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 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).

• 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.

• 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."

• 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, 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.

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.

• 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…

• 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.

• 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…