Episode 2 Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture

In the first programme we saw how four decades

and two world wars brought us from a sharply defined class hierarchy

to the brink of real change.

By the late 1940s, here in Britain,

we had new reforming Labour government,

a National Health Service,

the start of a welfare state, a whiff of socialism.

For the first time, more young people than ever were being released

into opportunities previously denied their families.

I was one of them.

This is Wigton in Cumbria and this is where, at 11,

I went to school - the Nelson Grammar, as it was then.

It was once a fee-paying school, but after the Butler Act in 1944,

if you passed a scholarship you could come for free, and people flooded in.

Now, it's a comprehensive school.

That's one of the changes that's happened since the Second World War.

In the post-war years, culture, especially popular culture,

driven by lower-middle classes and working classes,

seemed to obliterate the need for the old class distinctions.

I certainly felt that.

What you were didn't depend any longer on all that centuries-old stuff.

You were indifferent to it.

What mattered was what you listened to,

what you watched on television, what you read.

That was where you were anchored.

But the old systems, driven by private education, land ownership

and the historical power of upper class taste, were still there.

Were they just lying quiet or were they on the way out?

# It's a lovely day tomorrow... #

This is Liverpool - once a great, rich, north-western city,

its riches built on the cotton trade and the slave trade,

rich in squares and buildings and still over 2,000 listed monuments here.

But its very riches and docklands and industry

made it a target for the Germans in the Second World War

and it was the most heavily bombed city by the Luftwaffe next to London.

Liverpool would rebuild - its docks and shipyards would prosper again.

It was a city whose people had suffered great deprivations both before and during the war,

but it would become a crucible for a new culture

and supply key figures in a new generation that would define it.

It was this generation that would decide that they too could

write the books and make the films and make the television plays and do the art and make the music.

Art goes where energy is, and in the working class and lower-middle class,

there was tremendous energy, and it came out and it took over.

# You make me dizzy, dizzy Lizzy

# Oh, babe, you look so fine

# You're just a-rockin' and a-rollin'

# I wish you were mine... #

But, for most people across the classes, it was grim.

Pressures in the late '40s and early '50s came from chronic shortage of money

and the rationing that was there for years after the war.

So an optimistic Festival of Britain was planned for 1951

by the new Labour government.

It was to look to the future - a festival of culture and technology -

to echo the Great Exhibition of 1851.

It attracted 8.5 million visitors,

many of them here on London's South Bank.

In this time of austerity, the idea was that culture was important

and could be central in bringing people together.

For many, it was a way out, a way of bettering themselves.

It was an idea which was to flourish strongly over the next 60 or 70 years.

So is it possible to characterise and generalise

these people who came to the Festival Hall here

and festival sites all over the country just after the War?

Were they worn out by the War?

Were they content with the systems that they found in class and culture

or were they looking for something new, something different,

something that marked them out having come through this experience?

Certainly there was a seed bed here for what would become

a rather radical change over the next 40 years.

There were some, as there always are of whatever class,

who were happy to enjoy themselves when they could, unconcerned with arts and culture.

But others were hungry for something else

and they sought it out not always in the obvious places.

There's a survey that shows that in the late 1940s

only one in ten of working-class people claimed to read books as a hobby.

There were three in ten middle-class people read books as a hobby,

mostly crime fiction and romance, with Dickens thrown in now and then.

But the newspapers were widely read

and they contained some fine writers.

I remember reading Cassandra in the Daily Mirror,

and there was the Herald, and on Sunday there was the News Of The World.

All human life is there.

As well as newspapers, most people got their entertainment and their culture from the radio.

As well as listening to comedy, they could listen to concerts,

even if they couldn't come here, to the Royal Festival Hall in London.

It was still variety, music hall - very, very considerable audiences.

And the reconstruction of the radio, the wireless, after the war,

reflected the old class structure

because it was the Light Programme for the masses,

the Home Service for the middle class, thinking classes,

and the Third Programme for the class, the classy ones.

And the idea was that people would move up this ladder.

It was amazingly patronising when you look back at it now,

-but it was terribly high-minded.

-There was a bit of idealism in it.

-We're in a middle-class place.

-We're in a temple of it.

What did this represent culturally for the middle classes in 1951?

It stood out like a glowing optimistic good deed in a very drab austere world, this one.

I remember coming here in the '50s as a little boy and being so taken with it

that I used to go home and use my bricks -

that shows the level of technology we kids had - to recreate this.

The aristocracy, what place did the aristocracy see itself as playing then?

Well, the aristocracy wasn't uniformly culturally sensitive

but they all, as far as I can see, from top to bottom

had a sense of custodianship - that on their walls were these extraordinary pictures

and those walls themselves were the product of the best architects of the 18th century.

There's a feeling they gave out that they had been badly hit.

Oh, British aristocracy, it's had more comebacks than Judy Garland.

They're phenomenally good at it.

Two world wars had appeared to leave the British aristocracy battered.

Great loss of privileges.

There was a shortage of cash, there was a shortage of servants,

but this very small group of people still owned

more than 50% of the land in this country.

Land was to be held on to at all costs

but houses were a different matter.

The upkeep of these great houses, regarded since the 18th century as national treasures,

was to prove a pressing problem for many of those who owned them.

But there were some smart enough to see the post-war changes as an opportunity.

This is Woburn Abbey, or part of it.

The 13th Duke threw open the doors and the gates to people

who probably wouldn't have been admitted before and he did it with gusto.

His snobbish contemporaries whispered and looked down on him but he went for it.

