Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture

Melvyn starts with the period from 1911 to 1945. Through location sequences, interviews with experts and ordinary people, and copious amounts of archive material, Melvyn tells the story of how a rigidly class-based society responded to wars and economic hardship, and changed to the point where a classless society seemed a real possibility at the end of World War II. Melvyn paints a picture of the cultures of the upper, middle and working classes before the Great War. In the Great War, the classes joined up together for the sake of the nation. Class division went to the trenches along with the men but was shaken by the common experience. Melvyn explores the culture that emerged. The thirties saw the horror of mass unemployment, and culturally a new interest among middle class observers in the plight of others. Melvyn explores the importance of class in the work of George Orwell, particularly The Road to Wigan Pier. In 1939, the nation went to war again and the theme of the different classes pulling together is a major one, particularly in the cinema. Melvyn develops this with reference to In Which We Serve. With the Labour victory of 1945 and the implementation of the Beveridge report, it seems that a new world is on the horizon, one in which class will no longer be the defining factor. What role has culture played in bringing this situation about? And how will class and culture interact in the future?

The grim but settled austerity of the years after the Second World War were followed by an astonishing surge of energy that transformed our perceptions of both culture and class. Novelists and dramatists, 'Angry Young Men', had plenty to say about the snobbery and exclusivity of the system in which they had grown up and now they were saying it in books, on the stage and by the early 1960s, through television - which through the 1950s had grown to be the dominant medium in our lives. Melvyn Bragg looks at how his generation of writers, artists and film makers entered the breach made by the Angry Young Men of the Fifties, and came to dominate the culture and television, sweeping aside an earlier, powerful and more class bound generation. Alongside them were the teenagers whose new wealth and energy was spawning a rich pop culture, in music, art and fashion. Pete Townshend of The Who describes the heady days of class and culture in Swinging London and how it was the working class mods who effectively commissioned his music. The voices that dominated the culture were for the first time from the working and lower middle classes. It seemed that a new shared culture had transcended class. Or had it? The middle classes, it seemed, were not to be so easily pushed aside and in the strife and hardship of the seventies, creative energy dissipated. The old groupings reasserted themselves in our tastes and aspirations along with the start of new ways of identifying ourselves such as gender and sexuality.

Melvyn looks at the last 30 years of culture in the UK, and examines whether class is still relevant to what culture we create and consume. The 80s brought the all-embracing force of Thatcherism - from the new, aspirational house buyers, to the disenfranchised industrial working class and the cataclysmic miners' strike. Melvyn Bragg talks to the cultural voices of this radical decade - dramatist Alan Bleasdale; Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall ('...art was for posh people...'); writer Sue Townsend; genre-breaking band The Specials; and Chris Donald, the creator of Viz magazine ('...a comic created by a lower middle class Geordie became an organ of the metropolitan middle class...'). These people broke through to become key voices not simply of their class but of the whole, changing, cultural landscape. Melvyn travels to Leith, where he meets Irvine Welsh, a brilliant and mischievous literary voice of both the 90s rave generation and Scotland's disenfranchised working class. In the 90s, our leaders claimed we were all middle class, and culturally there has been a reaching out to the nation with free museums and galleries, fuelled by the National Lottery. But is this open, accessible culture simply masking newer divisions - a super-rich class of bankers and celebrities at one end and a poor underclass at the other, demonized by 'chav' culture? We may be more culturally democratic and varied than ever, but is wealth now creating a new, more extreme class system?