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Class traitors of soap
An inverted snobbery still lurks in television culture
O NE of the most influential men in television, or such is his reputation, said last week that middle-class life does not make interesting television drama. According to Phil Redmond, the producer of Brookside and Hollyoaks, working-class drama is "a lot more interesting" than middle-class drama, and that, in terms of television, the middle classes are "essentially quite boring". I am prepared to believe that Mr Redmond is hugely influential in British television, even though I have never heard of him or of Hollyoaks, and have only once seen Brookside. And I am sorry to believe it, because his kind of unthinking inverted snobbery still lurks in television culture and probably plays an important part in the present dumbing-down of television and radio.
Any subject can be interesting. A couple of tramps waiting for someone who doesn't turn up can be interesting, and so can an heiress whose mail doesn't arrive. What's more, as any story-teller knows, there are only a few great universal stories; most plays and novels and films are variations on these few great themes, and the details - the characters, the place and the social setting - are merely the idiom in which the story is retold. Betrayal is betrayal, whether it is in EastEnders or Neighbours or Pinter's Betrayal or Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The only question is whether the story is well told - possibly, in the case of television soaps, whether the story is commercially told. Nothing is in itself boring, least of all, one might say, in all its energy and muddle and aspirational striving, the bourgeoisie.
The view that bourgeois experience has little to offer sounds oddly out of date. When I was a student, earnest young things - many of them middle class - used to go about saying that only working-class experience had any authenticity. Middle-class life was somehow not "real", and middle-class people were weighed down by the burden of their own false consciousness, if not quite destroyed by the internal contradictions of their inauthentic class alignments. It sounded complicated, but the meaning was clear - working class good, middle class bad.
I thought all that had changed. I thought we were all middle class and upwardly aspirational now. The working class has shrunk out of all recognition and I thought that the idea that working-class life is more real, or more alive, or more significant than other kinds of life, had long since had its day, if only because most people no longer belong to it.
Yet that is the idea, I suspect, that underlies Mr Redmond's approach. He says working-class drama is not only more interesting than the middle-class variety; it is also more "relevant" - there's a censorious Sixties buzzword for you - to "a majority of the population". How can it possibly be more "relevant"? It may indeed be more interesting to most people, whenever it is better done, and in that case it will be more "relevant", as better art always is, though the artistic quality of the soaps is usually debatable at best. But it is not more or less "relevant" of itself. I think what he means is that he prefers working-class drama, and thinks most other people do, because he is not interested in middle-class concerns and assumes that they aren't either.
He is wrong about other people. But that is not really the point. The point is that there is widespread sensibility in radio and television - often, though not in his case, developed out of middle-class guilt and self-loathing - that feels that what people want, and what people ought to want, is deprivation, practical problems, the daily struggle and the lowest common denominator generally. Anything more aspirational or sophisticated or abstract is not relevant, or therefore must be boring. What this amounts to is dumbing-down. It's a dumbing-down that takes the form of excluding what is seen as "middle class". It is the conviction that audiences will not be interested in what is complicated, or unfamiliar, or not of direct personal concern to themselves.
It is true that there is enormous commercial pressure in this direction. Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the audience, as Sam Goldwyn said. But it is not necessarily the duty of the creative classes - the intelligentsia, the directors and the writers - to rush to the assistance of Mammon. Least of all is that the duty of the educated elite in our public service broadcasting. Although these people are very often the flower of middle-class culture themselves (or outstanding products of working-class, would-be middle-class aspiration), they seem oddly antagonistic to middle-class interests. It is a remarkable kind of self-loathing; in the old days they would have been called class traitors. To see it you have only to look at the obstinate way in which they are degrading Radio 4, trying to make it "relevant" to a much less "middle-class" audience, against all informed middle-class protest.
I don't understand middle-class self-loathing. I don't understand middle-class guilt either. None of us is personally responsible for the history of the middle classes, and in any case, there is a great deal in the achievement of the bourgeoisie of which to be proud. It is high time that the middle classes, and all those who recently moved into them, showed some self-respect, and said a firm bourgeois "boo!" to the pseudo-proletarian goose.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 20, 1998
