Comments on: BBC2: All white on the night

By: What’s Wrong with White Girl? « Inter-sections

What’s Wrong with White Girl? « Inter-sections — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:48:02 +0000

[...] is the patronising attitude that underlies it all. Here, I can’t really do better than quote Justin McKeating: “Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to [...]

By: Night Classes are for Geeks

Night Classes are for Geeks — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:50:25 +0000

Night classes – do you not remember that story about the government saying that night classes are “too white and middle class” and so less deserving of funding?

By: Rochenko

Rochenko — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:01:34 +0000

Come to think of it, the absence of the white working class (at least as far as that grab from the White website goes) seems to have something to do with the bloated and decidedly un-working-class presence of Enoch Powell’s fizzog.

By: Jim Bliss

Jim Bliss — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:37:52 +0000

Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.

Aha, ha ha ha. Stop, you’re killing me. Ha ha ha ha. No really….

Having been involved with various direct action political and environmental campaigns (not what we’re talking about here admittedly, but probably the purest expression of the ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’ attitude) I can safely say there’s few things the mainstream media hates more than people who do exactly that. I have plenty of ideas as to why this should be (even a few that don’t sound like conspiracy theories!) but whatever the reason, if you want to be lambasted by the media simply act like you don’t know “your proper place”. It pisses them off no end.

By: Luis Enrique

Luis Enrique — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:41:35 +0000

Great post Justin.

I think it ought to be possible to make interesting and sensible television programmes about the white working class, but these particular programmes look like being a long way from that. But I only really say this because i think it ought to be possible to make interesting and sensible programmes about any social group – never mind the ‘white’ bit, it would be nice to see some good telly about class in general.

But in principle I wouldn’t object to a series of documentaries looking at the social, economic and cultural life of the white working class, just as I wouldn’t object to a similar series on any other ethnicity. My neighborhood (Avonmouth, Lawrence Western) is overwhelmingly white working class, and I’d like to see documentaries made about areas like this. Perhaps the white working class is neglected in terms of thoughtful media coverage*.

I think there’s even a sensible documentary or two to be made about idea that the white working class has become neglected and/or ‘discriminated’ against by the (white middle class) bureaucracy, in certain respects. I’d expect such a programme to conclude the idea is mainly racist paranoia and that what discrimination there is, is still predominantly against non-whites. I wouldn’t say for sure there are never any instances of what might be called neglect or discrimination against whites – (local) government sometimes does silly things. All I really mean is that the perception seems to exist, which makes the topic worthy of exploration, if only show that it’s bollocks.

have you looked at the BBC “have your say” on this? edifying, as usual

* “thoughtful media coverage”! arf .

By: Legofesto

Legofesto — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:33:25 +0000

Night classes are now being slashed and burned by government funding cuts. The glory days when you could easily access a whole world of education at night is long gone.

Much of the adult education money is now going to attracting school-leavers to go to university, so a quarter of them can drop out and the others be saddled with debt up to their eyeballs.

By: Abdul-Rahim

Abdul-Rahim — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:34:04 +0000

Stilll, the trailler is pretty cool, all those languages written on the guys face.

By: Jherad

Jherad — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:09:03 +0000

Yikes. I’d heard about this BBC ‘white’ thing, but thought at first glance that image was a BBDO satire. Perhaps they’ll do a ‘BNP Babes’ calender.

Interesting reply from EJH.

By: redpesto

redpesto — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:06:26 +0000

Not only that, what’s the appeal to working class viewers? Where are the stories boys and girls done good? Where’s the message of ‘you can do it too, if you pick up a book or go to a night school class or join the Open University or whatever’. Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.

I think ejh and Rochenko have beaten me to most of the points I wanted to make. Besides which, this season is at least two decades too late: by the time Thatcher decimated heavy industry, and New Labour decided to chase after ’swing’ voters, ‘class’ pretty much dropped out of the vocabulary (as did the kind of places/constituencies likely to feature in the season). The narrative of ‘escape’ is one that often occurs in working-class fiction/drama, except that in (say) Educating Rita its more about gender and in Billy Elliott it pretty much boils down to ‘miners are losers – I’m off to ballet school’.

By: Rochenko

Rochenko — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:54:55 +0000

Great post and reply from ejh. I find the bad faith of the BBC in commissioning this quite staggering. “White” here signifies nothing at all; it’s just an attempt to replace a class designation with an entirely negatively defined (whatever you have left when you sift out other ethnic identities that are more “visible” to officialdom), empty category. If we want to understand what has happened to the working clas, we need an economic and social history of the period from the mid 70s to today. What we don’t need is this kind of public validation of a disingenuous and under-interrogated fiction.