"I love meeting them and talking to them," he said.

"We're perfectly happy to share the pleasures of the estate with our visitors."

He'd identified the notion of a family day out

and turned this place into one of the big centres for family outings.

At Woburn Abbey it wasn't just a case of displaying artistic treasures

but of offering animals and fair rides and fun.

It might have been a case of, you can come this far and no further,

but the old duke had sensed that a new energy, and money with it,

was beginning to flow from those below him

and he, like his friend Lord Montague of Beaulieu, risked ridicule to reach it.

# The stately homes of England How beautiful they stand

# To prove the upper classes Have still the upper hand

# Though the fact that they have to be rebuilt

# And frequently mortgaged to the hilt

# Is inclined to take the gilt

# Off the gingerbread And certainly damps the fun... #

The 13th Duke saved Woburn, and now his grandson, Andrew,

the 15th Duke, runs the family business.

When we started this 100 years ago, in 1911,

there would have been no question that the aristocracy owned a lot of the culture.

They literally owned it. They owned the great paintings. They were patrons.

They got things like the Royal Ballet going and so on.

-And you think that all that has gradually eased away now?

-I would say diminished.

I think you can look at things like the ballet, in particular,

is supported, but I wouldn't say it was supported by aristocrats.

I would say that you look at a lot of, you know, self-made people now.

What do you think is the biggest change in the position

and perception of the aristocracy since your grandfather's day?

I remember my mother telling me that years ago,

when they used to go to the cinema, they would ring up and say they were coming

and they would be met by the General Manager of whatever cinema they were going to.

This is very different. She's only 70 now, so we're talking 50 years ago.

You know, one can't conceive of such a thing today.

You just line up and stick your credit card in and get your tickets.

Many of the visitors to Woburn would have worked in the towns

and cities, commuting each day to and from the ever-growing suburbs.

Here was the middle class and it was expanding by the day.

"Gaily into Ruislip Gardens Runs the red electric train

"With a thousand Tas and Pardons

"Daintily alights Elaine

"Hurries down the concrete station With a frown of concentration

"Out into the outskirt's edges Where a few surviving hedges

"Keep alive our lost Elysium - rural Middlesex again."

The poet John Betjeman was a great success in the '50s with the middle classes,

though he could be a snobbish observer of its lower reaches.

There was a terrific amount of snobbery about, despite,

or perhaps in reaction to, the egalitarian spirit of the war years.

The upper-class writer, Nancy Mitford,

famously wrote about U and non-U vocabulary.

The writer Ferdinand Mount is himself a baronet who chooses not to use his title.

What did he make of these 1950s snobberies?

There was still, in this country, almost an addiction

to nuances and gradations of class

in what you wore, the way you spoke, of course. It never stops, that(!)

What you wore, the way you spoke, how you dressed.

Yes, or the way you addressed an envelope to anybody.

Did you address it to Melvyn Bragg Esquire

or Mr Melvyn Bragg?

That probably meant he was a tradesman you owed money to

and the cover was, sort of, blown by Nancy Mitford

in her famous article on U and Non-U

in which she exposed these, to her, very important differences.

Whether you said "notepaper" or "writing paper",

whether you said "chimneypiece" or "mantelpiece".

I mean, there was a whole language devoted to differentiating

between those who put the milk in first and those who put it in second,

one of which was supposed to be better than the other.

Part of John Betjeman's success

was that he had found a plain, accessible voice for his poetry.

It was a very different voice from the intellectual, TS Eliot,

that pre-war hero of Bloomsbury and the intelligentsia.

Betjeman was now joined by the poet Philip Larkin

in speaking for the world that was emerging in the 1950s.

"The large cool store selling cheap clothes

"Set out in simple sizes plainly -

"Knitwear, Summer Casuals, Hose

"In browns and greys, maroon and navy

"Conjures the weekday world of those

"Who leave at dawn low terraced houses

"Timed for factory, yard and site."

Larkin's poetry, though perhaps gloomier than Betjeman's,

is at the same time more accepting of the modern world.

What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is

and the kind of environment one's had and has now

that one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes.

One writes the kind of poetry one has to write or can write.

Betjeman and Larkin admired each other, but, for me,

Betjeman's poetry betrays a prejudice against the modern that tips into snobbery.

His famous line, "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough," written in 1937,

is not only disdainful, but unthinking,

at a time when war threatened and Spain had already been bombed.

There was quite a bit of snobbery in Betjeman.

Like any interesting writer, there's several different things going on at the same time

so there's certainly a snobbery about, you know, "Phone for the fish knives, Norman,"

that poem which uses every kind of phrase which was regarded as common,

um, for comic effect.

But at the same time there's a much broader sympathy

for the disregarded, the unglamorous, the dim -

both buildings and people.

A new outburst of building in the '20s and '30s

led to the building of suburbs such as this

which, by the 1950s, were firmly the home of the middle classes,

from lower-income, white-collar workers

to accountants, teachers, solicitors,

up to company directors and chief executives.

They were held together by common values, if not by similar incomes,

and they saw themselves as the mainstay of the '50s,

and this place is a place that defined them.

It was their tastes which predominated in that decade.

'There was a certain exclusivity to this sort of life.

While the aristocracy had found a clever way to keep

their estates for themselves, the middle classes tried to do the same.

They wanted to keep out those from below, many of whom were now keen to move up.

Its codes were enshrined in social clubs and private schools and what you wore.

The middle classes dressed as their parents had done.

Respectability and aspiration were key.

