When a posh pal once called me her “token working-class friend”, she was way off base. It has been several generations since any of my ancestors went down a mine, but it got me thinking about how the British idea of a society divided into upper, middle and lower classes is still shaped by John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in the 1966 “Class Sketch” from BBC TV’s The Frost Report.
The British New Wave of kitchen sink realism of the late 1950s and early 1960s wasn’t the first time the proletariat had been represented on screen. Ealing Studios had long been seamlessly weaving class issues into dramas such as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) or comedies like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). But it was the first time the voices of non-U British writers like Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving) or Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) were filmed, while actors from working-class backgrounds (Stanley Baker, Rita Tushingham, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp et al) broke en masse through the class ceiling to join the era’s pop stars in hoodwinking everyone into believing you didn’t have to be rich or a member of the social elite to forge a career in the creative industries.
But did the plebs themselves flock to 1959 films like Look Back in Anger or Room at the Top, which supposedly portrayed their lives on screen? Let us suppose that my aforementioned posh pal was right, and that I am a bona fide member of the working class. It means I have it on good authority (mine) that we gravitated more towards Bond movies, Hammer horror, Carry On films or Norman Wisdom in 1960’s The Bulldog Breed than to gritty tales of working-class anti-heroes who treated their girlfriends badly. This was before the contraceptive pill was widely available, so the female characters in such films were forever getting pregnant and “trapping” male protagonists into marriage, thus forcing them to relinquish their ambitions in favour of dull domesticity. Women! Destroyers of men’s dreams since time immemorial!
Hammer’s horror films have aged like fine wine, and Bond movies endure, while even Norman Wisdom continues to amuse, especially if you live in Albania, where he’s a cultural icon. But kitchen sink drama now seems dated, thanks to a misogynistic streak that almost makes the Carry On films feel like beacons of #MeToo. A few early 1960s adaptations of plays or books by women, such as Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey or Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, bucked the trend by telling their stories from a female point of view. But kitchen sink drama stuck mostly to the proletarian male experience, with only the charisma of up-and-comers like Albert Finney, Alan Bates or Tom Courtenay to make them tolerable now.
Social realist films about the working class are taken more seriously than any other genre, since it’s assumed they have something “important” to say that thrillers, horror films, comedies and fantasy do not. No matter that the whole of human life is on display in the work of, for example, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, subjects of a new documentary – Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. But until Martin Scorsese rediscovered and promoted their work in the 1970s, Powell was still persona non grata in the British establishment after shocking the critics with his horror classic Peeping Tom (1960), and their films are a long way from kitchen sink. Even nowadays, when P&P are critics’ darlings, you don’t have to dig far to find one of them declaring A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is “too harebrained to take seriously as a piece of important cinema.”
Shining a spotlight on common people so the middle classes can gawp as if they’re zoo animals
However well-made and worthy the films, I just don’t care for films set amid the British lower classes, with their singsongs down the pub (Educating Rita, 1983, and Distant Voices, Still Lives, 1988), domestic violence (Nil By Mouth, 1997, Tyrannosaur, 2011), alcoholism (My Name is Joe, 1998) and bad wallpaper (Vera Drake, 2004). Nor am I overfond of triumphalist little-people-against-the-system tales like The Full Monty (1997) or Made in Dagenham (2010), though at least these benefit from compelling stories as opposed to merely shining a spotlight on common people so the middle classes can gawp at them as if they’re zoo animals.
But I won’t have to worry much longer about my ambivalence towards working-class cinema. Government cuts to education, youth services and benefits are ensuring that the British film industry is on its way to once again being the exclusive province of rich poshos, nepo babies and alumni of Eton and Oxbridge, whose films will invariably be cast from the same ranks because everyone else needs a job that will pay their rent. The proles, like The Frost Report’s Ronnie Corbett, will once again know their place – as comic relief, or poverty porn.
Forget Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) or Charlotte Regan’s marvellous Scrapper (2023). Films by people who have grown up on housing estates will soon be extinct. Instead, the only writers and directors will be the ones who own estates, who shoot their films in each other’s country houses, and their screenplays about class will have all the depth and social nuance of Saltburn.
Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist and photographer
