Thanks, James, for exposing the working-class gap

On Wednesday, the playwright James Graham delivered the annual James MacTaggart memorial lecture to the Edinburgh TV festival. His theme was class and how distorted its impact has become in one of the great creative industries of our times.
Two numbers stood out in what Graham had to say. The first was 8 per cent — the percentage of people from a working-class background who are working in television, according to a recent survey from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. That compares with 46 per cent to 49 per cent of the population as a whole who identify as working class, according to Graham.
His other shocking figure was 22 per cent. It came in the context of where each player in the creative sector had been educated. “I was state school-educated at a comprehensive, like 93 per cent of the country,” Graham told his audience. “Whereas — and figures can vary — but in many parts of the cultural sector sometimes only 22 per cent of the workforce went to a state school.”
Graham then went on to describe his first steps to his ambitions. “My jobs have included the same warehouse as my mum, or night shifts in a plastics factory. After my degree, I was the stage doorkeeper at the Nottingham Theatre Royal — which I loved, seeing the touring shows pass in and out — and later jobs in theatre marketing once I moved to London to pursue my dream of being a playwright.
“Sleeping on friends’ floors and working in call centres and bars while I wrote and started to slowly get my plays put on, free, at fringe venues and pub theatres as my journey — thankfully and gloriously — began,” Graham chronicled.
The first person in his family to go to university, Graham went to Hull from his north Nottinghamshire coalmining roots to study drama and to begin to navigate his road to writing plays and becoming the successful playwright he is today.
I met him in June with a colleague in Glasgow at their request. We spent a couple of hours exploring an issue that I have some in-depth knowledge of that may, I suspect, end up as another of his plays. I found our encounter hugely invigorating.
I wasn’t at his MacTaggart lecture on Wednesday. I have, however, read the full text since. And it has prompted me to reflect again on my own working-class roots, not in a Nottinghamshire pit village but in the shipbuilding town of Greenock on the lower Clyde in the wake of the last great war. Materially, we were dirt poor, my mum and dad, my younger brother and me all squeezed into a single room in a privately rented three-room tenement flat.
Our dad, whose first name I’m proud to share, and dear old mum, who left a strict Northern Irish upbringing by her widowed father to join her older married sister in Port Glasgow in her teens, were materially bereft. But they were determined that their two boys would get the school education that had eluded them.
I still have dad’s last school certificate, clearly demonstrating his academic potential. After his alcoholic father had died, that Alf, the oldest of three sons, had to leave school and become the family breadwinner, in the carpentry shop in one of Greenock’s many shipyards.
His lifelong health issues eventually snatched him from us far too soon; but one of the many legacies that he bestowed on us was to work our way through life while profiting from the extended education that he had not enjoyed.
I delivered groceries from a store round the corner when I was still at school. The summer holidays I spent working as the galley boy on the first generation of Clyde car ferries. As demand grew, so did the hours we worked: I remember one week when I clocked up more than 100 hours on duty. When double and triple time was applied, I was left with enough after tax to buy my mum her first fridge.
So thank you, James Graham, for using your MacTaggart lecture to make the case for the value of a working-class upbringing and for exposing the extent to which such backgrounds are so woefully under-represented in today’s creative industries. The great unanswered question is what’s to be done to rectify that glaring anomaly. My fear is that nothing will change.
Alf Young is a visiting professor at Strathclyde University