You will already be aware that we Brits can shoehorn class into any debate, such is our obsession with where we sit on the social scale. And so the age-old trope runs, the working class aspire to be middle class but remain fiercely proud of their origins; the middle classes accept that they won't ever be anything other than that and spend their time consolidating their middle classness; and, obviously, the upper classes don't care where they are as they're loaded enough not to worry.
This brings immediately to mind 'The Class Sketch' from The Frost Report, something of a seminal moment in television history. Written by Marty Feldman and John Law, it had John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett capturing the topography of the British social hierarchy, trading off the actual background and physical height of the three performers in the process. Cleese, as the bowler-hatted toff declares that he looks down on Barker, to his left, "because I am upper class". Barker announces that he looks up to Cleese "because he is upper class" but looks down on Corbett "because he is lower class" before proudly stating "I am middle class". Corbett, clearly denoted as working class due to his scarf and flat cap (now in vogue amongst hipsters everywhere...) confesses: "I know my place. I look up to them both. But I don’t look up to him [Barker] as much as I look up to him [Cleese], because he has got innate breeding." Corbett ends up with the punchline, answering Barker's proposition: "We all know our place, but what do we get out of it?" - by looking up to the two next to him and replying: "I get a pain in the back of my neck."
The irony of this is that class has always played an unspoken, yet powerful role in the BBC. Lord John Reith, its fearsome-looking first director-general, shaped the corporation within a highly principled vision of public service broadcasting, one based on a high moral tone and giving equal consideration to all points of view. This, though, was carried through in the post-war years with a hierarchy that saw the corporation run by the officer class and the Oxford and Cambridge elite, and the conscripted class operating it.
My own father worked for the BBC for the better part of his working life, joining as a studio cameraman in the early 1950s after completing his National Service and working as a telecommunications engineer for the GPO. He didn't go to university, learning his craft in the Royal Corps of Signals and combining it with photography as a hobby. He would later become the head of a camera crew and, before retiring, worked as a coordinator of studio technical operations on shows like Only Fools And Horses, itself a tremendous examination of the aspirational working classes. As a family we would be considered middle class, but quite where in that strata is open to debate: my dad comes from a lineage of railway and agricultural workers; my mum's dad was a civil servant in the Air Ministry. So, lower-middle?
By the 1960s, when the The Frost Report and its predecessor That Was The Week That Was (also featuring David Frost) were leading the era's satire boom, starched post-war Britain was facing an existential crisis. The Profumo scandal and the Great Train Robbery had shaken the establishment to its core. Political, social and cultural change was everywhere. The BBC's upper management was somewhat reluctantly having programming reflect what was going on at a national level as The Beatles, rival ITV's Coronation Street, and a slew of so-called kitchen sink dramas gave greater national visibility to the working classes.
After The Frost Report, Cleese and several of the show's writers - Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle (Oxbridge graduates all) - went on to form the Monty Python team, freely lampooning the politicians, Whitehall mandarins, army officers and clergy drawn from their own backgrounds. Cleese would further rigorously expose petty British attitudes to class as Basil Fawlty, his prejudices and snobbery barely - if at all - concealed (much the same as Dad's Army did so cleverly). Interestingly, all of these shows were produced by the BBC.
So with this in mind, this week we learned via the Daily Telegraph that the BBC is worried that it is now too middle class, and is asking its employees to disclose details of family income and even upbringing in order to gain a better picture of the corporation's social profile. Staff will be asked various questions about their socio-economic background, including things like whether they received free school meals as children, in order to ascertain how representative of Britain the corporation is.
Without wishing to sound like the Daily Mail, whose eye-swivelling obsession with the BBC regularly means that it runs several negative BBC stories on any given day, only the BBC could come up with a scheme like this. I'm sure that most of the BBC's regular viewers and listeners don't spend their time worrying that the BBC is too much of anything when it comes to its employees (though readers of the Mail as well as most of the Conservative Party will be unbudged on the view that the Beeb is stuffed full of pinkos and lefties, etc, etc, etc...).
