Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture - Episode 3
Katy shared this link with our fellow Master's student, i caught the end of the episode and thought I'd missed something interesting so I'm definitely going to check it out. Here is the BBC's synopsis:
'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 now creating a new, more extreme class system?' (www.bbc.co.uk, 2012, 11/03/12)
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