It was tennis and bridge and the Home Service

and the local library and the car and mortgages

and prospects of holidays abroad and gardening.

And there was also going to the cinema,

people around here went to the cinema in droves.

But radio was still the dominant medium.

On a night in 1952, millions of people would have tuned in to some of this.

'For the next 30 minutes, it's Ticket From HMS Indefatigable

'with Joy Nicholls, Dick Bentley and Jimmy Edwards.'

Just as before the war, accent continued to be a strong indicator of class - or cla-a-ss.

Although regional voices were heard on radio, the top presenters and announcers

were required to speak with a BBC accent,

received pronunciation, and most of the upwardly mobile, lowwer-middle class

and middle class decided to temper or eradicate their regional accents.

So that we get something like this.

SPEAKS INAUDIBLY QUICKLY

But radio and cinema were about to be overtaken by the new, great, democratic medium of television.

But what drove television into people's homes was the Monarchy.

It was the Queen's coronation in 1953 that pulled off the trick.

People rushed to buy sets to be able to see this Royal event for the first time in history.

In one way, they felt closer to Royalty than ever before

but this new proximity also defined the sharpness of the gap.

It wasn't just the coronation, of course.

People had more leisure time and it was easier and warmer to stay in than go to the cinema,

but it took a while, together with the start of ITV in 1955,

to reach television viewers across the class barriers.

In the early days, televisions were expensive

and they were largely bought by the middle class,

and the BBC in those days was largely run by the middle class, the officer class.

They appeared on it, they ran it and they made it in their own image.

-Sir Laurence Olivier.

-How are you?

Not here tonight as an actor, but... How would you describe yourself?

-Well, I'm a manager.

-A manager.

The BBC seemed to dictate the way we spoke,

the way we dressed, the way we behaved,

to reinforce our perceptions of our class and culture, if not the reality.

It was a new medium

but it was very reluctant at first to leave behind the old hierarchies.

'What's My Line?'

We will of course show you what the challenger does for a living and here it comes.

-Isobel Barnett.

-Good evening. Do you work indoors?

-Yes.

Is it something that's a service rather than making something?

-Yes. Yes.

-Right.

If we were in a certain place, you would do this service for us. Is that right?

-Yes. Yes.

-If you were younger, I'd say you were one of those gorgeous little boys in buttons,

-but you can't be.

-APPLAUSE

A page?

Television programmes like these reflected the middle class, its manners and values.

The only way of getting on in life, it seemed, would be to adopt these.

But a new generation now emerging from the post-war gloom

saw things differently and they wrote about it.

Out of the conservatism of the early '50s came an explosion of books.

First off was the novel, Lucky Jim, from Larkin's friend, Kingsley Amis.

Then Room At The Top from John Braine.

These young writers found a voice that refused to accept tradition.

They were against what they saw as upper-class arrogance

but equally against a genteel middle-class way of life.

But theirs was a cultural revolt, not a political one, more DH Lawrence than Nye Bevan.

Alan Sillitoe's novel, Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, was made into an outstanding film.

It made a star of Albert Finney who paid the young Arthur Seaton in his own authentic voice,

a young factory worker whose main aim in life is to enjoy himself

but is also frustrated by the conventions of his own class that restrict him.

'Fred's all right.

'He's one of them who knows how to spend his money, like me.

'Enjoys himself. That's more than them poor beggars know.

'They got ground down before the war and never got over it.

'I'd like to see anybody try to grind me down. That'd be the day.

'What I'm out for is a good time. All the rest is propaganda.'

It was this small theatre in Chelsea

that became the focal point of what became a revolution.

Overnight, it seemed, the middle-class grip on the culture was finally overthrown.

Do the Sunday papers make you feel ignorant?

-Not half.

-Well, you are ignorant. You're just a peasant.

What about you?

-You're not a peasant, are you?

-What's that?

-I said, do the papers make you feel you're not so brilliant after all?

-I haven't read them yet.

-I didn't ask you that. I said...

-Oh, leave the poor girlie alone. She's busy.

Well, she can talk, can't she? You can talk, can't you?

You can express an opinion. Or does the white woman's burden make it impossible to think?

The opening of John Osborne's play Look Back In Anger in 1956

seemed to define a moment when the culture in this country changed gear.

All right, dear, go back to sleep. It was only me talking. You know, talking, remember?

-I'm sorry.

-Stop yelling. I'm trying to read.

I don't know why you bother. You can't understand a word of it.

Up till this time, playwrights such as Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward

were the favourites in the West End.

They'd established their reputation before the Second World War

and they had that sensibility which drew from the upper classes and the upper-middle classes.

Osborne's lead character, Jimmy Porter,

was the embodiment of the '50s angry young men and women,

lower-middle class, clever and discontented.

These young people were different from Albert Finney's Arthur Seaton.

They were better educated, but they shared a hunger for something new.

They weren't content to look round an aristocrat's safari park.

They were looking to take over the culture.

Being in here reminds me very clearly

of when I started to come to this theatre, here at the Royal Court,

in the early 1960s.

I came to London to work in 1961.

And this was... some sort of sceptred place.

I came from the working class, which you've probably heard too much about,

and England being England I'd known the trivial slights

and pinpricks of snobbery, and that great spider web

which we still have in this country, run by the smugs and the duds

and the perpetually fearful, but that didn't matter very much.

But here, and from what came from here, it didn't matter at all.

It was swept away. Something else completely was going on.

There was this feeling of a great rush through.

The playwright impact had ramifications way beyond the theatre.

Writers and musicians and artists from the lower-middle

and the working classes poured through the breach.

