It’s a sad fact of life that by the time you’re the age I am now (roughly halfway between hip-hop and hip-op) the things that struck you as important in your youth have lost their significance.
For instance, I know that my accent as a teenager was a terrible disappointment to my grandmother. She had fondly imagined that, after thousands had been spent on my education I would, like two sisters from my hometown who had been educated in the same school, speak in the plummy tones of the ruling class. What she fervently hoped for was a granddaughter who spoke like one of the royal family: unfortunately for dear old gran, the Windsor I most brought to mind was Barbara. I’m afraid that, surrounded by posh gals, the only thing I could do was to rebel.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the last time that I thought about the subject of social class and my place in its hierarchy, so how fortunate we are to be able to rely on our terrestrial TV channels to rub out noses in it on a daily basis. Apart from the odd discussion in the posh papers, an occasional remark by a politician looking for brownie points and the (now increasingly rare) public figure with a zeppelin-sized chip on his shoulder, the public discussion of what separates dead posh from dead common has lost much of its bite. The last event that seriously brought the old British shibboleth of class definition to the fore was Thatcher’s decimation of the miners.
However a powerful coterie of writers is determined to keep the home fires burning: Jimmy McGovern, Kay Mellor, Paul Abbott and even Doctor Who’s Russell T. Davies have all lent their very considerable talents to the subject of working class life.
Until relatively recently the lives of so-called ordinary people were considered unfit for or unworthy of dramatic treatment. In the plays of Shakespeare the action revolves around the triumphs and tragedies of kings and noblemen, working people making an appearance only to reinforce the elevated status of the main characters or as comic relief, when they would be referred to as “rude mechanicals” or some other equally insulting term. It took a few hundred years even for the middle-classes to appear in roles of any importance.
How things have changed! Now it seems that most of the dramatic moments on British TV are created by writers who are determined to prove that being working-class is a badge of honour; not that there’s anything remotely wrong with that, just that in doing so they can’t seem to resist going way over the top and turning anyone who isn’t, into a cartoon cut-out along the lines of Lord Snooty.
It’s not often that I find myself nodding in agreement with Julian Fellowes, in fact one sight of his smug, porcine face usually tips me right over the edge, but I had to acknowledge that in boycotting Casualty and Holby City he has a point. When was the last time that you saw a middle-class character on these two programmes that wasn’t lying, dissembling, strutting around looking like they’d just had the entire contents of the sluice room re-routed up their nostrils or barging up to the nurse’s station, banging it with their fists and saying something along the lines of, “Do you know who I am?!”? Fellowes and his even more patrician missus both acknowledge that they find it impossible to watch BBC’s flagship programmes because of their outrageous bias and, much as it pains me to admit it, they do have a point.
Not that the working-class characters in a drama series like Jimmy McGovern’s The Street, Paul Abbott’s Clocking Off or Danny Brocklehurst’s Sorted always behave impeccably, but their drunken rages, domestic abuse, infidelity and fist fights are generally passed off as understandable under the circumstances or the inevitable outcome of being patronised by someone with a slightly posher accent.
Kay Mellor’s dramas are particularly cringe-worthy on the class front, her veterinary soap, The Chase being a recent example. Writing about middle-class life in a sympathetic way must have piled a huge amount of pressure on Mellor, some of which she deflected by setting it in Yorkshire, thereby allowing the central characters to avoid having to speak with an accent that might be deemed traditionally middle-class. At the centre of the plot is the marriage of elderly vet, George Williams, to the sluttish Claudie, whose thoughtless behaviour constantly irritates George’s daughters, Anna and Sarah. When the family discovers that Claudie has used her job in the post office to commit fraud they are understandably outraged, yet most of Claudie’s defence revolves around the fact that their antipathy is bourgeois in origin. Mellor allows the Williams family little chance to fight back: “I had to fend for myself at boarding school” is Sarah’s feeble response (these posh gals have no idea!) Oh, and it was no surprise to discover that Claudie’s fraud had a noble aim from which she didn’t directly benefit.
It was the cumulative effect of similar storylines that made Paul Abbott’s otherwise excellent Clocking Off an occasional ordeal to watch. When one of the workers at the textile factory obtained a girlfriend with a cut-glass accent the audience immediately knew that it was destined to end in tears. In a Paul Abbott drama, intermarriage between the classes is still as big a taboo as miscegenation was amongst the Victorians. Yet a simple acknowledgement that it is possible for the working and middle classes to connect emotionally, socially or sexually isn’t enough: Mellor, Abbott et al won’t be truly happy until the bourgeoisie have unconditionally surrendered, fallen on their knees and acknowledged the error of their ways. “Gosh, we’ve been jolly rotten to all of you working people, haven’t we? From now on I’ll change my life, take little Imogen out of Roedean and enrol her in the local comprehensive, knock the conservatory down, start to breed budgies and keep ferrets in the bath”.
In a recent interview actress Diane Parish, better known as Denise Fox in EastEnders, revealed that her RADA training had emphasised the importance of received pronunciation. “My tutors told me that I’d need it if I ever had to do Shakespeare”, she explained. Considering the direction that the TV drama has taken in the last few years I’m hoping that Parish gets a few Shakespearean roles: unless she fancies playing one-dimensional sub-Hyacinth Bucket snobs, she’ll be hard-pressed to find any other use for her posh accent.
This article first appeared in the August 2006 edition of Views 4U magazine
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