This document discusses the representation of the working class in British popular film and television from the 1960s onward. It notes that films from this era, like Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, drew on existing tropes and stereotypes of northern working class life involving cobbled streets, terraced houses near factories. While the working class was previously marginalized, these "angry young man" films provided more realistic depictions that challenged norms. However, female and working class characters were often depicted negatively or stereotypically. Television shows like Coronation Street also drew from these film conventions but provided a more sympathetic portrayal of working class life.

1. The roots of working class
representation in British popular film
and television

2. Opening titles of Coronation Street, 1960s
Bill Brandt’ s Misty Evening
in in Sheffield, 1937

3. • According to Eley (1995), the images and
stereotypes of the ′traditional working class
culture′ as they are presented in many films
refer back to ′a historically specific formation
of the period between the 1880s and the
1940s′. Photography of Bill Brandt; the novels
of D. H. Lawrence; journalism of George
Orwell; the nineteenth century novels of Mrs
Gaskell. The north of England has been
identified since the nineteenth century in the
popular imagination as the “land of the
working class.” (Rob Shields, 1991) and these
films use the iconography of working class
social realism, which seem to have been
culturally ingrained in the collective
consciousness of what working class life is:
cobbled streets, terraced houses in the
shadow of smoky factories, men in big coats
and caps, northern accents.

4. • The working classes had been pretty much
marginalised in popular film until the late
1950s/early 1960s. There were exceptions like the
Salford-set Love on the Dole (1941), but in most
films, the working class knew their place, supportive
of the middle or upper classes – as in the World War
Two dramas Went the Day Well and The Way Ahead.

5. • This type of representation could be seen to
reinforce the Marxist theorist Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony: much of the media is controlled by
the dominant group in society and the viewpoints
associated with this group inevitably become
embedded in the products themselves
(representation of class, for example), even if the
promotion of these views isn’t conscious,
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.

6. • 1930s – British documentary movement led by
filmmaker John Grierson and others showed men and
women working a various jobs. One key film was
Edgar Anstey’s and Arthur Eton’s Housing Problems
(1935) (produced by John Grierson) – notable for its
use of direct sound putting the voices of working class
people on the screen.
• Stylistically, the ‘angry young men’ films sprang out of
the Free Cinema movement – a group of middle class
directors, including Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and
Tony Richardson, all of whom contributed to the
British New Wave who made short documentary films
with experimental narrative structures, often
highlighting the working class.

7. • But they were also influenced by Italian Neo-Realist cinema and the
French New Wave, a loose, experimental film movement in France that
set itself against classical Hollywood narrative cinema. Films were shot
with portable equipment on actual locations on city streets, sound was
recorded directly onto the film stock.
• And by some American films of the 1940s and 50s, especially those
crime films shot on location on city streets with jazz-inflected
soundtracks, like Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).

8. • This period saw the rise of the independent film
company as a significant force in British Cinema.
Woodfall was formed by ‘angry young man’
playwright John Osborne (and financed by his stage
success, Look Back in Anger) and director Tony
Richardson. The company’s aim was to replicate in
cinema the kind of impact the ‘angry young man’
literary and theatrical works had.
• Independent production allowed directors more
freedom to represent society in original ways and
tackle issues previously considered taboo. All the New
Wave films except Billy Liar were given X certificates,
which allowed them to tackle adult themes like
adultery and unwanted pregnancy, in a more realistic
fashion.

9. • They also reflected a time of restlessness and uncertainty
and of the beginning of social change. Britain has emerged
from the post-war period of austerity into a period of
prosperity for the working classes too, which led to tension
around class identity and class mobility, which can be seen
in several of these films – especially dealing with the role of
masculine identity in the family and workplace. Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan was claiming the country had
never had it so good, many people, especially young
people, were dissatisfied with their place in society and
demanded more than their parents’ generation had.
• In an early episode of Coronation Street, Ken Barlow says,
"You can't go on just thinking about your own street these
days. We're living with people on the other side of the
world. There's more to worry about than Elsie Tanner and
her boyfriends."

10. • The ‘angry young man’ films sprang up from novels, like The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and theatre, like Look Back
in Anger, of the period, so they were already reflecting a genre,
Although the novels were by working class writers, the theatre was
and remains essentially a middle class arena and for some critics,
the working class milieu on stage was too much. However, on
screen, note the use of the traditional charismatic male leads like
Richard Burton (Look Back in Anger) and Albert Finney (Saturday
Night Sunday Morning), the male-centric storylines (excepting A
Taste of Honey), even if their characters aren’t 100% sympathetic.

11. • Despite the working class milieu, these were
major films and would be vying with
Hollywood product of the time, and would
comfortably fit in with the social realist
American cinema of Elia Kazan, as well as the
French New Wave. They were being aimed at
the traditional cinema-going audience and
would open in major cinema chains,
something which, thanks to the dominance of
the Hollywood blockbuster, be it
action/adventure, romance, comedy or a mix
of the above, only popular working class films’
like The Full Monty or Billy Elliott can do today.

12. • Many of these films tend to be misogynistic – look at the way Arthur
and Bert treat Mrs Bull (and the way the audience is expected to find
it funny); the way the father joins in; the way the policeman dismisses
Mrs Bull’s claims; the way Brenda is expected to have an illegal
abortion (though she doesn’t, her story is more or less dropped and
the focus moves onto Arthur and Doreen, which seems an ambivalent
relationship at best and at the end, he threatens to continue his
rebellious behaviour (does this include his treatment of women?);
Mrs Seaton’s servile behaviour. The male-centric story, of course, very
uch reflects the cinema of the period and the patriarchal nature of
scoiety.

13. • The obvious exception is A Taste of Honey, another Woodfall
film, where the audience is invited to share the viewpoint of
the central protagonist, Jo, who is confused and vulnerable
and her relationships with other characters rely on mutual
support and the overwhelming image is, despite her poverty
and her position as an unmarried mother (which carried
more of a stigma than it does now) is one of hope for the
future (Jo and Geoffrey walking with vigour and declaring,
“We’re bloody fantastic.”

14. • Although her mother can be seen as stifling her,
there is obvious affection between the two and
they shoo away Geoffrey when he intervenes in
their fighting, saying, “We enjoy it.” Geoffrey is a
far cry from the traditional New Wave hero – he’s
gay, sensitive and gentle and a sympathetic
character.

15. • Television tried to capture the commercial success of the films
with the northern-set police series Z-Cars, the sitcom The Likely
Lads and most famously, the soap, Coronation Street, all of which
cashed in on the tropes familiar from the recent films, which in
turn relied on existing tropes from earlier representations of the
northern working class. Look at Ken Barlow’s brother in
Coronation Street – the bike and checked shirt are straight out of
Saturday Night Sunday Morning; the grim, smoky streets can be
seen in Room at the Top; Ken’s differences with his parents,
trapped in the class system, reflect, to some extent, Arthur
Seaton’s. There are, of course, major differences…

16. • How has this view been mediated? Well, through the eyes of
(often) working class authors and middle class directors and, in
turn, through the eyes of critics who have generally praised the de-
marginalisation of working class voices on the screen. Others have
been more critical. Roy Ames (1978) thought the middle class
backgrounds of the filmmakers led to a lack of emotional
involvement; John Hill (1986) thought this lack of empathy with the
characters has meant the films are little more than visual tourism
and that the working class male is motivated by individualism
rather than any sense of community or class loyalty. Female
characters are generally depicted negatively because they are
associated with pressure on the males to conform through
marriage or fatherhood. It’s interesting that the picture of working
class life in Coronation Street is rather different. Toned down to
appeal to a television audience, perhaps, but it’s a more
sympathetic view of working class life and its primary audience of
working class females and its knowledge and use of the
conventions of soap operas led to a very different depiction of
women.

17. • Thomas De Zengotita defined representation in post-modern terms by
saying, “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” (2005) and we need to go beyond this and note that
representation of working class in film and on TV often uses tropes that
we have seen before and they may well be shaped by earlier
representations of working class life that the film-makers have seen in
other films or, at least, in other texts. The 1960s working class sitcom, The
Likely Lads, was set in Newcastle but filmed in London; the makers wanted
to show back lanes, which are one of the visual signifiers of the working
class industrial north. Rather than film the scene on location, however,
they found the back lanes a few hundred yards from the studios in
London…