Episode 3 Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture

Behind me is the Tate Modern art gallery here on the Thames in London.

It was opened in the year 2000

and within a year, four million people had visited it for free.

Art, which had once been exclusive, expensive, available to only a few,

was now accessible and available to everybody.

Does that mean in turn

that the class system had undergone a comparable change?

Today, working-class heroes consort with princes,

former East End barrow boys are peers of the realm,

children of the suburbs are now ladies of the manor.

Information has been democratised.

Never has the opportunity to consume, process

and, above all, share culture been easier.

But perhaps the signs and symbols of a three-tier class system

are still there, just changed a bit in the way they're presented.

In this final programme,

I want to look at the last 30 years of culture in this country.

I want to meet the writers, musicians, comedians, obsessives,

people whose life and work reflect and challenge old notions.

Will they argue that our nation has changed?

Changed and decayed or grown? We all have an opinion on that.

I want to see if class,

that tangled web of divisions, of sub-divisions,

upper, middle, lower, all that fuzziness,

who has, who has not, is still at the heart of our culture today.

In many ways, the last hundred years

has moved us towards a more equal society.

The cataclysms of two world wars,

followed by the feeling of national unity in the '40s and '50s

was reflected in a culture that could be shared.

In the '60s and early '70s,

it seemed an even more culturally inclusive Britain had emerged,

driven by a socially mobile generation from the grammar schools and art schools

and the rise of popular culture.

We believed, whatever class you came from, everything was possible.

By the end of the '70s, culture remained open,

but it seemed that economics, the oil crisis and recession,

had driven us back to the old class divisions.

And since then, eliminating class

has been a preoccupation of successive Prime Ministers.

In 1979, we elected a Prime Minister

who became the embodiment of a three-class system.

It is, of course, the greatest honour

that can come to any citizen in a democracy.

Margaret Thatcher cultivated a voice that mimicked the upper classes.

Plenty thought she'd little interest in the old working classes,

and she championed her background from the lower middle classes.

The class system into which she arrived was still well defined.

Death duties had pegged them back,

but much of the old aristocracy held on to their vast estates.

Despite her proud lower-middle-class origins,

Margaret Thatcher still had a generous sprinkling

of old Etonians in her first Cabinet.

Beneath these symbols of privilege, the economic state was grim.

Inflation was in double figures, there was mass unemployment,

and the country had been crippled by strikes.

But while aspirational tenants

were encouraged to move into the middle classes

by buying their council homes,

the great manufacturing industries had collapsed,

throwing the industrial working class into crisis.

And this was immediately reflected in culture, in television drama.

Alan Bleasdale's Boys From The Blackstuff

followed the effects of unemployment

on Liverpool tarmac layers, the black stuff of the title.

It hit the nerve of the nation. The series was built

around the intense desperation of the blue-collar worker.

Gi' us a job. Go on, gi' us it.

Well, I wrote the original Blackstuff, I think, when I was 29,

and it was the Callaghan Labour Government.

I finished it off in the Thatcher Government,

and I knew that politically... the Callaghan Government wasn't great

but it was relatively benign.

And what happened as I was writing The Boys From The Blackstuff

is that Thatcher's Government came to power

and that was truly malignant.

Did you feel the Thatcher Government as a class attack?

I don't think she cared about what she would probably consider to be...

people who didn't count, and...that included me

and the people I was born and brought up with.

And that, inevitably, made you angry.

It was as if, unlike Dickens, she would say, "They don't count,"

and if they don't count, that means that I don't count, we don't count.

There were sections of the working class

that thrived under Mrs Thatcher's vision.

But in 1984,

it felt as if the old industrial working class was being threatened.

The miners' strike was a war between the Government and unionised miners,

and it became a confrontation between two working-class groups -

the police and the strikers.

With it went so much else -

sense of worth, sense of dignity, sense of community.

And for populations that grew up with not much money,

but with this immense sense of who they were, where they came from,

several generations in the same craft, unendurable.

The romance of the country for which the pit wheel

was the most potent symbol of all, all gone.

It's very, very hard to take.

Do you think it was the biggest cultural...movement

of the last 50, 60 years,

the collapse of the heavy industries,

the great labour-intensive, skill-intensive industries?

I think one of the great gaps in post-war British history

that is still to be filled

is to capture the magnitude of the change to British society,

when the "workshop of the world" element finally went.

And with the decline of heavy industry

went a hundred-year cultural tradition of self-improvement,

rooted in the pithead libraries, colliery bands

and art groups such as the Ashington miners.

But was there also a sense

that large parts of the industrial working class were culturally conservative?

The old suspicion that certain forms of art

are not for the likes of the working classes

could account for why there are few lasting memorials to mining

beyond the grassy slag heaps and long defunct pits.

But here, just off the M62 between Liverpool and Manchester,

a piece of public art has been erected

on the site of the old Sutton Manor Colliery.

It's a cultural memorial to a class.

Dream was made by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa,

but the project was driven by the local community,

in particular a group of former miners.

When you decided to do this,

people would say, "Let's have a new sports field or build a new..."

But to come to the idea of a work of art,

how did you arrive at that? Was there much dispute?

Quite a bit of dispute.

They were split half and half between the people

who thought the money could have been better spent on jobs

and those who thought it should be a work of art.

Quite a lot were opposed to it as an idea at the time.

Others wanted a...mining memorial.

Others objected because we didn't get a British sculptor to do it.

