This document discusses the representation of the working class in British cinema and television from the 1950s to present day. It notes that historically, the working class were marginalized on screen but this changed with "kitchen sink" films of the 1960s that depicted working class life in a gritty, realistic manner. However, it also discusses how more popular films and television shows have portrayed the working class through stereotypical tropes and icons for mass market appeal. More recently, some critics argue that some reality television programs exploit and demonize the working class for entertainment purposes, though audience research also shows people interpret media in varied, complex ways.

1. Collective Identity and the
Representation of the Working Class
in British Cinema and on Television

2. • Historically -working class marginalised on
screen – notable exception – John Baxter’s
Salford-set Love on the Dole (1941). Big change
with ‘Angry Young Man’ movement of late
1950s/early 1960s - plays and novels of young,
often Northern, working class writers were
published and later adapted for the screen e.g.
Karel Reisz’ Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

3. • Not always sympathetic and certainly misogynistic.
Protagonist, Arthur Seaton represented frustrations of living
within the confines of the class system in a country that had
been told they’d ‘never had it so good.’ Working class life -
without much hope - isn’t able to articulate all his
grievances but carries out his frustration by womanising,
drinking, and with violence and is often like a trickster, lying
his way out of one situation only to fall in another one.
•
• At work , in long shot - lines of factory workers doing the
same job, like automatons - he makes it clear that he
doesn’t want to grow old and turn out like the old men who
work nearby or like his father who sits at home deadened
and unresponsive in front of the television. His attempts to
break out of is place in society is shown through his nights
out where he dresses up in a suit as if he is escaping, when,
in fact, he just gets drunk.

4. • Conventional working class iconography (cobbled
streets, back lanes, industry, smoke and northern
accents) to establish its setting in the inevitable
northern city (Nottingham, in this case) – rooted in
ideas from 19th century and in many ways is a RE-
presentation of existing tropes.
• A very clear and well-defined image of working class
Britain has been formed between the 1880s and 1940s
(Eley, 1995) particularly in literature (Lawrence and
Orwell) but in other arts, like photography (Bill
Brandt). The north of England has been seen as the
“land of the working class” (Shields, 1991) particularly
in terms of iconography like manual labour, smoky
factories, back-to-back terraced housing and northern
accents.

5. • The kitchen sink realism was new and ground-
breaking but the films were largely
misogynistic, marginalising working class
women, with the exception of Taste of Honey
(Tony Richardson, 1961) with its vivid and
celebratory portrait of a pregnant teenager.

6. • In stark contrast - the soap opera,
Coronation Street. First airing in 1960 – one
of most popular TV programmes in the UK -
working class iconography with its cobbled
streets, northern accents, stills of back
streets, and a traditional brass band theme.
Institutional reasons for the difference in
representation. Its primary target audience
was working class and, in keeping with the
tradition of soap operas, largely female and
it needed to be popular to get the revenue
from advertising

7. • Built around strong female characters - Elsie
Tanner presented as woman whose affairs have
broken up her marriage and someone who would
continue to have affairs into late middle age, yet
at no point are the audience expected to be
critical. Gaye Tuchman (1978) - women -
‘symbolically annihilated by the media through
absence, condemnation or trivialisation,’ - soaps
one of the few TV arenas where women do not
have to fit the stereotypes of slim, youthful
beauty to have a romantic or sexual existence.’
Mike Clarke (1987), thus they transgress the
stereotypical role of women in a patriarchal
society.

8. • A strong sense of community and family from first
episode, We side with Arthur Seaton’s rebellion on the
big screen, but it’s hard not to be critical of Ken Barlow’s
snobbery towards his own family - represented as an
intelligent student trying to break away from his working
class roots but we are not invited to empathise with Ken.
When he arranges to meet his middle class girlfriend at a
hotel instead of his house, it’s clear that his father is
right: he’s ashamed of his parents; however, she turns up
in Ken’s absence and joins in with his father and brother
in trying to repair the latter’s bicycle and on top of that,
the oily handshake she exchanges with the brother
seems to symbolise that Ken was wrong, that his
working class background deserves more respect than
he is prepared to give it – which would have appealed to
its target audience.