But the great centre of this was in television.

Look Back In Anger was seen by relatively few people

in a theatre in London.

It wasn't until work like this was shown on TV that its full impact was felt.

What happened was that a new bunch of people came into the theatre,

into novel writing, into advertising, into photography,

into films and into television.

I'm here in Lime Grove in west London

where I came in 1962 to join BBC Television.

This was a place - in these houses were our offices -

which seethed with the idea that a new generation

could get hold of the mass means of communication and change things.

Over at ITV, Coronation Street had begun its extraordinary run.

And now, here too at the BBC, a new sort of programming emerged -

drama and documentary -

and it drew in both middle-class and working-class audiences.

Oh, there was one place we did go to,

and I thought we were going to have a chance.

They said six pounds, and the next thing we heard,

someone had offered them eight.

So that put the cap on that.

In the Wednesday play strand, as in Coronation Street, ordinary people

were now seeing their own lives as worthy of serious attention.

Television was entertaining, yes,

but in class terms the change was immense.

Young writers and directors, like Ken Loach, understood that the power of theatre,

previously a middle-class preserve, could be projected much further.

His drama, Cathy Come Home, about homelessness, struck a nerve

and pulled in a wide audience.

In 1963, the BBC was probably as open, I guess, as it's been.

Later I moved on to the Wednesday Play

and the people involved in that had a very clear idea

of what contemporary television drama could be,

and that would have a strong working-class character.

The aim was to try to show not only the surface of life

but the class conflicts within it.

And the idea of class conflict was something that you talked about,

-that you intended to pursue?

-I don't think we had any illusions. I mean, even in our youthful stage

we didn't have any illusions about what we could change,

but that was the proper function of drama,

was to illuminate and illustrate and clarify and sharpen

the way we saw the world, really.

Of course, we were only one stream within a much broader, complex organisation

and a lot of the other stuff was very traditional,

very establishment, right wing in our terms.

So, I don't think it was true that the BBC as a whole

was taken over by a bunch of lefties. Far from it.

Directors, like Loach, and writers, like Dennis Potter,

were determined to find a voice both for the class they came from

and, in Potter's case, a voice for those, like himself,

who wanted to get out and move up.

No-one who has been brought up in a working class culture,

can ever altogether escape, or wish to escape...

..the almost suffocating warmth

and friendliness of that culture.

But, and this is what I mean by the personal element,

as soon as you cross the frontiers between one class and another,

you feel... I feel...as though you're negotiating a minefield.

Dennis Potter's play was about a young working-class man

who won a scholarship from his local grammar school to university,

as Potter did, as I did.

It was a story being repeated all over the country.

Your services seem to be very much in demand.

Why not? Everyone's gone to the moon.

-That's this place, all right.

-Some moon.

Bright and shiny when you're a long way off.

Cold and grey and dark when you get there.

-Who said that?

-I did.

You mean you actually talk like that?

It doesn't sound right with your accent.

Patronising bitch, aren't you?

Not everything was new, of course, but it was the mass of it.

Wherever you looked around the place,

people were trying new things, doing new things,

hoping to get into trouble, wanting to change things, taking their turn.

What was new was a third channel that now attempted to satisfy

a hunger for a wider access to culture.

It was a channel designed for self-betterment.

We always watch BBC2 on Mondays.

I like it best of all the programmes.

I think it's very good because it has lots of concerts and things on it.

Do you want me to be honest? I prefer ITV.

With the arrival of BBC2 in 1964,

television, like radio before it,

replicated the three-tier class system.

BBC2 at the top end, BBC1 in the middle

and ITV at the market end, although, to be fair to ITV,

they used to a lot of public service broadcasting as well.

There were plenty who resented this new group

who were pushing from below at the class barriers.

The writer, Evelyn Waugh,

had satirised his own generation to great effect in his early novels

but deeply disliked the new world in which he found himself.

You're a great deal luckier than many people

because you made something of a fortune before the war,

-before it was all taxed away.

-Not a penny. Never saved a penny.

You never saved it?

No honest man has been able to save any money in the last 20 years.

An appearance on Face To Face was an accolade

given only to the middle aged and distinguished.

# What do you want if you don't want money? #

But the BBC now paid lip service - or was it homage? -

to the changes around them.

They put 20-year-old pop singer, Adam Faith, in the establishment chair.

His was a different voice that ran alongside

those of the highly-educated grammar school boys.

When you wake up tomorrow morning and go outside the house, the people...

-The flat.

-..in your own street, the flat..

-Yeah.

The local people in your own street will see you,

will you be mobbed by fans then, or do they accept you in your own home?

They accept me very much. I live on an estate of council flats

and having lived there for so long,

I haven't found any difference amongst them at all.

-You're still Terry Nelhams to them?

-Completely, yeah.

The respect accorded to the views of this young man

reflected a radically new economic and cultural reality.

By the early '60s, there are about five million teenagers

and they had around £800 million to spend.

It was as if these teenagers picked up the baton handed on by the angry young men and ran with it.

They weren't prepared to live by old class distinctions.

It was the teddy boys who fired things,

mimicking an older upper class in their Edwardian suits,

calling the more conventionally dressed uppers "peasants",

and then a new set of working-class dandies emerged, the mods.

Like Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,

their main aim was to have a good time.

They were energetic, but frustrated too,

and were looking for a way to say so.

In the early '60s, the south coast's beaches were the stages for clashes

between the young mods and the rockers,

two largely working-class tribes that terrified the middle classes.

