Working Class Creativity
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From an impoverished neighbourhood in South London, Charlie Chaplin became one of the most significant figures in the development of cinema. More recently, TV writers like Sophie Willan and Michaela Coel have transformed the way working class lives are depicted on TV, from the concerned paternalism of the 1960s to a more celebratory view from the inside in the 2020s. In this week's edition of Radio 4's arts and ideas discussion programme, Matthew Sweet charts these changes, and considers what they mean for our understanding of class categories in wider society. With TV historian Laura Minor, art historian Jacqueline Riding, novelist Adelle Stripe, and historian Samuel Johnson-Schlee. Plus, an interview with Ian La Frenais, co-creator of such comedy classics as The Likely Lads and Porridge. The paperback of Adelle Stripe's memoir Base Notes, and Jacqueline Riding's book Hard Street: Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London, are both published in February. Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might like our podcast too. |
| 0:12.1 | You might. You might. It is called Sightraught with me, Nick Grimshaw. |
| 0:15.2 | And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. |
| 0:18.2 | All the news, all the cultural happenings in the UK and beyond, |
| 0:22.2 | and great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can also enjoy lots of playlists, |
| 0:27.7 | music mixes and live radio, everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. |
| 0:34.5 | But obviously start with our podcast, sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. |
| 0:40.1 | So if you like music, listen on BBC Sans. |
| 0:43.9 | Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:45.4 | The Working Class. |
| 0:46.3 | Who are they? |
| 0:47.5 | What do they do? |
| 0:53.8 | E.P. Thompson, the great Marxist historian, wanted, he said, to rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity. |
| 0:56.5 | For him to be working class was more than an economic category. It described a moral |
| 1:01.8 | and cultural activity. The working class, he said, were present at their own making, |
| 1:07.8 | participants in it. And those who found time to write, to make poetry or art, |
| 1:13.1 | were he said, not oddities or eccentrics, they were spokesmen of a class in formation. |
| 1:19.6 | He made this argument in 1963, the year Nell Dunn's book Up the Junction was published, |
| 1:25.6 | a thrillingly unvarnished account of life among factory workers in industrial battersea. |
| 1:32.1 | It was the era of the kitchen sink and the British New Wave. |
| 1:35.9 | Sheila Delaney's play A Taste of Honey had just been adapted for the cinema, |
... |
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