9. • According to Owen Jones’ Huw Wheldon lecture
on the representation of working class (2013), the
election of a Labour government in 1963 and the
growth of the trade union movement after the
war had created an atmosphere favourable for a
more accurate depiction of working class people
on screen – a depiction which, at times, would
highlight issues thrown up by the class system and
the ways in which people reacted.
• We can see film-makers using the working class
milieu as a springboard for contemporary issue-
based drama in the BBC‟s single play programmes
like Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966) with its
naturalistic style of shooting and use of real
locations.

10. • Comedy – Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part and
the Newcastle-set The Likely Lads – main characters
were working class, as opposed to them filling out
supporting roles to the middle class lead characters. A
constant theme in the Likely Lads is Bob’s attempts to
‘better’ himself being constantly grounded in reality by
his friend Terry.

11. • Popular Working Class films of the 90s, like Brassed Off
- overtly political stance against the Tory government
and the middle classes – community has been
destroyed by the closure of the mines BUT after
success in the band competition and the speech at the
Royal Albert Hall, the community seems all too
optimistically healed – all the wives are present,
including the one who left her husband; all the men
are on the same side, including the one who took the
government’s offer of redundancy money; the
company spy is reintegrated with her original
community on a personal, professional and social level;
despite refusing to accept the trophy, they take it
anyhow and the film ends with a rousing, if ironic, Land
of Hope and Glory as the victory bus passes under the
Houses of Parliament.

12. • Institutional reasons - the film company’s need to
appeal to an audience beyond a local one. Film
distribution and exhibition in the UK - dominated by
Hollywood - many British films don’t get beyond the
‘art house circuit’ – if that e.g. Warner Brothers’ The
Dark Knight opened in 4366 screens across the UK; the
independent, working class-set film, This Is England,
opened in only 62.
• The US, of course, is the biggest market for English
speaking movies and in most cases, it provided at least
partial financial backing for the films in question
(Brassed Off was backed by Miramax, a branch of
Disney, for example) – hence the representation of class
has been governed by concerns of audience and
institution.

13. • Male identity - to seek some sort of status, male
characters in Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot
(2000) take up occupations/pastimes traditionally
associated with women to forge a new identity in
the post-industrial world. Billy overcomes the
stereotypical macho reactions of the working
class northern male and his father eventually
supports him. Gauntlett (2002): in contrast with
the past - or the modern popular view of the past
- we no longer get singular, straightforward
messages about ideal types of male and female
identities.

14. • The other strand of films that represent working
class life – more independent, less dependent on
US funding (or in Ken Loach’s case, not all) - often
visceral depiction of working class life where the
effects of the class system can be seen in the
brutalisation of family life, growing up and
relationships – as in Paddy Considine’s
Tyrannosaur (2011). These films were made with
little compromise – Loach, for example, refused to
tone down the language in Sweet Sixteen (2002)
(in which a young Glaswegian teenager gets
sucked deeper into the drug trade which has
already seen his mother jailed, until he stabs his
step-father), which meant the audience it was
intended for wasn’t allowed to see it.

15. • Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011)
• Joseph - rage filled alcoholic who is mad at the world
and living alone after the death of his wife. Meets
Hannah, a woman running a charity shop; she prays for
him even though he doesn't believe in God. Her
husband is an abusive controlling monster. This is not a
happily after story portraying working class people
struggling with loneliness, regret and doubt. His rage is
a poisonous way of managing his relationship with the
world. For many, particularly those lowest in the class
system, rage is the last pleasure left, or the last respite
from unpleasure, and the last source of anything
resembling self-respect. For those with no voice, it is a
kind of language, but one that distorts and obscures
and locks the user into his own unhappy world – an
idea that can be applied to a number of working class
films in this tradition, which, on the surface at least, can
often seen to be representing working class life as grim.

