Abstract
If the past two decades of British cultural studies and sociology have established a renewed potential for analysing class and regional identity, it finally feels as if television studies is recognising that potential for its own field. Beginning in the 1990s, the pioneering work of figures like Beverley Skeggs challenged hegemonic processes of erasure and essentialism that had crept into the academy. It disputed declarations that class and region were archaic models of social analysis by asserting the importance of these concepts to intersectional processes of identity construction and performance. In recent years, studies of class and region on television have appeared which follow Skeggs’s assertion that ‘class formation’ and regional identity are ‘dynamic’ and ‘fought out at on the level of the symbolic’ (2004: 5). The question of television’s role in this symbolic formation has produced works that engage with the textual specificity of the representation of both class (Skeggs and Wood, 2011) and region (Moseley, 2018).
Under review here are two edited collections from Palgrave MacMillan – Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain and Heading North – which not only continue this resurgence of class and regional analysis in film and television studies but more fully address television’s role in capturing the dynamic nature of identity formation. Both collections collate a wide variety of essays that explore the various ways in which television and film actively shape the cultural imaginary of class and region. However, both books deploy a methodology that foregrounds close textual analysis as an approach for understanding the complex ways in which identities are symbolically constructed on screen. By collecting together essays that pay sustained attention to the representational structures of individual texts, Social Class and Heading North continue the work of Skeggs and others by refuting the homogenous and archaic ways in which these social identities are imagined and demonstrating the many narrative, formal and thematic functions that notions of class and region perform across the spectrum of British film and television production. In the introduction to Social Class, editors Forrest and Johnson provide a clear account of the reasoning for both the scope of the collection and its object of television drama. Directed towards television work produced post-1997, the pair orientate their project towards opposing the neoliberal and post-Blair consensus that class was no longer an important social category. Considering this oppositional project, what is also notable about this introduction is the generality of the definition of ‘class’ provided. Indeed, the editors discuss British television drama as being ‘classed’, in the sense of its lower cultural status, as well as mentioning that the collection is interested in class as a social and economic identity. By not surveying the work of Marxism that could presumably underpin an introduction to class as a theme, the editors avoid a potentially overburdening history of class relations. This strategy suits the collection’s broad argument that contemporary television drama approaches class through a multiplicity of representational strategies and formal structures. Rather than homogenise class’s meaning, the editors open the collection up to considering how television constructs its own images of class. Class is approached as a dynamic issue, present as an overt object of representation as well as a set of ideological positions which shape television’s visual address.
This textual approach is foregrounded in Part One, entitled ‘Authorship’, as contributors complicate the figure of the auteur through an emphasis on the embeddedness of their authorial agency within codes and conventions of classed hierarchies. Stephen Harper, for instance, details the way in which the anti-materialist themes of Stephen Poliakoff’s post-millennial television work implicitly relies on stereotyped and instrumentalising images of the working class. Parts Two and Three continue this theoretical underpinning of using textual issues to define class. A stand-out essay in Part Two by Paul Elliot explores the relationship between class hierarchy and generic convention in the ‘Contemporary TV Noir’. Elliot traces Noir’s lineage through prior British detective programmes arguing that these roots have embedded a historical asymmetry in the genre whereby ostensibly progressive representations of gender politics remain beholden to narrative points-of-view which are firmly middle-class and construct working-class characters and spaces as other. Part Three explores how certain places in British television are coded as classed. While the programmes here deal with Northern and Midlands places that have historically been depicted in British culture as homogenous ‘land[s] of the working-classes’ (Shields, 1991: 208), contributors analyse their individual case studies as representative of a more dynamic representation of class communities. The agency of the author is repeatedly invoked to explain this complexity. For instance, Paul Long’s essay on Peaky Blinders (2013–) positions Steven Knight as a Brummie auteur. For Long, Knight’s personal class experience and his professional reputation anchor the programme’s ability to depict a uniquely three-dimensional and alluring vision of a working-class Birmingham at the peak of modernity. In both Parts Two and Three, the specificity of generic forms and the textual identity of authors is emphasised in order to bring to light the key role that television plays in culture, in actively mediating images of class that can affirm or subvert dominant social discourses.
The final section, entitled ‘Taste’, is broadly interested in how popular television registers the fracturing of traditional class groups as a consequence of the economic and social ascendency of British neoliberalism. Contributors look not only to the changing vocabulary of class that these programmes use – concepts like ‘aspiration’ and ‘lifestyle’ are borrowed from cultural studies – but also examine these changes textually through the generic forms that allow for class politics to continue in new, if less explicit, ways. An example of a chapter which bridges these considerations, Antony Mullen’s chapter on the popular drama Footballers’ Wives (2002–2006) examines the programme’s sympathetic portrayal of its female characters in order to nuance the cultural phenomenon of the ‘W.A.G.’. Establishing an ideological context for the W.A.G. as a cultural construction which embodies the Thatcherite ideals of a society of unrestricted and mobile economic agents, Mullen subverts the typical reading of the programme as a trashy valorisation of this figure by highlighting the viewer’s consistent narrative alignment with women who are caught between class worlds.
