No More Heroes: Only Toffs.
Robson Green, Paul O’Grady, BBC4 shipyard documentaries, the British Working Class have become a rich emotional seam of social nostalgia for TV. This is perhaps due to the fact that what was once the Working Class used to actually make and build things, instead of eating them. Leaving school at 15 in the 1950s presented the opportunity of being an apprentice, not just a BA, and having a very useful practical role keeping the physical infrastructure of the country ticking over; bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, electricians, welders, mechanics. Of course, even today in Germany, being any of these warrants a mark of utter respect - and that’s why Germany is Europe’s economic giant. Now the winds of change have pushed the brighter elements of youth onto one course - university. But a degree isn’t what it used to be, whereas building houses, plumbing and electricity are more important than ever. And so we write dramas about workers now, and ‘celebrate’ their long-gone glories in grainy documentaries.
I think what happens with many drama writers from the ‘lower orders’ who, via success, ascend to Guardian-reading middle class suburbia, is that they want to tell their more educated neighbours and the social strata above them how ‘grim’ it is to be a proletarian, and such depictions also contain a sigh of silent relief that they’ve left the class they sprang from behind. As well as the examples mentioned here, I also used to detest the work of people like Carla Lane - Bread in particular, where just the simple device of the family all being scousers was the bedrock for turning the characters into caricatures of Liverpudlian sharp-quipping ‘scallies’ who knew how to work the system. (All written in the comfort of Mersyside suburbia surrounded by her cats and doggies). I also used to think the same about The Liver Birds. There has been good working class comedy, though - The Likely Lads, for example, and even Porridge. But usually we’re all seen as failures, idiots, violent thugs, scroungers or worse still, constant victims. Some writers loved to give us a touch of 'nobility', but more often it was sympathy. Dickens, for example, was the Soviet Union’s favourite writer, yet it is always surprising to me because he was never a socialist by any stretch of the imagination. I love Dickens for his prose, his narrative and his meticulous observation, but in the broader scheme he was the archetypical Victorian ‘do-gooder’.
Alan Bleasdale did some good, because he was angry with the system and had a message to put across, yet you could see his class credentials slip away from Boys from The Blackstuff into GBH,where, as a better-off writer with a few quid in the bank, he’d begun to see the Militant Tendency as something his new ‘class’ should be scared of. That said, he did a decent job with The Monocled Mutineer, yet then again, the working class hero was a tragic victim, and a liar to boot. Thus, years later, he ends up opting for neutral territory with The Sinking of The Lusitania- WW2 pretension overload.
Perhaps one of the more positive working class-based series was Chris Mullins’ 1988 story A Very British Coup with screenplay by Alan Plater. In that you had a perfect ‘what could have been’ plot where a working class Sheffield Socialist Prime Minister runs rings around the establishment and the Whitehall intelligence toffs and tells the Americans to get off our lawn. The reality was we got Blair instead.
Call The Midwife, Heartbeat, The Royal, Downton Abbey, (the latter being the current Eton-class’s wet dream of where the proles should be - in servitude) all this is Sunday night shortbread-in-a-tin for cultural geriatrics whose reading matter doesn’t extend beyond old copies of Saga magazine in their GP’s waiting room. My special hate these days is the noisy, intrusive, sound-effect and incongruous music-laden documentaries. I particularly detest the way we’re always banging on about Royal history - the bloody Tudors in particular. Monarchy was, is, and always has been the rape and robbery of nations by tight little cliques of criminal, immoral scroungers and twats with dumb, un-thinking armies, led by people who seem to imagine they’re ‘majestic’ or even god-like. When people like David Starkey or that skinny little lass with the short haircut stand in front of some magnificent building or Cathedral and say stuff like ‘Henry built this in the twelfth century’ I yell NO HE BLOODY WELL DIDN’T - STONEMASONS AND CARPENTERS AND LABOURERS DID IT - AND DIED DOING IT! And as for Mr. ‘Wet shirt’ D’Arcy and Jane sodding Austen, give me a break. They conveniently omit to remind us that whilst these buttoned-up, high-trousered twats with their empire-line be-frocked tarts flashing heaving cleavages are posing around on the lawn at Chatsworth House, down in the village their peasants are up to their necks in shit, working an 18 hour day and dying at 35, whilst their glamorous perfumed masters count the profits from their slavery transactions in the Caribbean. Ever thought about that, Emma Thompson?
Is there a working class hero? Probably not, although Baldrick comes close. Pity yet again he was written by the biggest sell-out of them all - Ben ‘let me fellate you Sir Lloyd Webber’ Elton. Going back, the best working class drama, such as works by Jim Allen’s General Strike script, Days of Hope, directed by Ken Loach in 1975, would never get an airing today. They show the working class as brave, aspirational and, above all - threatening the establishment. We can’t have that - let’s have benefit scrounging caricatures. That’s why Ken Loach’s current excellent work, Spirit of 45, went straight to DVD. We don’t want people seeing that kind of stuff - might get ideas.
Actually, there is already a superb stage play on the Ashington Group of miners who studied art doing the rounds - it’s called The Pitmen Painters. Hopefully someone will dramatise it for TV (knowing our luck it’ll be bloody Andrew ‘I have to be commissioned for everything’Davies.) Now I’m 70, after a life spent hoping for revolution, after being a Communist Party member, a member of International Socialists, Militant Tendency (I even tried the Labour Party until Kinnock arrived), what I see as the ‘working class’ now makes me realise that the fight was noble, but lost. We now have the most tattooed nation in Europe, a grey-green stain on humanity, shuffling aimlessly in a texting waddle, crouched over their I-phones en route to McDonald’s. Thatcher’s children - unlike any other politician, her blueprint for society actually worked. Socialism? It’s a mental museum now. Dead as a dodo. Over and done with, Still, never mind. At least we tried.