16. • Ken Loach’s The Angel’s Share (2012) - Uses the social-realist
form to articulate the frustrations of Glasgow's working class.
Robbie is a ne'er-do-well and recent father trying to abandon a
life of crime in favour of stability. Story is about his quest for
redemption through community service - told with humour and
empathy. The tone shifts between candid kitchen-sink drama
(Robbie nearly beating a stranger to death in the street) to
broad humour.
• Many of the visual and narrative working class tropes from this
genre (deprived Glasgow, unemployment, crime and brutality),
but it has more in common with the popular strand of working
class films than some of his other works like Sweet Sixteen
(2002) - often comic has uplifting end as protagonists succeed
with their heist and are rewarded financially; the film was even
marketed as “This year’s Full Monty.”
• Representation - result of commercial compromise? Or has
Loach's representation been further mediated through media
critics using lazy shorthand to describe a film in terms their
readers will understand?

17. • Arguably, by focusing on Robbie’s triumph, we lose sight of
the fact that the others are going to use their share of the
money getting wasted. Although this is there for comic
effect, like characters in a lot of Loach films, they are
unable to get out of the system that has dragged them
down. Maybe the ending isn’t as optimistic as it seems to
be…
• Gauntlett (2002) - Today, nothing about identity is clear-
cut, and the contradictory messages of popular culture
make the 'ideal' model for the self even more
indistinct. There is an element of this in both Tyrannosaur
and The Angel’s Share. Both male lead characters finally
renounce the kind of macho violence that is often used to
define male working class characters in films – the love of a
woman and a son in Angel’s Share and the love of a woman
and the realisation of the effects of violence in Tyrannosaur.

18. • Owen Jones in The Demonization of the
Working Class (2011) is scathing about the
representation of working class in recent years
– says programmes exploit working class
culture – setting it up for the entertainment of
the middle classes changing with the Tory
government of Mrs Thatcher which waged war
on the unions and destroyed the coal mines
and heavy industry. He thinks an atmosphere
has been created that is conducive to the
dismissal of working class life and concerns.

19. • Programmes that exploit the working class – Benefits
Street, Jeremy Kyle etc. They’re cheap, they fill the
schedules, they’re popular, they compete with similar
programmes on non-terrestrial television - they have
become important to the schedulers/TV companies who
are likely to continue along this path in the future – success
of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding led to more series; success of
Benefits Street has encouraged Channel 5 to make a similar
‘documentary’ about a street in Hull.
• Use of violence and crime to spice up traditionally working
class soap operas in the chase for ratings (defended by the
makers as being ‘issue-based’ but the number of repetition
of such issues and the way they are trailed, reveals the true
sensationalistic nature of the shows’ attempts to expand its
audience in the face of multi-channel competition.

20. • Coronation Street presents a warmer, more nostalgic
view of working class life, emphasising the family
(whether traditional, single parent, extended or
surrogate) and community; Eastenders emphasises
conflict and is more issue based (although there are
elements of both in Coronation Street). Both shows –
but especially Eastenders, have moved to some extent
away from the working class roots, perhaps in
deference to changing times or the class system post-
New Labour, where upper working class merges with
lower middle class (note general mise-en-scene of most
of the houses and flats in Eastenders), or audience
taste, leaving other programmes to deal with the
emerging underclass, although even in Shameless it is
treated in an almost burlesque fashion as if to provide
laughs for a largely middle-class audience.

21. • Jones criticises comic portrayal of working class people
when it’s done purely for laughs – Vicky Pollard in Little
Britain, for example, and notes how such portrayals are
picked up by news media – using populist and sensationalist
headlines - like Daily Star – “Vicky Pollard Yob Sent To Jail;
Daily Telegraph – “Residents fear BBC documentary 'makes
their estate look like Shameless”; Daily Mirror – “Worse
Than Shameless.”
• A concern – if these views become widespread, will they
influence policy? Will they increase class conflict – after a
piece in The Guardian online discussing Benefits Street, a
reader commented that this was yet another example of the
demonisation of the working class and this was criticised by
another saying these people have nothing to do with the
working class!
• Of course, the programme was not a result of unedited fly-
on-the-wall filming – the show focussed on certain people
for a reason!

22. • Several audience theories could be used to back-up
Jones’ concerns - Katz and Lazarsfeld - Two Step Flow
theory (1955) – stresses the importance of Opinion
Leaders (like newspaper commentators).
• Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci – hegemony - the
media is controlled by the dominant group in society
(i.e. white, middle class and male) and the viewpoints
associated with this group become embedded in the
products (films and TV shows, in this case) so dominant
views come to be seen as the norm - hence the
marginalisation in the representation of the working
class in British cinema until the late 1950s – the effect
being that the views of the working class weren’t
thought of as being important. Jones sees this
happening again.

23. • Cultural Effects Theory (Professor George
Gerbner, 1965) - The focus is on ‘heavy
viewers’. People who watch a lot of television
are likely to be more influenced by the ways
in which the world is framed by television
programmes than are individuals who watch
less.

24. • However – these theories position the audience as
passive. Is it? Other theories suggest otherwise, that
audiences.
• For example Blumler and Katz’ Uses and Gratifications
(1975) which suggests audiences are active viewers
and use the media in various ways to get some kind of
gratification that will depend on the viewer. Are we not
aware that Vicky Pollard is an exaggerated comic
grotesque rather representative of a particular class of
people? Does the show not contain equally
exaggerated portrayals of middle class people?
• Or - Gammon and Marshment (1998) stress the role of
the audience in the construction of meaning from texts
and suggest there is a range of interpretations offered
by any text.

25. • David Gauntlett (2002): The media disseminates
a huge number of messages about identity and
acceptable forms of self-expression, gender,
sexuality, and lifestyle. At the same time, the
public have their own robust set of diverse
feelings on these issues. The media's suggestions
may be seductive, but can never simply
overpower contrary feelings in the audience. It
seems appropriate to speak of a slow but
engaged dialogue between media and media
consumers. Neither the media nor the audience
are powerful in themselves, but both have
powerful arguments.

26. • Evidence? Audience response to soaps, for
example, is rich and varied, as befits active viewers
(See, for example, The Broadcasting Standards
Commission to research audience attitude to the
British Soap Opera in 2002 – this showed even the
most ‘fanatical’ viewers are aware of the dramatic
and staged nature of the shows and that they
didn’t present a window on reality).
• On the other hand - Thomas De Zengotita (2005)
– Almost everything we know about the world
comes to us through some sort of media and this
influences our view of the world and even our
self-definition.

27. • How do working class people contribute to these images of
collective identity?
• Some filmmakers - like Ken Loach - work with non-actors from
the community they feature, but actors don’t contribute to the
self-representation more than the director; likewise, in
Newcastle, Amber Films works with communities to create films
based on ideas that come from the community and use people
from the area in the cast.
• The future? In the age of web 2.0, collective identity is reflected
in the use of websites, blogs etc - use these images of working
class to create a community amongst fans e.g.
http://www.corrieblog.tv/ (currently running this story: “Tens of
thousands of people living in Britain think Weatherfield actually
exists according to a survey by Hotels.com.”).
• There are also the inevitable facebook pages e.g.
http://www.facebook.com/CoronationStreetBlog; and the soaps
are, of course, on Twitter, officially and unofficially.
• The future? Can working class communities contribute to that
sense of identity through other means - posting on Youtube, for
instance? Blogs? What about the audience?

28. • Collective Identity: the individual’s sense of
belonging to a group (part of personal identity)
- not just representations by mainstream
media, but the self-construction by users of
the media and even communities formed from
shared identity: age, gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, cultural values, political
ideas etc.; the idea is that through
participating in social activities –in this case,
watching films and television - individuals can
gain a sense of belonging and in essence an
’identity’ that transcends the individual.

29. However…
• It is impossible to measure or ascertain HOW
FAR British television and film have helped to
create a sense of collective identity. Bear in
mind that TV and film aren’t the only fields
contributing to a collective identity of the
working class and that some of that
representation has become generic and
repeated not only on film and TV but also in
other forms of media.