I’ve become somewhat of an admirer of the words of Dr Lisa Mckenzie the self-described working class academic. I first became aware of her via the X platform and her contributions to television current affairs debates. She is clearly on the centre Left but is not (and this is most important) aligned with the middle class identiarian Left that can fairly be blamed for a lot of Britain’s current problems.
What’s fascinating about Dr Mckenzie is that she has not, unlike some, who have moved up the social scale and joined academia from their origins in the working class, forgotten where she came from. She’s rooted in the class she came from but not imprisoned by her class.
There is of course stuff that she says that I disagree with. As someone who had to overcome difficulties getting into my chosen media profession decades ago when the union closed shop was still a thing, I’m less enamoured of trade unions and their efficacy for the working classes than maybe she is. However where we do agree is on things such as the disastrous effects on Britain and on Britain’s working classes of successive government’s policies on deindustrialisation.
The point of this article in particular is to publicise to this blog’s readers the fact that Dr Mckenzie has started up a Substack blog and to let people know that it will be a site that will probably be worth reading. In her first post on her Substack Dr Mckenzie laments the falling number of working class people involved in television. Such a situation where the middle classes hog the opportunities in the television industry didn’t always exist and there were times such as the 1960’s and 1970’s where there were growing opportunities for those without money and without family connections in the industry to enter it and get on.
She recently attended a conference that covered the issue of the lack of working class representation in the television industry both behind and in front of the camera and this is part of what she said:
“The killer moment of those first panels was when an academic who was researching inequalities and television recounted a story from her research of a runner working on a set who had been given the role because the Director was friends with their mum, lets remember that those low rung roles are the first rungs of the ladder. It seemed no one in the room was surprised the surprising comment from the academic was that yes there was inequalities and ‘invisible barriers’ but none of this was in ‘bad faith’.
At this point I had to interject and reminded the room and the panel that the British class system is the best example there is of bad faith: when doors are closed for some applicants because of their postcode/accent/lack of connections that is bad faith, when work and positions are given out to the mediocre children of the middle class because ‘they act and talk right’ that is bad faith, the very notion there are invisible barriers at all is bad faith - because we can all fucking see what is happening?
Only 8% of the industry is working class, and that the writers, actors, and ideas are all fucking middle class, we know this because of the mediocre television we are confronted by: the thriller, that is set nowhere but anywhere, the characters that even wear fucking beige, the open plan houses with the kitchen Island. Between Suzanne Jones in a beige two piece, working class drag artists in the generic north, menopausal middle class women and murderous children somehow the working class can find themselves. Well they cant and it isnt-in- fucking-visible.”
You can find Dr Mckenzie’s Substack via the link below:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/181181111?r=1bzukl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true&triedRedirect=true
Dr Mckenzie is correct here. There are now very few ways that a working class person without access to money or contacts can get into the television industry, it is a business that is now almost entirely sewed up by the middle classes and this creates an industry that doesn’t tell working class stories or allow enough working class people to work in it.
If we want to have a television industry that reflects accurately the nation as it is and not how the middle classes would want it to be then we need to have encouragement for working class people to enter it. Diversity in appointments should not be on the grounds of race and sex alone but must include class if this diversity drive is to be meaningful. In addition in order to give working class people the skills needed to be able to survive in the television industry there must be far more opportunities for working class people to get involved in the arts and get involved on their own terms not those of the middle classes. I’ve worked in community arts and far too often I’ve seen these projects colonised by the middle classes and the ethnic minorities that they choose to promote rather than artists or potential artists from the broader working classes.
I have a son who is one of the most wonderfully creative children who I’ve ever met and he’s a person who should be able to access the opportunities that I had. I was talent spotted via a public exhibition of photographs in London and that helped me get started but my son might not have such opportunities as too many positions in television and the broader arts sector go to those whose families are wealthy, well connected or who already work in this industry.
Television should tell our stories and that should include a generous number of stories that tell of the lives of working class Britons.