'Vermin, hoodlums, sawdust Caesars,

'were among the names magistrates applied to them.

'Authority was determined that the rule of the tearaway should be brief.'

Pete Townshend of The Who began as a mod

and later wrote his rock opera, Quadrophenia,

against the backdrop of these battles.

His was a voice that found a way to speak for those who, so far,

had felt alienated from a middle-class culture.

Sausage, egg, chips, beans, gentlemen.

Steak pie, chips and beans.

When did you define yourself as a mod,

and was this a generational thing or was it anything to do with class?

It was definitely for me to do with class.

It wasn't just working class, but it was driven by the working classes.

Now, your generation came along, and you're very much in the front of that,

and one of the things you started doing quite early on

was taking control of the material.

After the first song that I wrote had been recorded for The Who successfully, I Can't Explain,

I was summoned by a group of mods who came,

there were five of them, and they said we need to tell you something

and it is that we love this song that you've written,

and I said, "Well, what is it that you love about it?"

And they couldn't explain what they loved about my song,

I Can't Explain.

And at one point, one of them said - he's a mod from Cork in Ireland -

"That's what we want you to do,

"write more songs about the fact that we can't explain what it is that we want you to do."

So, in a sense, those songs were commissioned by that little group, and they were...

-Working class mods.

-Yeah.

# Why don't you all.... just fade away? #

# And don't try and dig what we all s-s-s-say

# I'm not trying to c-c-c-cause a big sensation

# I'm just talking about my g-g-g-generation

# My generation... #

The Who's first managers were Kit Lambert, an upper-class boy from Lancing public school,

and Chris Stamp, a working-class cockney.

Theirs was a very '60s partnership.

It was magical because Kit was a Lancing boy

and Chris was an extremely good-looking man,

very mod-like, mod haircut, mod suits.

His friends weren't just through his brother, Terence,

who was a big film star at the time and still is,

but, you know, through him Michael Caine, Terry Donovan, David Bailey.

When I was 18 or 19, I had a flat in Chesham Place,

right in the middle of Belgravia.

I couldn't function there. I just couldn't function.

I couldn't buy milk without somebody in a fur coat saying,

"Get out of the way, boy!" you know.

I didn't know how to handle the established upper classes

that occupied the place at the time.

Kit and Chris lived together, you know,

and Chris was always, "Hey, taxi!"

And Kit would, you know, "No, we're in Belgravia. Cab!"

"Cab! Cab!" "Taxi!" "Cab!" Which one do you pick?

It was that kind of incredible power tension.

They worked incredibly well together.

Do you think class continued to figure?

You know, the band that did the most to, kind of, crack that was The Stones.

You know, Mick Jagger would enlist anybody that came in the room.

He seemed to be completely classless.

And by '64, '65, when I got to know him well,

he was already... He already had the house in Cheyne Walk

and parties with titled people and, you know, Lucien Freud.

With the invasion of Belgravia and Chelsea by the young pop stars,

and the educated boys and girls storming the media,

there was a brand-new sort of middle class.

From it emerged a group with the confidence to mock the old order

and the likes of Nancy Mitford and U and non-U.

These new satirists, unlike most of the post-war comedians,

were university and often public school educated

and they set about ridiculing

the social codes and values of their parents.

Perkins.

-Sir.

-I want you to lay down your life.

Yes, sir.

We need a futile gesture at this stage.

LAUGHTER

It will raise the whole tone of the war.

-Get up on a crate, Perkins.

-Sir.

-Pop over to Bremen.

-Yes, sir.

-Take a shufty.

-Yes.

-Don't come back.

-Right you are, sir.

LAUGHTER

Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going too.

Goodbye, sir. Or is it au revoir?

No, Perkins.

Satire was booming in clubs, on television

and in the pages of the brilliant Private Eye,

dedicated to unseating the old order.

A new Establishment was in town.

Since the early '60s, the Beatles had been pop royalty.

For our last number I'd like to ask your help.

Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?

And the rest of you, if you'd just rattle your jewellery.

# Oh, yeah, I tell you something

# I think you'll understand... #

The phenomenal success of The Beatles had helped to spread the new culture beyond their young fans

and they appealed to the middle-aged and the middle class as well.

They seemed to make class irrelevant.

But their manager, the middle-class Brian Epstein, had decided early on

that The Beatles shouldn't frighten the horses.

The Beatles were somewhat ill-clad, and their presentation was,

well, left a little to be desired, as far as I was concerned.

He took them out of their biker leathers and jeans,

working-class clothes as he saw them,

and put them in classless uniforms.

But after a while, Lennon in particular was reluctant to be claimed,

or perhaps reclaimed, by the middle class.

He'd been inspired, like many others,

by the black American blues tradition,

as well as that working-class genius, Elvis Presley.

# It's so lonely, baby

# It's so lonely. #

This is Menlove Avenue in Woolton, Liverpool.

As you can see, it's a respectable semi-detached.

In the late 1950s, this would have been seen

as an aspirational lower-middle-class house.

John Lennon was brought up here by his Aunt Mimi,

a lower-middle-class boy who went to a grammar school,

although later he wanted to be seen as a working-class hero.

This wasn't unusual in the 1950s and '60s when many middle-class boys,

and some women, looked to the working class for a cultural lead.

So he was brought up here by his Aunt Mimi.

What did she feel when his more definitely working-class friends came round, like Paul and George?

What was her view of that?

Well, of course, you know,

this is where the class system kind of kicks in a little bit

because this is Woolton, Mendips, situated in Woolton,

and it has always been a much sought-after area in which to live.