But what was very interesting was our journey what we've been on,

and it was a magnificent journey

of us starting off wanting something very mining literal here.

-Such as?

-A miner's lamp, a pick, a coalman holding a shovel,

something along them lines,

what you would normally see at any memorial.

Can you tell us how you arrived at this particular work?

We wanted something that would reflect the past

but also look to the future.

You know, it doesn't really reflect the mining industry,

but if you look at it and you ask questions about it

then it does, and don't forget the base is a giant miner's tally,

the type we used to use here at Sutton Manor Colliery.

People have a fairly low expectation of working-class communities,

what they might reach out to, what they might do.

What response have you had around this area, around St Helens,

for this piece, Dream, now that it's there and standing?

I think it's very positive.

The people who came to me criticising this five years ago

are now coming up and saying,

"I love it, it's beautiful when you get up to it."

There's always been a struggle within the working classes

that by allowing in unfamiliar culture, by crossing the line,

you are somehow betraying your class.

The film Billy Elliot brilliantly portrayed this internal battle

when it showed a boy choosing to pursue an art form

regarded with suspicion, even hostility,

by his own class and family.

Two, three, pas de bourree.

And a-one, two, three, pas de bourree.

You! Out!

Now!

I suppose Billy Elliot... I call it a sort of fantasy autobiography

because, you know, I'm not a dancer,

but I think the experience of growing up

in a working-class community then was...

..in the '70s, was that really, art wasn't for you at all.

And something... Um...

It was very odd that art was for posh people, for middle-class people.

It's still seen by a lot of people in the community that I come from,

they raise an eyebrow at it.

In the early '80s, Sue Townsend, a working-class mother of three from Leicester,

had her first novel published.

You'd been writing for the best part of 20 years

up to the publication of Adrian Mole but you kept it a secret.

Why was that?

Was it anything to do with writing or publishing is not for the likes of me?

It was to do with...

It was to do with...

Sorry. I'm unexpectedly moved by it because it was to do with

my not wanting to move away from my working-class background.

The awful thing is that people kind of despise you

for what they consider is a move away from them.

Um...

And there's another set of people who do look down on you

because of your working-class background.

So, it's a very awkward position to be in, a working-class writer.

You're desperate not to appear to be pretentious

or to be lording it over anybody.

And the money's difficult.

I mean, I said years ago that if you give money to people

they despise you

and if you don't give it to them, they despise you!

I don't know how you manage that.

The old dilemma for the working-class artist propelled to success still seem to be with us.

Yet during the '80s, the question of your background

began to be eroded by the insistence of new cultures

which seemed to exist outside class.

REGGAE MUSIC PLAYS

Coventry in the early '80s was a city in decline.

Once the centre of the car industry,

it had attracted a wave of Asian and West Indian immigrants in its boom years.

Then in the '70s, car manufacturing collapsed,

leaving a whole generation from the white and immigrant working class

facing a future on the dole.

They were also dealing with virulent racism.

But what emerged out of this neglected generation

was some of the most politically charged and original pop music of the decade.

HE SHOUTS LYRICS

The original creative force behind Coventry band The Specials

was in fact the middle-class son of a dean, Jerry Dammers.

But its musical blend of British punk and Jamaican ska

reflected the rest of the band, from Coventry's white working class

and first-generation West Indians.

The result was the 2 Tone sound,

the first significant musical blending of the two cultures

and an adjunct to the late '70s Rock Against Racism movement.

# Concrete jungle

# Animals are after me

# Concrete jungle It ain't safe on the streets. #

I met up with John Bradbury and Terry Hall from The Specials.

Coventry being the cosmopolitan city that it was,

you've got a high immigrant population here,

Indian, West Indian and Caribbean music,

and it was a big influence on me.

We were all at a really good age with the explosion of punk

and I think pretty much nearly all the band saw The Sex Pistols and The Clash playing in Coventry.

# God save the Queen

# We mean it, man... #

I do feel that punk empowered working-class people

and they haven't really gone back since then.

I feel that 2 Tone was an adjunct, really, to that.

The Coventry youth clubs were where the two cultures blended.

It was here where Specials guitarist and singer Lynval Golding started out.

This is where we used to feel the bass,

the bass just thumping in our music, you know?

# Better think of your future... #

Do you think those songs that you did and the group did,

do you think they helped people to behave better to each other?

Over the years I've met so many people,

I don't know how many bands I saw where people say,

"That song changed my life. It said something to me."

To me, it was unique

to get that clash of two different cultures working together, you know.

It was such a good thing, it really was a good thing

for the black people in Coventry.

I also think it was a very good thing for the white people as well

because there were a lot of youngsters, as you perhaps realise,

who didn't necessarily share some of the nonsense that was going on at that time,

which was totally unnecessary.

You know, I think that actually made Coventry change a bit, to be honest with you.

-You're talking about the racism of the time?

-That's right.

I think what they had in common, they actually show people

that black and white can actually work together,

not just in a factory, not just in a hospital,

but in a bigger picture where they're exposed to the world

and we're exposed to news camera.

-So, music has been an agent of social change for you?

-Absolutely.

So, culture has changed the class system in a way?

In a way, that's right. In a way.

Do you still feel yourself, as it were, as working-class artists?

-Or has the fact of your success changed you?

-No doubt I do.

I just feel like it's the work ethic

that's burned into me from a very early age.

