Stephen Graham is right. Television has forgotten how funny working-class people are

Independent

05-02-2025

In an interview at the weekend, the actor Stephen Graham said that British television misrepresents what it's like to be working class in this country. 'It's very condescending,' he said, pinpointing TV's 'Ooh, look at the poor!' habit of portraying working-class life as one long, grim struggle. 'Things can be hard, but there's also a lot of laughter. My childhood was full of it.'
His words struck a chord. I've been banging on for years about the fact that television has forgotten, thanks to the way that it's now almost monocultural, how hilarious working-class people are. When I was a kid, extended family made our house feel like a stop on a never-ending stand-up tour. Great aunts, uncles, cousins, each brought their own brand of humour that would just fill up our living room. We would laugh so much. Being teased by adults and learning how to hold your own was just part of growing up.
The first time I found myself in a culture defined by an agglomeration of middle- and upper-middle-class folk – Fleet Street – it was a massive shock. They communicated with each other completely differently. It felt like being forced into a collar that was so tight it was cutting off your air supply, having to talk in your best 'telephone voice' for eight hours a day. I had to learn it like a foreign language. Of course, I discovered they were witty, too, but in an entirely different tonal range.
I still think of something Shane Meadows said when I interviewed him in 2015. The director of This Is England, whose mum worked in a fish and chip shop and whose dad was a long-distance lorry driver, has mobilised a small army of working-class talent that includes Graham, Vicky McClure, Paddy Considine, Joseph Gilgun and Jack O'Connell. When asked what he thought he'd have done had his 1996 short film Small Time not won an award that set him on the road to a filmmaking career, he said he'd probably still be 'concreting... being one of three or four lads going around in a van'. He loved the stories and the humour, and he knew that he was a natural storyteller – he'd have been 'one of those guys in the pub' making people laugh because of his 'knack for remembering the lunacy or the violence or the funny thing'.
Meadows made it through the eye of a needle to be a filmmaker – working-class representation in film and television shrinks and shrinks (it now stands at around 8 per cent across the board). So many men and women like the This Is England creator will still be out there, all over the country, 'concreting' or working at the hairdresser's, telling their stories, making everyone laugh. But they're less and less likely to be creating what we see on our TV screens.
That wasn't always the case. Before the moneyed classes had all the entry routes into film and television pretty much sewn up, there was evidence everywhere you looked. There was Johnny Speight, who left school at 14, writing Till Death Us Do Part (1965-75); former plasterer's apprentice Ray Galton and milkman's son Alan Simpson writing Steptoe and Son (1962-74); John Sullivan (dad a plumber, mum a charlady) writing Only Fools and Horses (1981-2003). Yes, I know, that's a list of white men, but that's a different and equally important conversation about those times and now.
Some of the funniest people I've ever met have been working-class women who would not even have dreamt that they could turn their natural gift into a career. Laura Checkley and Hannah Chissick's brilliant The Proper Class Podcast ('celebrating all things working class, because if we don't who the hell will') shows how hard even the most successful have had to fight to overcome stereotyping and barriers against progress. (They would have had fun, I'm sure, chatting to The Royle Family 's co-creator Caroline Aherne, who left a big hole when she died in 2016.) It is still possible to make it, of course, as In My Skin writer Kayleigh Llewellyn and the Bafta-winning creator of I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel, have shown. Coel was raised by her mother, who worked as a cleaner while studying to become a mental health nurse. Both writers have brought new perspectives to their craft.
That's not to say that writers from ordinary backgrounds are entirely blameless for what you might call the Ken Loach-ification of the working-class experience. Dramatists like Loach, whose father was an electrician in a tool factory, are from a generation for whom a grammar-school education could lead to unheard-of social mobility. Political ideals and social conscience drew Loach and others back to the inequality they had left behind. Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) is probably the high-water mark of socially committed drama from that generation, but the tang of desperation it left behind of the working-class experience under Margaret Thatcher's ruthless, free-market policies seems to have found its way into almost every depiction since.
There are still working-class writers, actors and filmmakers out there – from Andrea Arnold to James Graham to Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, whose series A Thousand Blows, about a Victorian pugilist, Stephen Graham is about to star in. But there just aren't enough to create a genuinely broad picture of what life is like outside of the 'big kitchen dramas' that make wealth itself part of the appeal of what's on screen.
No one wants to be prescriptive about what any writer should be creating – Jed Mercurio's father worked as a coal miner, but he writes blazing thrillers, and hallelujah for that. But if you don't have a broad enough spread of writers, stereotypes take hold. Downbeat (and beaten down) is only a small part of the story of British working-class life, but it's what we see more of than anything else. It's time to change that.