I mean, I was brought up in Woolton as a young lad,

and I think there was some alarm

because, of course, these were boys coming from council estates

and there was that feeling that maybe this was the rougher element.

You know, common might be the word that would be bandied about.

I think she was worried he may start being an impressionable lad.

He might start wearing, you know, the Teddy Boy gear

and start speaking in that Scouse accent,

which she abhorred because this is Woolton.

We're talking about John Lennon here, making a dive towards the working class

and getting some sort of energy from it at that time.

Well, I...I mean, the connection is rock'n'roll, isn't it?

It was Elvis Presley that had such a huge impact on him

but, of course, he was a young lad in England

so, thankfully, we've got Lonnie Donegan.

# The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road

# The Rock Island Line is the road to ride... #

Lonnie Donegan kind of cut across all the classes

and it was a melting pot.

Skiffle was a melting pot, live-played skiffle, it was acoustic,

you could create your own instruments from...

You could deploy it with a washboard and a...

And it was inclusive.

And so, basically, it brought together people

from different backgrounds to make bands.

From skiffle to the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who and the Rolling Stones,

in a few short years it was these voices,

some from the lower rungs of society,

that were now heard above all others.

The explosion of pop music in the 1960s took us all over.

It was written by the musicians themselves, for a start,

our generation. It spoke to us about us.

And it seemed to be inclusive of all classes and all cultures -

one sound fitted all.

And most of all, it was so very good.

It was on a par with all the other arts at the time,

but it was also totally accessible.

It was the essence of the '60s and it was its promise.

# ..All day and all of the night. #

The young had a whole new set of heroes,

many of whom, like themselves, came from working-class backgrounds.

As well as pop musicians, there were working-class artists

like David Hockney from Bradford,

the '60s superstar who had become one of our most eminent artists.

There were writers and actors,

and they could come here, to Carnaby Street,

where another working class hero, a former Glasgow welder, John Stephen,

became the lord of Carnaby Street

and attracted all the dedicated followers of fashion.

Most of these boys and the girls

who come to us have got ideas of their own,

set ideas of their own,

and most of them have got very good taste,

which is much more than their parents

and their parents' parents had before.

On all sides, our culture was becoming less rigid.

The old dress codes that had pigeonholed people's status

were falling by the wayside.

It was beginning to be much more difficult to identify someone's class,

particularly the young, by the way they dressed.

Fashion no longer came down from on high via Paris

or the likes of the Princess Margaret set.

Hats were finished, gloves were thrown away,

jeans became ubiquitous, but there was a foppishness in the air.

The working-class dandy replaced the Regency buck.

And, of course, there was sex.

As Philip Larkin said, "Sexual intercourse began in 1963,

"which was rather late for me," he wrote,

"between the end of the Chatterley ban and The Beatles' first LP."

Philip Larkin's poem singles out DH Lawrence's explicit novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover,

written in the '20s, but suppressed till 1960, as signalling a sexual revolution.

But this revolution was propelled less by the mass sales of Lady Chatterley

and more by the mass production of the birth-control pill.

Thousands of women were free from constant childcare and went to work.

Family incomes and aspirations rose.

So, perhaps, did the sum of human happiness.

We're sticking broadly to the arts in these programmes

but in 1959 the scientist and novelist, CP Snow,

delivered a lecture called The Two Cultures,

which spoke of the rift between the arts and the sciences.

There were the beginnings of a technological revolution,

one whose consequences would eventually bite, as we'll see.

But for now, the white heat of technology was feted and fed

by young scientists from schools like this one,

Harrow High School, a former grammar school,

where Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel prize-winning geneticist and president of the Royal Society,

set out on a scientific path in the 1960s.

You know, you never forget when you're 11, do you?

Oh, is this scrubbed wooden tops and Bunsen burners

and that sort of thing?

When it was a lab, the floor was the same

and the windows were the same but it was all these wooden benches.

-That's right.

-They were beautiful.

You were at this school in the '60s.

Did you feel you were a different lot from those doing arts,

who were doing English, history and languages?

Do you know, I did, because this is sort of anecdotal

but I have a feeling, I came from a working-class family,

and I had a feeling it was easier for me to do science than the arts

because at home I hadn't, you know, I'd never been to the theatre,

I'd never been to a concert, we didn't have books and novels,

whereas science, it was more of a level playing field.

And there was something else. You know, my dad was a fitter.

He worked with his hands.

When you do science, there's that... You work with your hands too,

so I felt more comfortable with that.

And there was a surge of new ideas, new ambitions,

with a new tranche of people doing it.

Do you feel the same was happening in science at that time?

I do. I think it was the beginning of a major expansion in science.

And of course CP Snow himself, when he wrote his book,

was, in fact, interested in driving science because of driving wealth.

I think that scientists like Paul Nurse make a nonsense

of any barrier between a creative and a scientific imagination.

But when CP Snow talked of two cultures,

he probably still thought of the arts as something traditional and mainly for the elite.

With popular culture so dominating,

it seemed at the time that it took the energy out of the traditional arts

and they were in decline, but not so.

Behind me at Covent Garden, it was the time of Maria Callas

and of Nureyev and Fonteyn whose fame on the stage of ballet

has never been equalled before or since.

The orchestras were playing in Liverpool, in Edinburgh,

in Birmingham and, of course, in Manchester.

The philanthropist, Vivien Duffield,

has been involved with opera and ballet for many years.

She's given £100 million to the arts and arts education.

How did she regard the connection between class and high culture?