Where Social Class strategically leaves class as an open concept for analysis, Heading North takes an equally valid approach in clearly providing both a conceptual field and an intervention that scaffolds the subsequent chapters. Mazierska begins the collection with what I consider the most rigorous survey of the canonical screen North written so far. It opens by defining the theoretical object of the North with which the collection is concerned. Dealing with a notoriously loose designation of place, Mazierska clearly establishes the North under examination as being the imagination of place: a set of images, stereotypes, myths. Mazierska argues that this imagination centres on a ‘master narrative’ of the North as a place of the rise and then terminal decline of an industrial working class. Via a judicious account of the canon of Northern screen fiction, she indicates how film and television, and its scholarship, has reproduced this narrative persistently whenever the region has been paid attention. Thus, the introduction sketches a picture of the North’s canonical representation as homogenous, historically static and ideologically hegemonic. In doing so, Mazierska sets out a theoretical framework which gives coherence to the chapters that follow, developing a common project of altering the master narrative and of looking outside the canon to bring to light a more varied and complex picture of the North. The work Mazierska does in this introduction is continued in the strong thematic and theoretical organisation of the chapters that follow. Each of the three parts of Heading North strategically appropriates a core characteristic of the Northern imaginary.
In Part One, the concept of the ‘history’ of the North is explored, as contributors seek alternatives to the often nostalgic or deterministic ways in which the region is related to its industrial past. This section exemplifies the multidisciplinary method at work throughout the collection in which historical intersections between Northernness, class and race are revealed through a shifting focus between grander concepts of history and careful consideration of visual form and meaning. In particular, Heather Norris Nicholson’s chapter on the visual heritage revealed by Northern film archives provides a wonderfully clear demonstration of textual analysis enriching a historiographic study. Nicholson examines the recent work of Northern-based film archives in attempting to promote social inclusivity by locating historical materials that document ethnic minority experiences. The subtlety of Norris’ argument comes from her engagement with the visual rhetoric of individual texts within the archives. Looking at home movies shot in Salford, she notes how the filming of minority ethnic children engaged in quotidian scenarios and in typical working-class settings, such as the terraced street, ‘show[s] how visible difference is woven into the tissue of regular urban encounters’ (p. 79). Norris’s attention to textual detail underpins a convincing argument for archival material as offering a genuinely inclusive Northern history through its use of a common rhetoric of Northern ordinariness.
Part Two, detailing geographies of the North, deals primarily with television and how programmes utilise space and landscape in ways that re-appropriate Northern stereotypes. Peter Atkinson’s chapter argues that the long-form nature of television soap opera, with its consistency of setting, provides a knowable iconography that comes to define the essence of real-life Northern places. Looking at the settings of Coronation Street (1960–) and Emmerdale (1972–), he reads a gentrifying milieu in these programmes as the result of a conscious attempt to re-brand Manchester and Leeds as vibrant, service-based cities in the post-millennium. Other chapters in Part Two examine how television texts symbolically incorporate the rural Northern landscapes to treat issues of sexualised and class politics. In their chapter on BBC Three’s gothic kitchen sink drama In The Flesh (2013–2014), Amy C Chambers and Hannah J Elizabeth detail how the iconography of the rural North – signifying harshness, ordinariness and provincialism – is woven into the mise-en-scene of a gothic fable of queer passing This chapter does, however, demonstrate a slipperiness in its definition of the North which, for me, renders it slightly unclear as to how the region is functioning ideologically in the programme. Specifically, the writers establish the North as a metaphoric backdrop but one that is used to suggest rural Britain as ‘more hostile to queer sexualities than elsewhere in the U.K.’ and, yet, at the same time, the writers argue that the programme presents the North as a ‘queering of the South’ (pp. 202–205). While potentially suggesting the ideological ambivalence of the show, the impression while reading is that the imaginative looseness of the North leads to definitions being altered where necessary, at the cost of an overall vague sense of the region’s meaning. The problem of leaving the North too vaguely defined is notable in this specific chapter because of how rare it is throughout the collection. Elsewhere, the relationship between the specificity of Northern locations and the generality of its symbolic functions is handled sensitively.
The final section of Heading North explores how the North’s cultural identity is altered when imagined outside the context of England and outside of its subordinate relationship to a dominant South. This re-appropriation of the myths of Northernness is explored in the context of post-millennium Northern-set cinema in Mazierska and Kamila Rymajdo’s chapter. They examine how the region’s identity is invoked in relationship to Europe, in biopics of two North-West musical icons: Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Ian Curtis in Control (2007). The critics highlight the postmodern aesthetics of both films as key to how they refigure the myth of the provincial North. In 24 Hour, Wilson’s Northernness references an authentic socialist identity, alongside the film’s visual and aural use of high cultural intertextual references to suggest his cosmopolitan European sophistication. However, Control uncritically represents the North through a ‘“static postcard”’ (p. 253) style that ignores social and historical context and, in doing so, casts the region as a space antithetical to Europe, as a space that must be escaped from for the artist to achieve their dreams.
Within this review, it has only been possible to detail some of the work undertaken in these collections. Yet, from these representative contributions, it is possible to infer the intervention both Social Class and Heading North are making into the field of television studies. In foregrounding texts that demonstrate the variety of class and region on British screens, these collections point to the future value of paying close attention to television in order to grasp the complexity of these social formations in contemporary culture. Even though Heading North makes no explicit distinction between screen media, both collections’ contributions illustrate television – in its ordinariness, domesticity, and ubiquity – as the ideal medium for exploring class and region, not as historically determined categories but as dynamic forms of social meaning embedded in our everyday lives.