“If the working class wants anything,” declares Sir Phil Redmond, creator of TV classics Grange Hill and Brookside, [with decades of frustration/righteous anger in his voice] “they have to build it for themselves”.
The great talent of post-1960s British TV is talking to an audience of producers, creatives, academics and execs at the ‘Is TV for the working class – Bridging TV’s Class Divide’ conference at Manchester Metropolitan University at the end of November. The conference has been organised by a combination education and creative organisations to address the declining numbers of working-class people and their stories within the TV industry. It’s an issue not solely of social justice, says Redmond, who built predominantly working-class production teams to establish Grange Hill and Brookside, but also of quality and viability.
Brookside, he says, was built on the idea of reflecting different class experiences and mixed social class communities – showing Britain back to itself through relatable and enjoyable storytelling. The production team was ‘full of working class warriors’, and middle-class directors asked why so much fighting took place in the scripts – seemingly oblivious to some people choosing slanging matches or a fist fights to resolve their issues.
The period between the 1960s and the 1990’s now seems like rather a golden age for working class stories– the glory days of soap operas that were bastions of working class stories and actors) - and the era of Channel 4’s arrival with a new wave of groundbreaking shows such as Queer as Folk, Brookside, Scully, The Royle Family and Shameless. Channel 4 redefined what was acceptable on the telly, its daring programming prompting the Conservative government to rein it in with new ‘taste and decency’ regulations in the 1990 Broadcasting Act. That, according to Redmond, was the moment when, in a great many TV boardrooms, the tide turned against working-class stories, with cautious middle-class commissioners deeming them a bit too risky.
That was compounded by changing leisure habits in the new century. Although on the whole we now owned ever-bigger and better tellies, we had more viewing and leisure options, which meant a decline in audiences and falls in revenue from ads. As money got tighter according to Redmond the first out were the working-class programmes and provisions like paid internships that levelled access to jobs. It also meant that commissioning budgets were tighter for both public and commercial broadcasters.
Many viewers would be surprised at how most of the high quality drama that they now watch on terrestrial and streamed telly is paid for. Long gone are the days when the BBC could fund drama productions costing £2.5M an hour-long episode from our license fees; most drama now, whoever is making it, is created through investment partnerships, with money coming from many international sources – predominantly the US through cable channels like HBO and via global distribution partnerships. For example, Coldwater, an ITV Studios co-production, is an example an internationally orientated production model which sold to 40+ countries.
There are dire consequences to this.
Elsewhere at the conference, screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, who wrote the hit Netflix series Fool Me Once and cut his teeth on Shameless, Clocking Off and Brassic, talked about how his TV commissions had moved “from the kitchen sink to the kitchen island.” Producers, often drawn from different countries and needing work that appeals to audiences across the world, tend to look for “aspirational” settings and characters: in practice, that means large, fashionably-decorated houses with fabulous kitchens, and well-dressed, young professional characters with great cars. Aspirational middle-class people are, the logic goes, recognisable and relatable across the globe; they work in all territories. This is why even Netflix shows shot in Manchester look as if the characters inhabit in a kind of default, beige, mid-Atlantic Nowheresville where even the cleaners wear Arket and drink Nespresso. Well, they might, but we never see them.
Nowheresville: in TV land, it’s the new normal.
Where are the working class stories in all this? Brocklehurst talked about the failure of the BBC’s plans for a TV adaptation of Douglas Stuart’s Booker-Prize-winning novel, Shuggie Bain. Executives came to feel the project was “too difficult” to finance, chiefly because of its Glaswegian accents, gritty setting and distressing story. It’s the kind of show you might think the BBC, with its commitment to Public Service Broadcasting and British talent and stories, should be prioritising, but it seems to present more problems than opportunities. Never mind that the story would resonate with many viewers who would see their own lived experience reflected and that it had already proved it had a massive audience through its book sales.
If these new economic realities seem brutal, it’s because they are so, to an extent that would shock most British viewers. Bear in mind the case of the 2024 ITV hit Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, probably the most high-profile and socially-impactful TV drama of the decade. Yes, it was a critical and popular success, but nevertheless it turned out to be a financial disaster for its commissioners. Why? Simply because the domestic British setting and concerns meant it did not attract international investors or distribution.