The English upper, upper class,

I'll probably get shot down for saying this,

has never really been interested in culture.

They're interested in visual culture.

They've got wonderful possessions

and they're probably very interested in museums,

but if you look at the patrons of the arts in the last 50 years

I don't think there are any aristocrats included in that list.

If you looked at the list of funders, being mainly a lot of Jewish people,

not entirely, of course, because people like the Sainsburys were not.

Was there a sense in which the working class just didn't get to places like this?

I don't think they were deliberately excluded, but there was an amphitheatre in those days,

and there was a totally separate entrance to the amphitheatre.

People who went to the amphitheatre didn't even think they were at the Royal Opera House.

They had their own bar upstairs,

they had that horrid, narrow, little staircase

and they did not in any way mingle.

And so one might have got the impression,

if you came in the front door,

you would think it was all knobs and swells

because you never saw anybody else

but they were there, and they were upstairs.

Nureyev and Fonteyn led

a great renaissance of interest as well as of artistic mastery here, didn't they?

It was Beatlemania.

I mean, what happened to The Beatles happened here to Nureyev and Fonteyn.

I always remember, people used to sleep - you're too young -

-but people used to sleep...

-No, I'm not.

..do you remember? They used to sleep on Floral Street all the way round,

-Yeah.

-..waiting for tickets.

So the more traditional arts were booming too,

in London and, to some degree, around the country.

But were we looking at two aspects of one culture?

So there were these two strands,

one rooted in Covent Garden the opera, the ballet and so on,

and the other rooted in popular culture -

popular music, photography, fashion.

But were they part of the same spectrum in the end?

Were they all to do with quality?

I thought they were,

and I think it's become increasingly clear that they are.

The middle and upper classes had lost exclusive hold

over forms of artistic expression.

Culture itself was more open.

The Open University was about to start up,

the most democratic university we'd ever had

and, underpinned by the BBC, a great success.

But as the decade moved on,

it also seemed as if the voices that had articulated the frustrations

and energy of the lower classes

had themselves become a new middle and upper class.

Many of our pop stars now aped the gentry, buying big country houses,

while others, John Lennon among them,

were absorbed by the new hippy culture imported from America.

There was a distinct dress code at work here.

If you were dressed as a hippy,

you were likely to be new posh or old middle class.

Up to this point we'd seemed less marked by the way we spoke,

the way we dressed, we liked the same things,

we liked the same music, there's a feeling of coming together.

But was it like that or was this just a clever regrouping by the establishment?

Were they just getting ready for their next move?

The so-called spirit of the '60s was more or less over.

The Beatles broke up

and the skinheads had just begun to appear,

defining themselves against the middle-class hippies.

And, unlike their predecessors, the mods,

they seemed to have no-one to speak for them, or not quite yet.

The economy was going bust

and the white heat of technology had helped put Liverpool Docks

as well as much else out of business.

That terrific creative energy seemed to be running out of steam.

We were entering a darker period. There was a recession.

What was left of our manufacturing industry took another hammering

as we can see here, in Liverpool, with the steep decline of the docks.

The '70s were very tough on those optimisms.

The quadrupling of the oil price in '73/'74.

The stagflation,

the under-performance of the British economy,

growing industrial strife,

the break-up of the post-war political consensus which made us,

which we so liked and so felt at home with.

I think that knocked a good bit of the stuffing out of us,

and the areas where the fight seems to go on now,

and thank God it does, is trying to retain the high seriousness strand which was very much part of this.

-Mm.

-It's what Richard Hoggart once called

"the bump of social purpose of the early post-War years,"

which some would deride as bookishness, excessive scholarly.

-Or being too serious.

-Or being too serious.

It's interesting that we can use,

-you can be accused of being too serious.

-Exactly.

It's very revealing. It's a kind of reverse class antagonism.

-Mm.

-Don't use the long words.

Women, come and join us!

The vacuum left by a seeming loss of confidence in the '70s

was beginning to be filled by other groupings

that were just starting to stake their claim to acceptance.

Meanwhile, the new '70s heroes, like David Bowie, were playing with gender and identity.

Did this mean we were now identifying ourselves

culturally in a new way?

Had cultural distinctions replaced those of class?

Most people belonged to several tribes.

They belonged to perhaps an ism, feminism,

if it's Gay Rights, that's centrally important to them,

but at the same time they don't forget

where they came from and what made them,

and it depends on the question, the mood, the moment, the anxiety,

state of mind, which is to the fore.

And that's the problem with class, it lurks.

You'll find this in newspaper coverage.

When somebody becomes very prominent

in one of those groups where class doesn't seem to be the determinant,

certainly not the number-one pacemaker, nowhere near,

when the profile is written in the Guardian or the Observer or wherever it is,

when they become a bit of a figure for the first time,

background and schooling, right up there,

and if there's a heroic element of social mobility,

right up there, absolutely integral to the understanding of everybody.

We'll never get out of it.

Some of Fay Weldon's comic novels of the 1970s

played with the status of women in society.

I asked her if she felt that class was part of that equation.

Was that outside class, do you think, the Women's Movement?

I think it was a very middle-class movement, actually.

I think it tended to be

professional and middle-class women

who were protesting at the state of the world

because they wanted to be active, they wanted to join the community.

Men wouldn't let them, which was very true at the time.

Working women tended to be rather grateful to be allowed to stay at home

while their husbands provided the money.

So, in a way, what these educated women were doing

was actually making life extremely difficult for the uneducated women.

You really think that?

