A Class Act: Representations of Class in British Cinema and Television 1979–2008

Abstract

This chapter offers an analysis of a variety of texts from British art cinema to mainstream cinema and finally examines television as a way of productively opening up British media to questions of class. To begin with, I examine the work of Mike Leigh, Peter Greenaway, and Derek Jarman. All three have become central to the canon of British art cinema and yet critical work on them has a tendency to erase any troubling class questions in their work. The critical tendency has been to steer clear of treating them as middle-class auteurs, and instead treats their work as offering universal or existential themes, or as echoing “radical” postmodern/poststructuralist concerns that as we have seen, also evade the problem of class. The section on mainstream cinema will briefly examine the class narrative in the Harry Potter movies, as well as Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. In both cases these two highly successful mainstream productions offer ways of seeing how class is managed and positioned for a popular audience. Turning to television I examine the class dynamics of various “make-over” and “lifestyle” programs that have increased in popularity during the period, as well as examining the troubling class and gender aspects of the political drama The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard. Some of the concerns that have been raised will then be explored by looking at how the working class has been presented in various television comedies such as I’m Alan Partridge and The Office.

The working-class… is a group that is in itself, as a group within the social edifice, a nongroup, in other words, one whose position is in itself contradictory; they are a productive force. Society (and those in power) needs them in order to reproduce themselves and their rule, but nonetheless, they cannot find a proper place for them.

—Slavoj Žižek¹