This is, though, the same BBC which moved its news and sports output to Salford to be less London-centric, such was its self-realised sensitivity to a dominance of Received Pronunciation that had served it well for decades without anyone expressing any notable concern. But, while this hasn't meant Sophie Raworth presenting the Six O'Clock News in Hilda Ogden curlers and addressing Laura Kuenssberg as "chuck", on the BBC World channel there has been a noted regionalisation of accents. And maybe to this Londoner's ears, they just sound odd.
Possibly, though, the real root of this BBC initiative is that its Royal Charter is up for review. In an ironic role reversal, it is the Conservative government which appears to be pressuring the corporation to be more politically correct in including underrepresented backgrounds for presenting talent as well as backroom functions. In a separate measure, the BBC has even introduced "unconscious bias" in its recruitment processes, whereby recruiters are unable to see an applicant's educational background or even their name in order to ensure a pure and objective opinion of a job candidate's professional qualities. This also follows renewed efforts by the BBC to meet quotas on the proportion of disabled and LGBT employees, as well as a broader range of ethnicities amongst its on-air and backroom staff, specifically to be more representative of the general public.
One newspaper this week quoted a BBC source as saying: "We are already making a real difference to diversity on and off air but we’ve been clear there is more to do. Nothing should be a barrier to thriving at the BBC whether it is where you were born, what school you went to, the colour of your skin, your gender or a disability. “If we’re going to serve audiences even better and be the creative powerhouse for the UK at home and abroad, we need the best people working for us and a workforce that reflects the many communities that exist in the UK – that’s what these plans will ensure."
While no one can fault equal opportunities, there is perhaps too much social engineering going on here. My dad wasn't hired by the BBC because of his background - he built his career with the corporation because he was capable of doing the job. As someone who left school after his A-levels and went straight into journalism, purely on the basis of capability, I've proudly followed in my dad's footsteps. Has my social background been a blessing or a curse? Not at all.
Class is, though, an odd beast within the British media. When broadcasters like Janet Street-Porter and Danny Baker first appeared on television in the late 70s and 80s, viewers were apparently appalled by their strong London accents.
Even then, viewers and listeners expected TV presenters to sound like the BBC's original radio announcers, broadcasting from Alexandra Palace while dressed in evening wear and speaking with the plummiest, elocution lesson-taught voices possible.
But here is where class, background and even the appearance of "innate breeding", to come back to the Cleese/Barker/Corbett sketch, can be a misnomer. One of the BBC's poshest-sounding presenters in recent memory has been the intrepid war reporter Kate Adie: born in Northumberland, brought up as the adopted daughter of a Sunderland pharmacist, and who studied at Newcastle University. I wonder what she'll put on her form when Human Resources comes calling?
This brings immediately to mind 'The Class Sketch' from The Frost Report, something of a seminal moment in television history. Written by Marty Feldman and John Law, it had John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett capturing the topography of the British social hierarchy, trading off the actual background and physical height of the three performers in the process. Cleese, as the bowler-hatted toff declares that he looks down on Barker, to his left, "because I am upper class". Barker announces that he looks up to Cleese "because he is upper class" but looks down on Corbett "because he is lower class" before proudly stating "I am middle class". Corbett, clearly denoted as working class due to his scarf and flat cap (now in vogue amongst hipsters everywhere...) confesses: "I know my place. I look up to them both. But I don’t look up to him [Barker] as much as I look up to him [Cleese], because he has got innate breeding." Corbett ends up with the punchline, answering Barker's proposition: "We all know our place, but what do we get out of it?" - by looking up to the two next to him and replying: "I get a pain in the back of my neck."
My own father worked for the BBC for the better part of his working life, joining as a studio cameraman in the early 1950s after completing his National Service and working as a telecommunications engineer for the GPO. He didn't go to university, learning his craft in the Royal Corps of Signals and combining it with photography as a hobby. He would later become the head of a camera crew and, before retiring, worked as a coordinator of studio technical operations on shows like Only Fools And Horses, itself a tremendous examination of the aspirational working classes. As a family we would be considered middle class, but quite where in that strata is open to debate: my dad comes from a lineage of railway and agricultural workers; my mum's dad was a civil servant in the Air Ministry. So, lower-middle?
