BBC - Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture (2012)

Melvyn Bragg explores the relationship from 1911 to 2011 between class and culture, the two great forces which define and shape us as individuals and as a society.

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Part 1: 1911 to 1945
Melvyn starts with the period from 1911 to 1945. Through location sequences, interviews with experts and ordinary people, and copious amounts of archive material, Melvyn tells the story of how a rigidly class-based society responded to wars and economic hardship, and changed to the point where a classless society seemed a real possibility at the end of World War II.

Part 2: Early 1950's
Melvyn continues his exploration with the grim but settled austerity years following the Second World War - and the surge of energy which transformed our perceptions of culture and class. From the 'Angry Young Men' of the early 1950s and their influence on books, stage, screen and the newly popular medium of TV, to the birth of pop culture in the music, art and fashion of the swinging 60s. Featuring contributions by Pete Townshend of The Who.

Part 3: Radical 80's
Melvyn talks to key cultural figures of the radical 80s, including Alan Bleasdale, Sue Townsend and The Specials, about the all-embracing force of Thatcherism. In Leith, he talks to Irvine Welsh, literary voice of both the 90s rave generation and Scotland's disenfranchised working class, about a decade in which our leaders claimed we were all middle class. Culturally there has been a reaching out to the nation with free museums and galleries, fuelled by the National Lottery, but is this open, accessible culture simply masking newer divisions - a super-rich class of bankers and celebrities at one end and a poor underclass at the other, demonized by 'chav' culture? We may be more culturally democratic and varied than ever, but is wealth now creating a new, more extreme class system?