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

Bill Brandt’ s Misty Evening in in Sheffield, 1937

Opening titles of Coronation Street, 1960s

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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…

• 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…