Yes. Yes. I mean, everybody has to go out and work.

Once upon a time, one male wage would keep a family.

One male wage no longer will because, almost,

the women went out to work, so, you know,

the value of the wage dropped

because you had doubled the workforce.

The Yorkshire poet, Tony Harrison,

also felt that the more basic aspects of class,

the significance of accent for social distinction, for example,

had not faded as we might have thought.

His poem, Them And Uz,

recalls a schoolmaster mocking him for his pronunciation.

"We say 'us' not 'uz', TW.

"That 'shut my trap'

"I doff my flat As as in 'flat cap'

"My mouth all stuffed with glottals

"Great lumps to hawk up and spit out.

"Enunciate."

First thing I did for the National Theatre in 1973

was Le Misanthrope of Moliere.

And I always remember in the interval

hearing a woman with the class of voice I was...

creating a poetry to undermine, saying,

"He has such a command over language,

"but they say he comes from Sheffield."

And so it was still going on.

This was a typical, cultural audience at a first night, you know.

Do you think it still goes on?

Well, I thought the battle had been won,

but people keep telling me that it still goes on.

What was the battle as you saw it?

Not to, as I said in the Them And Uz poem,

only the drunken porter part is available to people with my voice, you know.

We are the rude mechanicals.

Yes, yes. We are the rude mechanicals, yeah.

That's the only part we can play, rude mechanicals.

That used to annoy me intensely.

Yeah, yeah. Me too.

And it was only when I did the Mystery Plays

and got Northern actors to, you know, doing verse

that I felt I was reclaiming, um... the energy of classical verse

in the voices that it was created for.

The fragmentation of our cultural battles

and the political conflicts on all sides left many of us a bit confused.

It's perhaps not so surprising that in hard times our tastes seem to turn back

to an Edwardian world where everyone knew their place.

The massive popularity of Upstairs, Downstairs,

with its snobbery and forelock tugging,

seemed to prove the point in the '70s.

You remember Lady Pendlebury,

she came here to dine once or twice last season.

She was lady-in-waiting to the Queen as Princess of Wales.

Thin, angular person.

Very sallow skin.

Indeed, I remember Lady Pendlebury, Mrs Bridges,

she had a regrettable habit of throwing her head back when she laughed.

Edward nearly had the potatoes knocked out of his hand when he was serving them.

In the present, too, there were enough young people

aspiring to climb a conventional class ladder

to make it the butt of popular humour.

Do we have a fondue set on our wedding list, pet?

We will have tomorrow.

Alan's mother bought us that at Harrods,

she has an account there, you know?

Oh, and these lovely table mats, these are new.

Well, hunting scenes.

Just haven't had them out before. They were a present from Auntie Elsie.

Oh, your Auntie Elsie, how is she, Brenda?

Is she still a cleaner down the brewery?

By the mid-1970s,

was the great blossoming of the '60s already blowing away in the wind?

Were we back where we started from?

Well, the old establishment was now being reinforced by the new super-wealthy,

and its opposite, the lower classes, were themselves starting

to become marginalised, becoming an underclass.

But there was life in the old dog yet.

There were still a few echoes of the angry young men

of the '50s and '60s in the Wednesday Play.

There was still hard hitting drama with tough humour

and no time for middle-class hypocrisies.

We see it in Jim Allen's play, The Spongers,

set on the day of the Queen's Jubilee.

From the council.

Oh blimey, what's up?

-Mrs Crosby?

-Yeah.

Actually, I'm a certificated bailiff and I've come to...

-Oh.

-You are Mrs Crosby?

-Yeah.

Yeah, I'm dealing with you. 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.

Eh, eh. Oh, the Queen, the Queen.

Turn the Queen the other way, you bloody Communist.

Get her upright. The right way up, the Queen.

Put the Queen up...the right way up. The Queen!

Use your bloody head, the other way!

'Ello.

And then there was punk, out of the depths, it seemed.

The '70s version of the angry young men.

Finally, here was the voice that could speak for the skinheads

and for a new generation of youth.

It had real energy and fury

and it upset both the old and the new middle classes,

sweeping away the remnants of hippydom.

But it seemed to come as a last gasp

rather than able to kick-start something new.

Its influence, however, would be felt in the years ahead.

CHEERING

# God save the Queen

# She ain't no human being

# And there's no future

# In England's dreaming. #

Yet it was hard to hear the Sex Pistols' anthem in the summer of 1977

above the clamour of pro-monarchy feeling.

The country was apparently gripped by the excitement

of the Queen's Silver Jubilee.

The desire of most of us to better ourselves,

to be part of the middle classes,

had led not so much to a sweeping away of social barriers

as a redefining of them.

Thank you very much.

Less than two years later, we would enter a new era.

Very excited, very aware of...

And when we listened to the distinctive voice of Mrs Thatcher,

what we heard were the clear tones of the old BBC received pronunciation,

that accent once so essential for the upwardly mobile

and which we briefly thought had gone for ever.

Were any of the gains of these post-war decades to stay with us?

There had been a marvellous surge of energy which had given us,

at the very least, what appeared to be a shared culture on a very high level.

It was now the case that talent and skill,

whether in the service of entertainment or high seriousness, could transcend class.

So, had culture replaced class as a truer way of saying who you were?

Did your birth still mean that that was your destiny,

as it had done for centuries?

Or was this period a little splurge, a little bubble,

that was going to burst while the others up there regrouped?

This is what we're going to look at in the culture

between Margaret Thatcher from Grantham Grammar

and David Cameron from Eton College.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd