This document discusses the representation of the working class in British popular film and television from the 1960s onward. It notes that working class culture and lives were typically portrayed through certain established tropes and stereotypes involving northern English settings, industrial imagery, and accents. Several key films from the 1950s/60s like Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning helped bring working class stories and voices to the screen. Television shows like Coronation Street and The Likely Lads also drew upon these filmic tropes to depict working class life. Representation is shaped by earlier cultural works, and tropes become ingrained over time.

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 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. • They also reflected a time of restlessness and
uncertainty and of the beginnings of social change.
Britain was gradually emerging out of the post-war
period, but while the 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; there were
other influences, such popular culture and the idea of
the ‘teenager’ from America, which appealed to these
young people. 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."

9. • 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.

10. • 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 only popular working
class films, like Brassed Off, can do today.

11. • 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…

12. • 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…