When I'm sipping macchiato in Islington

I'd like to think it's a working-class thing,

but it doesn't feel that way, it really doesn't!

I'm for ever trying to answer my son who said, "Are we working class, Dad?"

I don't know. But it's still there. It's still there.

But, you know, at 50, living in Islington, sipping macchiatos,

I really don't know. I really don't know.

MUSIC: "Ghost Town" by The Specials

2 Tone was a vital cultural fusion of working-class and immigrant culture

but as often happens in pop, it was usurped by a new pop culture.

Not all-working class kids were committed to expressing social issues in their music.

In the early '80s, there was an almost Thatcherite spirit of you could be what you want to be,

even if the New Romantics were more interested in flamboyant costumes than in politics.

Your cultural tribe was becoming more important than your class.

I think the first musical tribes were Mods and Rockers

and then punk kind of turned all that on its head.

Then after punk, we had New Romantics

where people wanted to dress up, they wanted a reason to look lovely.

Some of the New Romantic outfits were frankly absolutely insane

but it was something that transcended class in a lot of ways.

It was how you looked, not where you'd been to school or how you spoke.

The working-class youth created its own cultural tribes

but with the upper classes you could be born into a ready-made tribe.

When Ann Barr and Peter York wrote Sloane Rangers

it was the most brilliant piece of social observation.

Not only were they talking about a group of people that already existed,

instead of the people they wrote about being kind of...

feeling maligned or insulted by this pigeonholing of them,

they were proud to be Sloane Rangers.

Do you know, I bloody hated Sloane Rangers.

-I hated them as much as I hated hippies.

-Why?

Thought they were superior. You know, Mummy and Daddy had paid for everything.

But the emerging force of the '80s was the ever-expanding and amorphous middle class.

Their ranks were now being swelled

by the new home-owning working classes who were on the move upwards.

MUSIC: Brookside Theme Tune

Brookside was set in a classic early '80s new-build housing estate.

And here it is, at that time Britain's best known cul-de-sac.

The anchor family in the series were the Grants.

They lived here at number five.

The father Bobby was a trade union leader and the working-class Grants

had moved up the social ladder to middle-class Brookside.

Bloody hell. Are you sure you've got enough here, Sheila?

Eh? Want to feed the starving hoards of India while you're at it?

It's not like having the shop at the end of the road any more.

It's in the boot of the bloody car.

Moving in the other direction socially was the Collins family.

Forced to downsize from their grand house in the Wirral,

this upper-middle-class family moved here, number eight.

SHE SIGHS

And next door at number nine were Heather and Roger Huntingdon,

a classic, young, upwardly mobile, early '80s couple.

Trade unionists rubbing shoulders with Yuppies.

Fallen toffs slumming it with the middle class.

This was Thatcherite new-build Britain.

Brookside showed that the classes could live alongside each other

and the soap became a cultural landmark,

despite its early struggle to get viewers or good reviews.

In reality, we may have had

an all-embracing new middle class in the early '80s,

but it seemed they didn't want

this culture thrown back at them as entertainment.

They preferred dramas where the classes were more defined

like Brideshead Revisited, which pulled in 11 million viewers.

Or they watched working-class soaps like Coronation Street,

which had audiences of 18 million

and appealed, it seemed, to everyone.

But where we did enjoy watching our middle-class world

was when we could laugh at it.

It's often in television comedy

that the nuances of middle-class culture are played out.

There's a direct Oxbridge comedy line from Beyond The Fringe in the '60s,

through Monty Python in the '70s,

and Not The 9 O'Clock News in the '80s.

Now the alternative comics from red brick universities

were challenging the successful line of Oxbridge comedians.

-Representing Footlights, we have Lord Monty.

-Hello.

Lord Snot.

-Miss Money-Sterling.

-Ah!

-And Mr Kendal Mintcake.

-Hi.

And representing Scumbag, we have Mike.

Hello.

-Prick.

-What?

-Vyvyan.

And Neil.

Vegetable rights and peace.

The middle-class strand of alternative comedy

began to dominate on radio and television,

but what's happened to live comedy?

This is Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

It's a comedy theme park.

Whatever your comic taste, you can usually satisfy it here.

With a huge expansion in live stand-up over the last 30 years,

I wanted to ask the comedian Russell Kane

if comedy could be this country's great class and culture melting pot.

Do you think among comedians working now there are different classes?

I'm not talking about class acts.

-I'm talking about class backgrounds and class projections.

-Absolutely.

Comedy more than any other discipline -

music, painting, anything -

is democratic because the audience response is so brutally measurably.

If I'm double first Oxbridge or I work in Tesco,

the audience are either laughing or they're not.

There are some comedians, northern comedians like Chubby Brown,

who never get on the television and seem to be excluded, almost.

Roy Chubby Brown is from the comic tradition of working-class men's clubs

where the material is often considered too offensive for mainstream television.

Look, I'm not a racialist, I swear down.

My father said to me, "Never judge a man by the colour of his skin."

My answer to that is f...

First of all, Roy Chubby Brown, et cetera, are very successful

and obviously are very funny cos their assembled thousand people are laughing.

So, the democracy of laughter, that argument, stands.

So far as who is exposed on television and in the mainstream,

that is currently controlled by an agenda which says,

"It's probably better to love people of colour and gay people and get along."

I'm glad that dominates. I want it to continue to dominate.

Were you defined by your upbringing and the class you were born into?

Absolutely. I do a bit about it on stage and I stand by it in life.

I wanted to do everything possible to annoy my father.

It was a horrible, passionate, angry rebellion I hit

when the puberty hormones hit my body.

He was racist, homophobic. "I've never a read a book.

"Never needed to read a book, never will."

Meat and metal working class. Weightlifting.

So, as quickly as I could become an effeminate, Penguin-classic-consuming,

I-love-everyone-of-every-colour, cover-me-in-hummus, three-to-a-bed, I did.

Then I fell in love with the language that I was using

for my own egotistical and show-off reasons

and I ended up having a love affair with literature.

The comedy thing's just an accident.

What do you think of the Fringe? Is it how it should be, all classes mingling together?

Things have changed in the last five years since I've been doing comedy.

Alternative has become the norm, as it were.

And there are all types of people up here.

I've had people come to my show that have never seen me do stand-up.

They just saw me on BBC One dressed as Beyonce,

raising money for charity when I did a dance.

At the same time, it's the people doing what I call festival lip, intellectual lip.

They go, "Mm, so post-modern." That's intellectual lip.

I first came here in the 1960s to make a film for the arts programme Monitor,

and I think I've come to every Edinburgh Festival since.

It's expanded hugely, especially in the 1980s,

when the Fringe established itself in new venues like this,

like the Assembly venues and like the Gilded Balloon.

The high culture of the main festival was being challenged,

even superseded by the varying demands of the young middle classes.

There was an audience for the comedy festival, but also for the literary festival,

which started small in Edinburgh in the '60s

with a few thousand visitors, but now welcomes over 200,000.

It extends across the genres, embracing the new energy in poetry

which is exemplified by our Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy,

herself a working-class voice from Glasgow.

The traditional festival and the Fringe have expanded mightily and become more and more inclusive.

But have they just drawn in more and more of the middle classes?

If that is the case, you might well say, "What's wrong with that?"

Over the last 30 years, this rising middle class

has fed and nourished much of the arts.

Theirs is the dominating voice in mainstream culture.

There's a certain kind of art that only appeals to the middle classes.

-And that's theatre, opera?

-A lot of the theatre.

But what we have seen really explode in popularity over the last decade

is the popularity of musicals.

We are...

All the middle-class critics and the middle classes think,

"Oh, it's hen night material. It's kind of common."

So, even within the theatrical experience,

and in London on any night of the week you've got something for everyone,

but there's still that kind of unwritten class distinction

between high art and low art.

And low art is "Mamma Mia!". High art is Hamlet.

But quite a few musicals attracted the middle class

in their hundreds of thousands in London over the last 20 or 30 years.

Oh, Les Miserables. Well, maybe not the Andrew Lloyd Webber ones,

-although I actually like them.

-Well, I do. I mean, Phantom did, Cats did.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals dominated the West End

and later the capitals of the world in a way never seen before.

His work was the cultural embodiment of the three-class system,

transformed into brilliantly crafted popular culture

for the ever-expanding middle classes.

He drew on the high art of opera,

the middle ground of musical theatre and the commonality of pop music.

# Memory

# All alone in the moonlight... #

When I first came up with it,

I thought, "Well, you know, what do I do?"

I did actually go and play it to two or three people,

the last of whom was my father.

I said, "Does this sound like anything to you?"

He said, "Yes. It sounds like 5 million!"

# Touch me

# It's so easy to leave... #

Alongside this fantasy world so widely enjoyed,

another more down-and-dirty culture was being consumed avidly.

During the early '80s, an underground comic began to appear

in Newcastle record shops and then across the country.

It parodied everything from the tabloids' letter pages

to classic children's comic strips.

The key characters came from round here on Tyneside in the Northeast,

where heavy industries had gone in the 1980s,

completely ripping away an entire working-class economic structure.

For its first five years, Viz was a cottage industry,

only available at alternative record shops and some newsagents.

In 1985, its creators struck a deal with a major magazine publisher.

By the end of the decade, it was a nationwide bestseller.

The magazine was started by

a former clerk from a Newcastle branch of the DHSS.

My dad was working class but he wanted to be middle class.

He said, "Don't talk slang if you use the Geordie accent."

He wanted us to be sort of posh.

As far as we could tell, there was posh

and there was the kids at school, the sort of rough kids,

who we called menties at the time.

My brother Steve and I, we were never comfortable being a sort of middle-class kid

cos we both failed our 11 Plus and stuff

and we weren't going to make it as university material.

But we weren't comfortable being ordinary either.

You felt like you were in the middle and removed from everything.

As a result, you saw things as an observer.

Are you lampooning the Geordie working class?

These are vivid... Fat Slags, Biffa characters.

Did you see that around you at the time in the '80s?

Oh, very much so. They were all based on...

The best ones would be sparked off by an actual event or a person.

Sid The Sexist was based on a person.

And Biffa Bacon, I was on a train and there was two kids fighting.

Their parents were sitting either side of them

and instead of saying, "Sit down, behave yourself,"

he said, "Go on, son. I'm right behind you."

The people you were taking the mickey out of would come up and say,

"Oh, my mates reckon that I'm Sid The Sexist. Is it true?"

They're proud of it cos even though you're lampooning them

and there's some people, probably the top end of your readership,

the intellectual people, would be laughing at them,

they're laughing at themselves, laughing with you.

The Guardian started giving it good reviews

and the Daily Telegraph gave it a good review.