The current erasure of working-class people from our TV screens is all the more shocking because, to a very large extent, the history of great British TV drama and comedy is a history of working-class stories, and talent. So which class experience is now considered mainstream and exportable? If it’s the aspirational middle classes that fit this bill will this inevitably mean a decrease in working class stories? As Mike Benson, MD of Clapperboard Studios pointed out, this might be assumed, but in fact some of the most definitive international shows of recent times –The Bear, Peaky Blinders and Breaking Bad, for example – are in essence working class stories. Such shows appear to be losing ground to corporate and high net worth dramas: Succession, Severance, White Lotus. Yes, Happy Valley and Alma’s Not Normal and their ilk are still there but they are diluted by beigevision.
Professor Beth Johnson, who researches working-class television and the experience of working-class people in the industry at the University of Leeds, argued that middle-class stories also closely mirror the commissioners’ own lives, as television’s powerful elite are still drawn from a very thin top sliver of society. The middle-class gaze rules them all, and the precarity that working class people suffer in the industry, said Johnson, means that they don’t survive for long enough to make any significant changes or to achieve positions of power.
It is impossible to discuss class without race, and issues of racism and intersectionality were hotly debated throughout the conference. Lisa Nandy MP, the Secretary of State of Culture, Media and Sport, who spoke on stage, related how TV historian David Olusoga who had told her that gaining access to the TV industry as a working-class Black man had been difficult enough, but that his treatment once inside the industry had nearly driven him to suicide. She promised to hold the BBC and others to account for their practices and access routes, but until the industry improves its race and class representation at executive level, it’s hard to understand how this could improve. The indivisibility of race and class in this context was affirmed by Ali Naushani, a TV director whose work includes “Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius”. She was realistic about representation of race on British TV: "If you don't see your life reflected back at you it creates marginalisation. You see more brown people on TV now - but it's mainly posh people.”
Period drama rarely seemed aimed at working-class people, as it hardly ever features them as characters except in below-stairs storylines, she said. “Working class audiences don't think period drama is for them. It's for people with elevated tastes”. She’s probably right, but she also noted that there was an opportunity when making contemporary historical dramas to “put some truth on the history” and foster a better understanding of the history of slavery and women’s rights. Looking at these through a contemporary lens, she added, enables us to ‘expose the truth about that time’.
So what kind of working-class stories would we like to see? What’s missing? We’ve talked a lot at the Bee about how many producers and editors seem to regard misery or escape narratives as the default setting for working class storylines, and that joyful or contemplative narratives are seen as less authentic. This is clearly a gross distortion of most working class experience. One theme that is underexplored is close community; many working class stories, from Lark Rise to Candleford to Trainspotting to White Teeth, are distinct in their use of a whole community or group as protagonist, and in their interest in the close relationships found at work and in working class housing situations. Naushani pointed out the unique ability of working class stories to portray community and connection between people in ways that more middle - class stories never do.
Are these omissions deliberate or unconscuious? Beth Johnson felt that “none of this is done in bad faith” by the commissioners and people in power, but nevertheless it is consistently done by them, and until we have more people from working-class backgrounds in authority the power dynamics of the television industry will make it impossible to challenge. It should be said, though, that some audience members felt some of this was in fact done in bad faith, and as one said, “the erasure of working class people and their stories in TV is absolutely intentional.” Whether or not middle- and upper-class people seek to eradicate working-class people from our screens (and possibly our whole culture) is a subject on which there is little consensus. Still, looking at our screens in 2025, it is easy to find evidence for a lack of representation.
What struck me most about the issues that came up through the event were the similarities to debates in the publishing industries, and the differences in potential opportunities. The global financing of mainstream television seems set to unintentionally diminish the diversity of stories and deliver a monocultural vision of the world that ultimately won’t speak to most people’s experiences. At worst, it posits a set of norms – particularly homes and prosperity – that in reality are way out of reach for most of us. What is to be done? Well that remains unclear as yet – perhaps as Phil Redmond said, we will need to build something ourselves. In the meantime, let’s hope that the raising of these issues can at least exert some influence on how our bigger broadcasters and production companies think about their workforces, and their approach to commissioning work for the many, not the few.
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