Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture

information has been democratised'

'never has it  been easier to share culture' (due to digital technology).

In this three-part series, Melvyn Bragg explores the relationship, from 1911 to 2011, between class and culture - the two great forces which define and shape us as individuals and as a society.

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 

Has digital technology democratised the class system?

Punk empowered working class people Pauline Black (The Selector). Has digital technology perpetuated this?

 Giving access to everything to everyone?

Is this a way of defining 'We Media'?

Music as an agent of social change?

Cultural tribe becomes more important than social class? New romantics in 80s transcended class.

Amorphous middle class. Brookside (soap opera set in Liverpool in 80s)became a cultural landmark. 

Russell Kane 'comedy is the most democratic form of art'.

but who is shown on TV is dominated by institutions.

Are we all middle class now?

Viz comic, how would that work now online? Only available in indie shops until they struck a publishing deal.

The Underclass, a swelling class left behind on crumbling estates. Amoral addiction & drug use, mass unemployment.

Do we all have access to cultural tools now due to 'We Media', as Irvine Welsh discussed?

Film & TV has always been more democratic, is literature the last undemocratic bastion of art and culture?

Now sees himself as one of the idle rich and upper class, rather than working class as he started of.

Chav, invidious class superiority. Bad side effect of expansion of middle class, those left behind.

Negative stereotypes & contempt and representation of W/C. Shameless. Where are the positive representations?

Media has created a new elite

A culture has created a celebrity superclass.

Where do we look now for new cultural charge?

Creativity of 'We Media'.

Pop music, Grime produced pop superstars from a new generation.

60% of government went to 7% of private schools.

Avalanche of access to new mass intelligentsia and culture.