We were always a bit uncomfortable when we got highbrow reviews.

On the other hand, Auberon Waugh said

if you want to know what's going on in this particular period,

better to read Viz than to read Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes.

Yeah, I was aware of his credentials, so I was quite flattered by that.

But just occasionally you thought, this is all a bit silly, really.

I don't know what level people were getting it at.

At its peak, Viz sold in excess of a million copies an issue.

It was one of the magazines most bought

by the sharp-elbowed young professionals of the late '80s.

So, a comic created by a lower-middle-class Geordie

lampooning his fellow working-class Geordies

had become an organ of the metropolitan middle class.

# I've got the brains

# You've got the looks

# Let's make lots of money... #

In London in 1986, Mrs Thatcher continued to dismantle

what she felt were old class barriers.

The City's growing confidence and drive

owes a good deal to young people.

Its vast new dealing rooms are run by the young.

People who made it not because of who they know

or what school tie they wear, but on sheer merit

and that is the kind of society I want to see.

As well as the old City gents of the upper middle class,

the Government had aristocrats and their country estates in its sights

with the looming prospect of a new inheritance tax.

£100,000.

The sale of the century has just finished at Christie's in London.

70 drawings owned by the Duke of Devonshire fetched £19,611,000.

But this was simply old-fashioned death duties by another name

and just a token gesture against the aristocracy.

They were still rich, if not quite as rich, in land and possessions.

They may have lost their power decades ago,

but selling off a picture or two

was an easy price to pay for hanging on to their wealth.

So, it was perhaps only symbolically that the aristocracy was under attack.

And television was joining in the bunfight

with the Royal Family on its agenda.

# Once I was adored I was glorified

# All I had to do was wave and they were on my side

# But then we had so many scandals that their sympathy was lost

# Now I have to pay my taxes and one's children are divorced... #

By 1992, the Royal Family seemed to be in trouble.

Their buildings burning, their marriages dissolving,

their taxes pending.

Some thought this was a defining moment for the keystone of this country's upper class.

In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents,

"It has turned out to be an annus horribilis."

Sue Townsend caught the spirit of the times

in her novel The Queen And I by deposing the Royal Family

and forcing them to live among the working classes.

What did the novel The Queen And I say about the class system in this country?

I think by putting them on a council estate

and forcing them to mix with their neighbours in the community,

I think the classes started to merge a little,

just a little,

when the Queen helped a young girl to give birth to a baby

and was able to do some kind deeds, if you like.

When the working-class people eventually accepted the Queen,

I think it was a way of just saying what everybody knows,

that we're all the same under the skin.

I mean, you know, I forced them to live with each other

and they largely got on well.

And the Queen was happier.

SHE CHUCKLES

So, it's a true story, then?

Oh, yeah(!)

Ladies and gentlemen, we're leaving Downing Street for the last time,

after 11 and a half wonderful years

and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom

in a very, very much better state

than when we came here 11 and a half years ago.

Mrs Thatcher had gone, but her dream of middle England emerged again,

this time in a more benign form.

The new Prime Minister dreamed of a lost middle-class Eden,

of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer,

dog lovers, and as George Orwell wrote,

old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.

John Major's kindly, nostalgic and very English view of a middle-class England

contrasted starkly with a wider world in flux.

RAVE MUSIC PLAYS

As in the 1960s, class was apparently subsumed and blurred

into a frenzy of music and drugs.

But there was a darker side to this second summer of love

when the hardening drug culture collided with the social problems of the time.

During the '90s, we began to hear references in the media

to a new social group dismissively referred to as the underclass.

Jobless, said to be feckless, possibly criminal,

they were a swelling demographic on Britain's blighted housing estates.

They were from communities left behind

by the aspirational, home-buying working class.

In 1993, the author Irvine Welsh,

who was born in one of these crumbling estates,

illuminated the world of the scammers, dealers and pariahs

of his neighbourhood in Trainspotting.

In the novel and the film adaptation

some critics felt that the underclass depicted

was at best amoral and at worst glamorised addiction.

-Would sir care for a starter? Garlic bread, perhaps?

-No, thank you.

I'll proceed directly to the intravenous injection of hard drugs.

As you wish, sir. As you wish.

I went to Leith to ask Irvine Welsh

if the world he came from was still an issue when the book came out.

When you published Trainspotting,

did you feel you were in a literary world that was itself class divided,

not just the books but the way it was run?

You have to be realistic about it.

Most writers are going to come from the upper echelons of society

because basically, they've got more time to write.

They're going to be in rooms stuffed full of books

and they'll have all this exposure to all these cultural tools.

You'll get your Jock right, or your Paddy right, or your Asian right,

to show how kind of cool and multicultural we are,

but the bedrock of it all is this very kind of waspish kind of writing

and I think it's always going to be that way to an extent.

Reading contemporary literature over the last 30 years in Britain,

do you find that it inhabits the old class system, the upper, the middle, the lower?

Literature, in terms of the voices,

it's probably the most conservative kind of medium.

I think it's the one that takes a lot longer to catch up.

You can see film making, TV, has always kind of been

a bit more democratic about letting different voices in.

The Play For Today stuff I think was a massive influence on a whole generation of writers.

You must have read a lot and that takes you into areas

which defies your categorisation, don't they?

I think for a lot of working-class kids,

the big thing that chimed with me first was Orwell.

I was also interested in stuff that was outside my own experience.

