“And you think you’re so clever and classless and free” : Television and the working class in British films (1959-2021)

Abstract

Many British feature films have presented a rather critical view of television since its development, especially when related to the representation of the working class, because of its ambivalent ideological damage. Since 1959, television has thus often been presented as both a tool to depoliticise and indoctrinate its audience. Yet, over the decades, the representation of television and its impact on British working-class households has morphed and become more nuanced as the medium went mainstream. By the late 1960s, television was less of a vehicle for the directors’ and their heroes’ misogyny and fear of “dumbing down” through advertising and consumerism. Instead, it was associated with more positive aspects of working-class culture and family entertainment. But the advent of real TV shows has proved to be the latest development in the class opposition that has always underlain the representation of television in British films. The irony being that television in films was initially criticised for its potentially damaging classlessness yet it has always remained a channel for cinema to express its class-related bias. Because whether British cinema looks at how the working class watches television or at how television shows the working class, the representation mostly results from one class (the upper-middle class) watching another.