly, have fallen in line

with a broader political agenda, helping fuel support for the

slashing of the welfare state by demonising its "undeserving"

recipients. The fact that most social security spending goes on

pensioners who've paid in all their lives...

That most working-age benefits go to people actually in work, and that

there are 6.5 million people chasing full-time work in this country...

Well, you'd never think this, watching these increasingly shrill

and extreme reality TV shows. And so, TV has helped harden popular

attitudes towards the poorest in the country. And this at a time when the

political elite are implementing policies that, according to the

Child Poverty Action Group, will drive over a million children into

poverty. But what does the term "working class" mean in Britain

today? Throughout the '90s and the noughties, the mantra - again, thank

you, Tony - "we're all middle class now". That the old working class had

vanished, because they'd all pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.

Except, of course, for a few feckless types splashing out their

benefits on widescreen TV sets... That is, when they weren't voting

for the BNP. One of the stock arguments is that the working class

had vanished with the old industries. But what we really saw

was a dramatic shift from an industrial working class to a

service-sector working class. Today there's far more part-time and

zero-hour workers and many will have to jump from job to job in the same

year. They're often blighted with poverty pay, with millions having to

have their wages topped up with tax credits. But these people are all

but invisible on television. The reality of their lives is rarely

seen. There's also been a lot of talk about an "underclass", a

dehumanising term. Right-wing American political scientist Charles

Murray defined the "underclass" as a "new rabble" that had been created

by the collapse in the family and demanded economic penalties for

single mothers. Murray's theories received a warm welcome from

sections of the British right and clearly influenced the debate here.

Almost by definition, people who might be characterised by others as

being the so-called "underclass" may simply be suffering pressures and

difficulties of an acute kind. Here's a short excerpt from the BBC

documentary series, People Like Us, which focused on a struggling group

of locals from the North Manchester suburb of Harpurhey.

'Nicola is a single parent to one-year-old Crystal and tonight,

her mum is supposed to be baby-sitting.' Have you seen a book

in my house? We can't read or write, we don't know where to send it to

you, the book is going in the bin. Do what you want...

Me mam's got a personality where she changes. She's not a very nice

person to get along with. No. Hey, Nicola!

What? You left a parcel behind. Get her

ready for bed. She's grown bigger this time.

Make sure she's got a clean nappy and put her in bed.

Why should you get out early and leave the child to us? I don't think

so, we've got things to do. Have you now?

Yeah, we do. And what's that? Not sitting in here all night

baby-sitting. I'm not baby-sitting.

Get her ready, get her jammies on and settle her down and I'll

baby-sit. That's too much!

What do you mean, "That's too much"? Why can't you baby-sit my child

until I go out? You should wear a condom.

Uncomfortable viewing from People Like Us.

Was it properly explained to the people of Harpurhey what the effect

of welcoming cameras in to their homes might be? And that

unemployment, drug-taking and anti-social behaviour would become

the focus of the series? As it was, some 200 Harpurhey residents

attended what was an angry meeting when the first series aired. Their

complaint was that People Like Us gave a "biased and distorted" view

of the area. Also that local children were being bullied in

school as a result of the programme. And even that people had pulled out

of buying houses there as a result. A local council worker, Richard

Searle, whose daughter appeared on the programme, argued that, "The BBC

should not be propagating this harmful and misleading image of the

working class". But how do you define what working

class is? My view is an old-fashioned one. It's those who

have to work for someone else in order to live. And they don't have

control over the work that they do. I think that's most people, whether

you're a supermarket worker, nurse or secretary. It also includes

workers driven into unemployment because of a lack of jobs. What's

interesting is the number of people who identify themselves as

working-class has remained stubbornly the same, however much

the mantra of "we're all middle class" has been drummed into people.

A study by the polling group BritainThinks suggested that people

looked at class through the prism of culture. When asked to come up with

a symbol of being middle class, some suggested...the cafetiere. There's a

popular sense that, for example, you read a tabloid newspaper or watch

soaps, well, you're working class. If you listen to Radio 4 and read

The Times, you're middle class. We may wish to be classless but it

seems that we Brits still get our vowels and our knickers in a twist

when the subject arises. The BBC launched their online Class

Calculator earlier this year after surveying 161,000 people. The

suggestion was that the existing upper, middle and working class

divisions no longer reflected modern British occupations or lifestyles.

The survey suggested that there were now seven groupings, including new

additions such as the "precariat" - roughly speaking, the financially

insecure proletariat. Public interest was such that an

astonishing six million of us used the calculator to find our place in

society. It also seems that television series on class come like

buses, in threes, as if acknowledging our anxieties.