One of the most important things that we really have to remember

through all the kind of class and cultural thing,

as soon as we posit the issue of class or culture,

we're immediately thinking about the vision,

but we do have a common humanity.

That can be very strange because I was in choirs when I was a kid,

church choir, town choir, school choir,

and we sang some magnificent music by the greatest composers

and yet when the Third Programme came on in our house,

we knocked it off immediately.

We didn't want to listen to that sort of music that we were doing.

A lot of people in that town were singing that...

It was a very strange thing.

On one level, it wasn't for us and on another level, we were doing it.

So, you wanted to do it yourself but you didn't want to watch other people doing it and consume it.

You started off as working class. How would you describe yourself now?

Probably upper class, really,

because I think of middle-class people as having...

People say that I'm middle class now, but I don't see that at all

cos I think of middle-class people as having mortgages

and jobs and sort of struggling a little bit, you know.

But I'm... You know, I don't live that kind of life, really.

I have a very comfortable life in terms of what my own needs are.

I live quite a...

I mean, I work hard because I'm kind of driven to write,

I enjoy doing it, but I don't really see it as work.

I see it as a kind of hobby that I've been able to make pay.

So, I see myself as quite a sort of idle rich person, really.

-Is it nice?

-Yeah, it's great! It's wonderful!

Irvine Welsh's success made him part of a new classless, cultural elite

which he shared with a generation of young British artists.

They showed

that provocative artistic gestures

plus an acute sense of publicity

was more important than if you came from working-class Leeds or Margate.

This new culture was also being manipulated and bankrolled,

not by an old art establishment, but by collectors,

most notably Charles Saatchi, whose background in advertising

gave him a particular skill in spotting, even creating, cultural trends.

At the same time, money for the national culture appeared

on a scale never seen before.

AUDIENCE: ..Four, three, two, one. Go!

And the first ever national live lottery draw takes place on the BBC.

The first number will be coming out now. It's a green.

The public may have seen the National Lottery as a route to becoming a millionaire,

but for culture, it was a turning point,

providing funding on an unprecedented scale.

Its aim was to provide access to culture for all.

But was it as classless as had been intended?

Certainly there were thousands of beneficiaries, not least up here.

For example, the Gateshead Sage.

Since 1994, the arts and heritage have received over £8 billion of Lottery funding,

benefiting projects from the major concert halls

to the smallest town choirs.

But did the bigger chunks of money go to the bigger,

middle-class institutions?

And which class was controlling this cultural enrichment?

I went to the Royal Opera House,

beneficiary of a vast Lottery grant, to meet Lord Gowrie

who was Chair of the Arts Council of England when the money was handed out.

There was a feeling abroad that the Lottery

benefited those who had

unduly and disproportionately compared with the rest of the country.

Well, the argument was that more poor people played the Lottery

than rich people played the Lottery.

We got round that, not simply as a political fudge,

but out of great belief, by regionalising it.

We did the great school of music in the Northeast

and we did the Baltic Exchange and we did the Lowry Centre.

We're here behind the stalls in the Royal Opera House

and there was a great controversy in the '90s

about the Lottery money coming to the Royal Opera House, the size of it.

The idea behind the Lottery was in order to be able to give money

to things like the Opera House, which was very unpopular in terms of current funding.

So, it was to help those things in our culture

and our society which needed public money

but which the public, on the whole, didn't like getting money.

So, it was an irony that it was chosen in that way.

Not helped by my friend and somebody I very much admire,

Jeremy Isaacs was the intendant at the time,

who popped champagne, and my heart sank when I heard that.

There were, and are, a few affordable tickets for the Royal Opera House

but the public perception was that their Lottery money

was being handed out to institutions that only the elite could afford or enjoy.

So, although over there the Tate Modern welcomes four million visitors a year for free,

is there still a sense that somehow things like opera, ballet,

classical concerts, even theatre are not for the likes of us?

I remember I wrote a play and it was on at the Haymarket

and on the first night, I'd invited all my relations,

my extended family,

and I was on the balcony looking down, waiting for them to come

and...there they were in their best suits and shirts and ties.

Everybody else was in casual clothes,

but they'd all had their hair cut for the theatre

and their shoes were shiny and I really...

I mean, I love them for it. I love them for it.

But I knew that that meant there was an awful lot of anxiety as well.

They hadn't been to the theatre.

A massive injection of money into arts and heritage,

along with a booming economy, was the welcoming arena into which Tony Blair stepped.

But like his predecessors, he had a familiar mantra.

Slowly but surely, the old British establishment is being replaced

by a new, larger, but more meritocratic middle class.

Where Tony Blair diverged from Mrs Thatcher

and John Major was the way in which he spoke.

Mrs Thatcher, a lower-middle-class child of the '30s,

cultivated an abrasive upper-class voice.

The lady's not for turning.

But Tony Blair, public school and Oxford educated,

went in the opposite direction.

He found a voice that he thought would appeal across the classes.

What do I need a bloke with a stick and a pig's bladder for? LAUGHTER

I've got John Prescott, he's much better!

APPLAUSE

As we all know, class is blurred by accent, defined by accent,

camouflaged by accent, lied about by accent.

The late John Peel went to Shrewsbury Public School,

but when he climbed the ladder of success in Broadcasting House,

he took his accent downstairs, to Liverpool,

to a sort of Beatles accent.

Nowadays there are regional accents all over the airways.