After The Frost Report, Cleese and several of the show's writers - Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle (Oxbridge graduates all) - went on to form the Monty Python team, freely lampooning the politicians, Whitehall mandarins, army officers and clergy drawn from their own backgrounds. Cleese would further rigorously expose petty British attitudes to class as Basil Fawlty, his prejudices and snobbery barely - if at all - concealed (much the same as Dad's Army did so cleverly). Interestingly, all of these shows were produced by the BBC.
So with this in mind, this week we learned via the Daily Telegraph that the BBC is worried that it is now too middle class, and is asking its employees to disclose details of family income and even upbringing in order to gain a better picture of the corporation's social profile. Staff will be asked various questions about their socio-economic background, including things like whether they received free school meals as children, in order to ascertain how representative of Britain the corporation is.
Without wishing to sound like the Daily Mail, whose eye-swivelling obsession with the BBC regularly means that it runs several negative BBC stories on any given day, only the BBC could come up with a scheme like this. I'm sure that most of the BBC's regular viewers and listeners don't spend their time worrying that the BBC is too much of anything when it comes to its employees (though readers of the Mail as well as most of the Conservative Party will be unbudged on the view that the Beeb is stuffed full of pinkos and lefties, etc, etc, etc...).
This is, though, the same BBC which moved its news and sports output to Salford to be less London-centric, such was its self-realised sensitivity to a dominance of Received Pronunciation that had served it well for decades without anyone expressing any notable concern. But, while this hasn't meant Sophie Raworth presenting the Six O'Clock News in Hilda Ogden curlers and addressing Laura Kuenssberg as "chuck", on the BBC World channel there has been a noted regionalisation of accents. And maybe to this Londoner's ears, they just sound odd.
Possibly, though, the real root of this BBC initiative is that its Royal Charter is up for review. In an ironic role reversal, it is the Conservative government which appears to be pressuring the corporation to be more politically correct in including underrepresented backgrounds for presenting talent as well as backroom functions. In a separate measure, the BBC has even introduced "unconscious bias" in its recruitment processes, whereby recruiters are unable to see an applicant's educational background or even their name in order to ensure a pure and objective opinion of a job candidate's professional qualities. This also follows renewed efforts by the BBC to meet quotas on the proportion of disabled and LGBT employees, as well as a broader range of ethnicities amongst its on-air and backroom staff, specifically to be more representative of the general public.
One newspaper this week quoted a BBC source as saying: "We are already making a real difference to diversity on and off air but we’ve been clear there is more to do. Nothing should be a barrier to thriving at the BBC whether it is where you were born, what school you went to, the colour of your skin, your gender or a disability. “If we’re going to serve audiences even better and be the creative powerhouse for the UK at home and abroad, we need the best people working for us and a workforce that reflects the many communities that exist in the UK – that’s what these plans will ensure."
While no one can fault equal opportunities, there is perhaps too much social engineering going on here. My dad wasn't hired by the BBC because of his background - he built his career with the corporation because he was capable of doing the job. As someone who left school after his A-levels and went straight into journalism, purely on the basis of capability, I've proudly followed in my dad's footsteps. Has my social background been a blessing or a curse? Not at all.
Even then, viewers and listeners expected TV presenters to sound like the BBC's original radio announcers, broadcasting from Alexandra Palace while dressed in evening wear and speaking with the plummiest, elocution lesson-taught voices possible.
But here is where class, background and even the appearance of "innate breeding", to come back to the Cleese/Barker/Corbett sketch, can be a misnomer. One of the BBC's poshest-sounding presenters in recent memory has been the intrepid war reporter Kate Adie: born in Northumberland, brought up as the adopted daughter of a Sunderland pharmacist, and who studied at Newcastle University. I wonder what she'll put on her form when Human Resources comes calling?
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