Recently, noted Corporation chin-strokers such as Melvin Bragg

and Andrew Neil considered the subject, respectively, in Class And

Culture and Posh And Posher. But when Paul O'Grady tackled the

working class in his recent compelling series, the word "class"

was perversely removed from the title by anxious executives, leaving

it emasculated as Paul O'Grady's Working Britain. Fascinatingly, it

would fall to a self-proclaimed "transvestite potter" to playfully

tease out some the differences in British class, using taste as the

key. Everything about Sunderland you just

love. The history as well. Our mining history, the shipyards'

history, what's all gone now, but we're still living the tradition. My

dad's still a coalminer to this day. What else does Sunderland got to be

proud of apart from the football now? Well, the heritage...

That's the past. Yeah, well, we're proud as we're

still here. We're still all together. We might have nothing now,

but we've still got this kind of generosity what we did have in the

old days. Is that the industry, generosity, you think?

And call centres, know what I mean?! Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson

Perry there getting among the people.

Perry seemed to be equally intrigued by tattooed lads from Sunderland as

mansion dwellers in the Cotswolds. Somehow, by taking a less dogmatic

and a more open cultural route, he managed not to patronise those he

met and also to celebrate the diversity of British class. But I'm

not sure that the truth about class isn't more brutal. I think class is

ultimately about wealth and power, and where you are in the pecking

order. An aristocrat who watches the X Factor is still an aristocrat. The

postal worker who goes to the opera is still working class. And it seems

to me that now, the poorer sections of society and the working class

certainly don't have the power to influence how they are portrayed on

television. Was there ever a time when working-class lives, in all

their complexities, not only found expression on television but also

gripped the nation's viewers? If there was a mythic golden age, it

was precipitated in the late '50s and early '60s by kitchen sink

dramas such as Billy Liar, A Kind of Loving and A Taste Of Honey which

were then progressing from play or novel to feature film. Television

would be just a beat behind this vanguard. But by the early '60s,

vibrant working-class voices would be making themselves heard properly

on TV for the first time. Of course, the years after World War II had

already rung the changes in British society. A majority Labour

government demonstrated its belief in collective solutions to deal with

social problems which weren't regarded as the fault of the

individual. And, crucially, there was a strong and growing trade union

movement to represent working people. It was only a matter of time

before this once invisible class, and their stories, would appear on

television, in number. In 1960, a new 13-part drama series, made by a

north of England company called Granada Television for the fledgling

ITV channel would have a seismic effect on the box. Here were the

lives of sympathetically portrayed, three-dimensional working-class

characters on screen for the first time.

Did you go down to the labour today? I'm not due till tomorrow. You just

don't want work! Did you see the adverts in the

newspapers? What papers? We only get the one in

the morning and there's nothing in that. You could've gone to the

reading room. Here am I working myself to death and you can't even

look at a newspaper. What sort of job would they have for me?

There's plenty of jobs for them that look for them.

They ask you want experience you've had.

You've had experience. Not the right kind.

Just drop it, will you? No, I won't. It's the same every time.

Look, you know why I can't get a job! You've been out of that place

seven weeks now. Oh, don't let's wrap it up. If you

mean prison, say it, everyone else does.

You can't go on like this. What am I supposed to do?

Tell me that. Why did it have to be me who had a son like you?

The matriarchal majesty of Elsie Tanner there, as played by Pat

Phoenix. Despite initial concerns Coronation Street might be just too

dull, the series quickly became a phenomenon, and for many years, was

the most popular programme on British television. Its creator,

Tony Warren, had initially contacted the BBC about the series. But he

heard nothing back. Hardly surprising, given that Auntie was

viewed as largely middle class and a source of "improving" television.

ITV, of course, was looked down upon as the home of less-improving

working-class entertainment. Some 50 years later, soaps still offer the

largest number of supposed working-class characters on

television. But it's debatable whether this microcosm of

shopkeepers, cafe owners and pub landlords truly represents the

beleaguered British working class of 2013. And the increasingly

hysterical story lines in EastEnders and the like suggest that

ratings-chasing is much more important than creating any social

truth within the drama. Although the BBC could get fidgety about class,

from the early '60s and then for the next couple of decades and beyond,

the Corporation would go on to create numerous classic comedy

series, often based on working-class figures.

Come on, sit down. Where's my machine? It'll be all right now. All

right, here we go! Done it at last. Now, we're off and running.

I don't believe it! Oh, you wish to become a blood

doner? -- donor. I certainly do. I've been thinking about this for a

long time. Something for the benefit of the country as a whole. "What

should I be?" I thought. "Become a blood doner or join the Young

Conservatives?" Think of all the great stags of the

past. Think of all the lads whose memory you're letting down. Think of

Bob Shearer who went to the wrong church. And Tony Charles who was

sick in the vestry. John Webb and the stomach pump. Was that in vain?

More fool them! I'll be quite frank with you, Dad.

I'm not prepared to go on living in a house without a bathroom. I don't

think you realise how degrading it is. It's uncivilised. Cor blimey,

the Greeks had baths 2,000 years ago!

And that's only a snapshot. More often than not, these sitcoms were

scripted, unsurprisingly, by working-class writers. For example,

Steptoe And Son was created by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. John

Sullivan wrote Only Fools And Horses and Carla Lane began a celebrated

career writing on The Liver Birds. And this from within a rather

middle-class organisation. The BBC seemed at once nervous of, and

trying to do the right thing by, a working class which its management

sometimes didn't seem to fully understand. But the sound of

laughter seemed to soften the divisions of class. A couple of

years ago, Danny Cohen, then Controller of BBC ONE, said he

thought there were too many middle-class sitcoms and not enough

working-class ones. It was obvious he was looking wistfully over his

shoulder to this golden age for blue-collar comedy. You might say

that working-class comedy was the Trojan horse left in the car park at

the old Television Centre. But the BBC of the '60s was still under the

influence of the Reithian mantra which promised to "educate, inform

and entertain". So, the Corporation could also prove to be an incubator

for gritty, issue-based working-class drama. Again, the

background of its key creators was crucial. The doors of the BBC opened

to a phalanx of bright, working-class young men, and it did

seem to be mostly men, who worked their way up the Corporation to

become writers, directors or producers. The list is as long as it

is impressive, including luminaries such as Tony Garnett, Ken Loach,

Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke. These were just some of the committed

film-makers at the BBC who were unafraid to court controversy,

grabbing both headlines and great reviews. Their work would likely

appear on The Wednesday Play or later, Play For Today. Occasionally,

as with the celebrated Cathy Come Home, watched by 12 million viewers,

the drama might even lead to questions in Parliament. Something

almost unthinkable now. By the late '70s, the openings for ideologically

committed dramatists were narrowing. But that didn't mean that the

powerful possibilities of the so-called "teleplay" had diminished.

A case in point is The Spongers. Written by Jim Allen and first

transmitted in 1978, it looks back on the Jubilee of '77. As producer

Tony Garnett recalled, he and Allen had decided that, as the BBC was

bound to indulge in, "an orgy of loyal sentimentality" during the

Silver Jubilee, they thought they would make their own contribution to

the celebrations. # And as the time goes by. # You

stay by my side... From the Council. Oh, blimey,

trouble. Mrs Crosby, actually, I'm a certificated bailiff.

I've come to... You are Mrs Crosby? Yeah. There's ?262 owing, I must

advise that I've got to collect this now.

I haven't got it. ?262. I haven't got it.

Mmmm...subversive. Avoiding didacticism and stereotype, director

Roland Joffe's camera follows single mother of four, Pauline, as she

struggles to survive on dwindling state benefits. A subject as

relevant now as it was then. Now, you're in trouble with your

rent arrears. With my what? Rent arrears.

Yes, that's right. The bailiffs are... Yes, you're owing...

?262? And if I don't pay it, they'll take

away my furniture. What has been happening to the rent

allowance we've been paying you each week? We pay you money. Your rent is

calculated, as part of your allowance. And you seem to be

spending it on other things, yes? You try keeping a home and three

kids on what I get. I bet you couldn't manage it. You should have

a try. But that's not the point, Mrs Crosby.

We've been paying the rent and we expect it to be spent on that. That

is the point cos I'd rather feed them than pay the rent and it's only

two weeks. That's probably because you're a bad

manager. Surely you should be able to do it. I can't, I'm sorry, I just

need more money. Despite the bleakness of the

mother's situation, the unfolding drama and the sense of injustice

still grips us. Perhaps we could have a little more

of this in 2013, please? The Spongers went on to win one of the

most prestigious of television awards, the Prix Italia. By the

early '80s, the political left was on the back foot and the era of the

committed drama seemed to be drawing to a close, with one notable

exception. The Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher took over

government in 1979 and by 1982, unemployment had climbed to a

then-astonishing three million. Then the catchphrases on everyone's lips

were "Gi's a job!" And "I can do that!" The source was a desperate,

unemployed character called Yosser Hughes who appeared in writer Alan

Bleasdale's five-part elegy for the working man, Boys From The

Blackstuff. Apart from Yosser, Bleasdale adeptly created a variety

of working-class characters, each with their own opinions.