MONTAGE OF REGIONAL ACCENTS

But is this blurring of accents really a sign of the blurring of the classes?

Is it a step along the way towards a classless society?

Or is it merely an attempt to mask your privileged background

because now it isn't cool to be posh?

Tony Blair certainly saw cross-cultural coolness

as part of his new classless vision.

And as for this new, inclusive, smart, middle-classless culture,

there was a perception from many parts of the country

that it was all a bit too metropolitan.

And this assumption that our society was now open, more liberal

and inclusive as reflected in our cultural tastes,

now came up against something more traditional - voices from our past.

On the 22nd of September in 2002, 400,000 people marched to here,

Hyde Park in the middle of London, to protest

at what they saw as a threat to the way of life

of the British countryside.

The issue that mobilised most people was political,

the Government bill to ban fox-hunting, but there was a wider schism.

It seemed to highlight a class division

between the governing metropolitan bureaucrats here in London

and the ancient loyalties and hierarchies of the countryside.

It was the ancient medieval divide between the city and the country

in a modern form.

If you define class in terms of income and occupation,

that was a huge concertina of class on the move from the countryside

and what brought them together, the core of the alliance,

was that you metropolitan types don't understand us.

You think we're bloodthirsty,

our motivation in life is slaughtering fur and feather.

"You are metropolitan wankers, we are the real people."

But it was a class society, plural, on the move

against a different kind of class society

and they too, I suspect, had a parody view

of the people they thought neither understood them nor wanted to.

Fascinating phenomenon.

These two groups, so seemingly opposed to one another,

nonetheless share a fear and distaste for the class

that finds itself at the bottom of the heap.

They've been called chavs and the wide use of the word

seems symptomatic of this growing contempt.

The problem with the word "chav" is it's not a sub-culture

like Goths, for example.

It's not something really people describe themselves as such.

But basically, what it sums up are things like antisocial behaviour,

being work-shy, teenage pregnancy,

spending money in a tacky way, but all of those things

exclusively associated with people from a working-class background.

50 years ago, the novelist Nancy Mitford

wrote about the notion of you and non-you vocabulary which was used

by the upper classes to look down on those beneath them.

"Chav" seems to be a continuation of this invidious class superiority.

The writer Ferdinand Mount sees this as indicative of a demonisation

of the working class that comes out of a wider social context.

The huge expansion of the middle class, which in general,

is a very good development, has had a bad side effect

which is that those who are in the bottom class

are regarded as having been left behind,

they have become a class to be pitied, and in some cases despised.

And it is reflected too in television.

Still wouldn't want ya.

Cos he knows a bit of class when he see it.

-SHE SCOFFS

-Class? Class?!

You peroxide chav!

Uh, who you calling a chav? You're an ugly ginger muggler!

In the post-war period, you at least had positive representations

or an attempt to positively represent working-class people.

You had things like the Likely Lads, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet,

whilst today you don't really get any positive representations.

You get grotesque caricatures.

Vicky Pollard, I suppose, being probably the most striking example.

Did you bite Jacquie Hayes?

I never even done nothing. Let me tell you the whole thing.

Julie wrote on the wall about Lorraine being a 100% minger,

and then Samantha came into our dorm to stir it all up,

but Carlie found a pube in her lasagne.

I think dramatists, especially, have always taken the piss

out of working-class characters, underclass characters,

you know, the village idiot,

the fool is part of the, you know...

It's the dramatist persona if you're a dramatist.

Six kids,

kids to keep on top of.

You never had to do stuff before.

Massive...and clothes for school, massive.

I see it as a very old tradition

of the satirist from Gillray, Rowlandson

and the great Victorian novelists, of celebrating people

who are resistant to the status quo.

When people come back and defend the use, they'll say,

well, it's not just used against people who are working class,

it's used against people who are actually really wealthy,

like Cheryl Cole, like Katie Price, like David Beckham, for example.

He's sometimes called a chav.

And of course, what unites all of those celebrities

is they're from a working-class background and there's this sense,

and this is sometimes how "chav" is used,

is that when working-class people get money, they don't know how to spend it properly.

They spend it in the wrong way, they don't have the taste,

the discretion, you know, the elegance, whatever,

that middle-class people have when they have money.

So, although there seems to be a new destructive contempt

for the lives and cultural taste of those from the modern working class,

it hasn't stopped the middle class from colonising their great institutions.

This is Old Trafford, the biggest football ground in the country.

It's the home of the most successful English football team of the last 30 years.

With a billionaire American owner and a fleet of trophy-winning international stars,

it's also a global brand.

This club's now worth more than a billion pounds

but it started like all of them, in very humble circumstances.

Formed in 1878 out of a local railway company, Manchester United

is a football club rooted in the industrial working class.

And the players are still overwhelming working class,

as is their manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, a former shop steward.

But at the top level in places like this,

football culture's changed radically over the last 100 years

like so much else.

Peter Hargreaves has been going to Old Trafford since 1954.

As well as being a season ticket holder,

he's also part of the Sad Red Bastards Club that attends every reserve and youth game.

What is going on today in terms of the crowds going,

in terms of the prices being charged?

I've had a season ticket since 1969.

In 1969, it cost £12 for the whole season.

My season ticket this season is £950.

Exactly the same seat, I haven't moved.

So, it's now double the average weekly wage

and what I think happened, I think somebody had been to America

and went to an American football match and saw it was exclusively middle-class people

and thought, "This is what we want.

"This is what we want football in Britain to be like."

