Writer calls for more working-class people in TV

4 comments

1. Acting is a wealthy persons game.

   You can spend months/years not getting any work, but still need to commit to auditions/casting calls.

   Who can afford to float an acting career financially before they earn a living from it?

2. Fact is most TV shows are set in rich people settings where the main characters are young, have beautiful surgically altered bodies, and can afford to live in a massive apartment with all their mates. 

   It’s just a lot more interesting to watch shows in those settings than a depressing show about the grim reality of living in a shite hole. 

   It’s called escapism.

3. For too long liberal middle class TV execs have fallen over themselves to action diversity but completely ignored a far more wide ranging issue – class barriers to the working class. Glad to hear someone is making their voice heard.

   Its assumed the class system and class barriers have magically vanished in the UK and everyone has the same opportunity, nothing could be further from the truth. Whether it be white working class boys performing worse than any other group in education, class barriers in certain occupations, professional opportunities in traditionally middle class sports such as rugby, having the ‘wrong’ accent to work in a given field, the list is endless.

   The old school tie still goes a long, long way in the UK. If only the amount of action that has gone into diversity based on skin colour had also been applied to class barriers we would have a much stronger & equal society. As it stands work still needs to be done on the former but class driven prejudice & lack of opportunity seems to be given a free pass at present, its time for change.

4. Portrayals of working people on tv are hilarious. The local copper lives in a two million quid house and drives an 80k car.
   School teacher has a nice county cottage in an idyllic setting, or a nurse living alone in a London town house

   90% of writers have never seen a working person’s home