Give me a job as a start. I could do that.

Look, there is a bit of work for plasterers at the moment. Oh,

yeah(?) So, how come you're here on ?14 a day?

I'm blacklisted. You're blacklisted? What for?

I start strikes. Not a bad reason.

I'm also in the WRP. Didn't we use to have them during

the war(?) Tin hats and gas masks and knock at your door if you didn't

draw your curtains(!) The Workers Revolutionary Party.

Oh, aye, I remember them. They were at our factory gates the day we

closed down. Full of brotherly love and "fight the good fight" and all

of that. We still closed down, though.

Yeah, but Snowy's different, aren't you, Snowy? No the same as all those

others in that Workers Revolutionary Party. Right, that, innit? You're

the only one who's working class. The Boys From The Blackstuff, which

struck a nerve and found large audiences in 1982. Where once The

Boys From The Blackstuff or The Spongers seemed to be part of the

television ecology, now such dramas seem as rare as hen's teeth. What

producers of the '60s and '70s understood was that there was some

kind of moral obligation for television to show healthy and

constructive class portrayals. This stemmed from the prevailing

faith in television's transformative power in its early days. Producers

were aware of television's capacity to shape society and to shine a

light on the issues that affected parts of that society. Often their

audiences may not necessarily have been familiar with these issues but

they still came to the plays in large numbers. Here it might be

appropriate to yoke together two cliches. "Television is a powerful

medium" and "With great power, comes great responsibility". By the early

'80s, some trends suggested some erosion in this belief in collective

responsibility. Television producers would turn increasingly to what were

known as "cops, docs and frocks". Cop shows, documentaries and costume

dramas, a formula which still seems prevalent today. My impression is

now, in contrast to the numbers of working class people who entered the

television industry in the '60s, '70s and '80s, is that such

opportunities have shrunk. It now seems that it's largely those young

people who are supported by the Bank of Mum and Dad who can afford unpaid

internships in the industry. Anecdotally, this feels true, but

don't take my word for it. At the end of last year a survey by the

British Academy of Film and Television Arts found that young

people were being needlessly discouraged from pursuing a career

in television. I quote: "With talented young people from lower

socioeconomic backgrounds, and women, "at particular risk of being

lost". This serious imbalance means that not only is creativity lost to

the industry, it also means that the likelihood of truthful, first-hand

portrayals of working-class life are less likely, no matter how

well-meaning, say, middle-class programme makers may be. It also

means that empathy for those less fortunate may be in short supply. Is

it a healthy television culture which treats its sometimes

disadvantaged members, such as Britain's travelling community, as

if they are a strange breed to be prodded through the bars of their

cages? My Gypsy Christening is the latest offering in Channel 4's

long-running series on Gypsy life. And once again, it seems that

travellers old and young are there to be patronised.

'For many Travellers, the subject of childbirth is strictly off-limits,

even among adults. 'Sex education is almost unheard of and instead,

Naisha has been taught to think of babies as consumer goods.' Where do

babies come from? My mum goes into the hospital and

buys the baby. And Jesus brings it there and then me mam goes and picks

it up and gives the doctors the money and then brings it back home.

Are babies expensive? Yeah. Thousands of pounds.

One of the most powerful challenges to this prevailing narrative was

BBC's Poor Kids, which offered a less patronising insight into the

lives of a handful of the 3.5 million children growing up in

poverty in one of the world's richest nations. As the programme

billing noted, these children were "under-represented, under-nourished

and often under the radar". Here was a platform for the children

themselves, allowing them to communicate their own experiences in

their own words. SHE SINGS: # My mummy's got no

money. # My mummy's got no money. # At all At all.

'The gap between rich and poor in the UK is now wider than at any time

since the Second World War.' It doesn't get any better.

It gets worser and worser as the days go on.

'We asked four children to show us what life is really like growing up

in Britain today below the poverty line.' Shopping, debt.

Shopping, debt. Shopping, debt, shopping debt, shopping debt,

shopping, debt. There's all sorts of things that

happen bad around here in my life. Money is the main priority. I always

worry about it. A more considered take on Poor Kids.

It'd be easy, but facile, to claim that the reality of working-class

Britain has been entirely driven from our TV screens, that the

programmes which remain have simply become modern versions of the

medieval stocks, there for us to pelt their subjects with our

disapproval. But it would be unfair, too. When Big Brother launched in

the UK in 2000, it had a revolutionary quality about it - a

social experiment using a multi-camera set-up to observe 11

strangers crammed into a house for several weeks. Of course, it quickly

became a genre of TV that hunted down the extreme, the freakish and

the unsympathetic for our supposed entertainment. But Channel 4's

latest multi-camera reality show, Educating Yorkshire, provided a

much-welcome development in the genre. Here were teachers and

students in an everyday community in Dewsbury, getting by and trying to

do their best. This was astute, dedicated programme-making. Using 64

cameras and editing down 2,000 hours of film rushes, the end result was

an often moving series which allowed viewers to empathise with these

young people as they prepared themselves for adult life.

BELL RINGS Come on, people, get moving, please!

I came to this school knowing exactly what I wanted to achieve.

Yes, improve exam results. Yes, make behaviour better.

You cheeky bitch. But the most important thing for me is that

alongside everything else we give them, they walk out of here as

decent human beings who are ready for the world and if that doesn't

happen, we have failed them. Stop crying, you moangy bugger.

'But when you deal with teenagers, life's never straightforward.' Did

you stamp on his head? I don't know, I might have done.

Right, thank you. 'We filmed over a year to find out

what life is really like in one of our secondary schools.' There comes

a tipping point. I'll have to ask him to leave.

Good. 'For the teachers...' Let's have a

massive year seven hug. '..and the kids...' If he doesn't

apologise, he'll spend the rest of his natural life in detention.

..at the very start of adult life. Do you like my eyebrows? Shaved my

eyebrows off. This may have been a rare, realistic

portrayal of working-class teenagers, but all the more welcome

for it. Importantly, viewers wanted to see Educating Yorkshire in big

numbers. Cumulative figures for some individual episodes reached almost

five million viewers. The irony is that if certain television

executives or journalists are sniffy about programmes predicated on

working-class life, be they documentary or sitcom, they might

not be best judge of what the public will respond to. The theatrical,

scabrous and energetic working-class Irish comedy, Mrs Brown's Boys, was

denounced by critics as being "crass" and "lazy trash". Yet one

episode grabbed an astounding 11 million viewers last Christmas.

Representations of working-class life should be many and various.

Television must be more honest about the portrayal of working people. I'm

not arguing that there aren't bad, difficult things in working class

life, but don't demonise, report accurately and don't make poverty

porn. There are some good programmes out there, but we need to remind

ourselves constantly of the potential pitfalls and the

dishonesty of cynical agendas. So what's the solution? Some might come

away from this and think, "Ah, he wants to swap demonization of the

working class and poor for glorification instead." But that

other extreme, after all, would be to patronise, to turn people living

in poverty into saints and to ignore what can be morally complex,

ambiguous and disturbing problems. That's the last thing I'm calling

for. Rather, it's simply to move away

from focusing on the most extreme and unrepresentative stories and

passing them off as the mainstream. The big problem with, say, Shameless

or On Benefits And Proud, is that there aren't enough counterbalances.

There are ten million people living in social housing in this country,

and yet it seems only dysfunctional residents seem to appear on our TV

screens. We need more television programmes that at least reflect the

reality that most of Britain's poor are in work and still trapped in

poverty, challenging the myth that work is an automatic route out of

poverty. It means exploring the reality of what our welfare state is

- that most of it is actually spent on pensioners who paid in to their

pensions for most of their lives, and that most working-age benefits

go to people in work. It means looking at the desperation of many

unemployed people searching for work, like the 645 people who

applied for a single job as an administrator at Hull University

earlier this year. It surely means providing a platform for those

living in poverty to communicate their own experiences in their own

way, not edited to sensationalise and humiliate. It doesn't mean

pretending that dysfunctional people don't exist, but it surely means

balancing them with a more accurate cross-section of the community. This

would mean a challenge to the dogma that issues like poverty and

unemployment are individual failings, rather than social

problems that should concern all of us. If we want television to provide

a more honest, accurate portrayal of life outside the privileged bubble,

it means cracking open the industry. It risks becoming a closed shop for

those from pampered backgrounds. We need to abolish unpaid internships,

which increasingly mean that only those who can afford to live off

their parents can get a foot in the door. We have to challenge the

growing emphasis on requiring expensive post-graduate

qualifications, which are less and less accessible to those without the

financial means. Now more than ever, we need a new wave of paid

scholarships and traineeships to allow ambitious television producers

of all backgrounds - from Glasgow, Middlesbrough, the Rhondda Valley,

Manchester, wherever, to have a chance to have their stories told.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your time. Good night.