Our Britain columnist laments the decline of working-class culture
I FINALLY GOT round to watching a few episodes of “Fleabag” to see what all the fuss is about. A few good scenes, I thought, and a magnificently disgusting character with a beard, but apart from that underwhelming. The breaking of conventions was tediously conventional; the sentimentality, particularly about a pet hamster, was cloying….
Comedy used to be a pretty working-class affair. In the Victorian and Edwardian era the upper-classes went to music halls to listen to working-class songs and jokes. Many of the giants of post-war comedy such as Eric Morecambe and Les Dawson came from the northern working class, their talents honed in working-men’s clubs and local talent contests. The “Carry On” films traded in seaside-postcard smut while taking pot-shots at the pretensions of the British professional classes .
A popular explanation for this great social closure is that the fix-is-in: a tiny clique of hyper-connected metropolitan liberals have seized control of the machinery of cultural production and then throw a few baubles to selected minorities in order to persuade everybody that Britain is still an opportunity society.
Businesses are calculating exactly what a far-left government would mean and preparing to act accordingly. Foreign powers are beginning to think seriously about what they would do if Britain were run by a man whose basic foreign policy principle is “whatever America is for I’m against”. The Israelis are terrified about the prospects of a British prime minister who has supported Hamas, a militant Islamist group in Palestine, and indulged anti-Semites in his party’s ranks.
Kenneth Clarke, who succeeds amazingly well in combining his twin roles as Tory grandee and regular bloke, recently gave a long interview to thein which he said that he repairs to the Kennington Tandoori every Tuesday evening on his own to enjoy a curry and read a copy of. A colleague of mine found himself having dinner in that very Tandoori last Tuesday. Sure enough Mr Clarke was sitting there, on his own in a window seat, solidly working his way through his copy of.
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