Would you say a different class of people go to football now?

Yeah, I think so, I think it's likely.

Plainly, there are still a lot of working-class people go, like me,

who have had to cut other bits of expenditure,

change, reshape their budget, to accommodate the increases.

I think by necessity, the profile's changed.

I mean, I see people walking into Old Trafford

who are dressed in outfits that are worth more than my car.

There's also the fact that a lot of people who were working class

and have, in the last 50 years, one way or another,

made a bit more money, they're going and they would say,

"We're middle class now but we were working class and we can't be blamed for that."

No, no, I'm not blaming anybody.

No, no, honestly, I'm not, and I'm not criticising.

People are people irrespective of what they've got.

But what about the pay on the pitch, because I remember my dad's idol

was Tom Finney and one of the things he liked about Tom Finney,

Preston North End, you know that, best winger we ever had...

-Yep.

-..was that he was a plumber

and at home games, he would work on a Saturday morning at his plumbing

then catch the bus into the ground and play his game in the afternoon.

Now, that is... that's a planet away, isn't it?

It's totally different.

-Yeah.

-I mean, equally, had that facility been available to Tom Finney

he would not have refused it, he wouldn't have said,

"Oh, no, I don't want the £200,000 a week. I'd just go and sooner fix this U-bend."

So, with priced out working-class fans, millionaire players

and billionaire owners,

is top division football nowadays less for the working class

and more for the rich, or the super-class?

What do we mean when we say somebody's upper class these days?

Is it their dress sense, their accent, their education,

their house, their title?

Increasingly over the last three decades, entry into the elite

has been guaranteed by one thing above all - money, loads of money.

It seems the ancient cultural symbols of the aristocracy

have been appropriated by new money,

particularly from the City of London, hedge funds

and the internationally global elite, but this is no recent development.

There have always been new men and new money.

I mean, there were people who did well

out of the dissolution of the monasteries

and there were people who did well

out of the dissolution of the nationalised industries.

And new money comes from new trades.

Over the last 30 years, with the rise of new media

and the entertainment industries, another elite has emerged.

It's made up of the pop stars, sports stars and TV stars who feed the media and the media, in turn,

builds their status and financial value.

Instead of a class creating a culture,

a culture through magazines, internet gossip, hit TV shows,

has created a celebrity super-class.

So, has that classless pop culture idealism that we saw in the 1960s

been eclipsed by instant fame and the riches that go with it?

Where do we look now for new forms, new groupings,

a new cultural charge?

At the beginning of this programme, we met a de-industrialised country

that had sidelined both the working classes

and our immigrant population.

But a creative moment emerged from this time

that showed the growing importance of our immigrant culture.

# ..Out tonight

# I don't know if I feel all right

# Everyone... #

Three decades on from 2 Tone,

and even if only 13% of our population is considered of ethnic origin,

the cultural influence is fully anchored.

Pop music is at the heart of this, and recently grime,

an original form of urban British music,

has produced several pop superstars

from a generation that some wanted to write off.

# It was nothing but a quick thing Kids' games, kiss chase

# Just a quick fling, now I'm hoping you never go missing... #

Brought up one of east London's roughest estates,

Tinchy Stryder is from this generation.

He's still only 23 but his career has taken him

from being a 14-year-old rapper on pirate radio to two UK number ones.

The music definitely rose above all the differences in the background

because music, I guess, is like a language everyone understands, like,

if you hear music and you know it...

But just to relate to, like...

I guess that's why it opened my mind up before, like,

you know, what I like and what I listen to

only people that might have grew up

or been around where we've been might understand that.

I feel like it's come together much more recently

when you hear people from different genres of music

coming together and collaborating and making music

and it feels like it gets kind of rounded up a bit more.

Britain's multicultural inheritance has shown that cultural mobility

can burst through social restriction,

both celebrating and subverting the usual stereotype of hoodies,

gangsters and blighted estates.

This is one modern triumph of culture over class.

There are now few boundaries, alternative to commercial, pop to classical, black to white.

-# Dodgin' police

-Constables

# Walking with ... Jeans too low to ever consider

# Running or jumping walls

# When I walk round here There's a couple of rules

# No bling round here Tuck your jewels

# Unless you wanna get done by the wolves... #

So, what's changed over the last 100 years?

You could say, "Not very much".

Although free education for all has flourished,

around 60% of the current Cabinet were privately educated at schools

that still represent only 7% of the population

and the consequences that flow from that.

The upper classes are still with us, joined by the new super-class,

still forming an economic upper crust.

While at the other end, some of the lower class

appears to have been abandoned, demonised by the more privileged.

But it seems to me that the middle class has just grown and grown.

An avalanche of access to all the arts has given them

a command across culture, from festivals to galleries,

through television, radio and the internet and theatre, wherever you look,

their appetite for culture appears to be insatiable.

And it's the multicultural tastes and ambition

of this new mass intelligentsia which characterises us now.

After a tumultuous century, many people have, I think, emerged

as more tolerant, more ambitious, now defined by their culture.

Class, especially expressed in money, still matters,

but culture is in the ascendant.

Britain 100 years ago seems rather like a foreign country.

We all do things differently now and on the whole, in my view,

much, much better.

# I wanna live like common people

# I wanna do whatever common people do

# Wanna sleep with common people

# I wanna sleep with common people like you

# Well, what else could I do?

# I said, "I'll see what I can do." #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd