BBC 2's 'White Season'

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gumdrops

Well-known member
supposely a series of programmes about white working class identity. saw the advert for it last night and i found it a bit worrying. its a white guy getting his face written on in non english languages in black marker until hes written on so much that his face turns black, at which point the tagline comes up - it was something like 'has white working class identity dissapeared'. the implication of course being that immigrants have 'ruined' traditional 'british identity' (as if trad brit identity wouldnt have changed without immigrants), replacing it with a foreign culture and burying all notions of englishness in the meantime, and sullying this country etc etc.

i dont have a prob with bbc2 doing something about working class white britain, its about time really, but from what safraz manzoor was saying on newsnight, this sounds like its just going to be sensationalistic and pandering to the prejudices of the majority - about how white britain is 'under threat' from ethnic immigrants, yet again. if thats true, it seems a bit irresponsible imo, even if it is just people being honest about how they see things. also likely to be one sided from the way its being advertised (although this might just be to lure viewers, and then give them a more balanced picture once they see it). but what about w/c white ppl who work side by side with black/asian ppl and dont think were just ruining everything? i hope theyll show some of that too.

should be interesting anyway. im definitely going to watch it. even if it will make my blood boil (hopefully it wont though)

heres the link -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/white/
 
you

you

Well-known member
I really hope the content wont follow along the same lines im implication as the trailer.

If c4 are not making an 'edgy' drama about a council estate then its an 'edgy' drama about extremists in britain, or people with an unusual medical condition.... I dont know what the medias fascination with certain sectors of the population stems from but I bet its pretty annoying for the groups portrayed to watch every night. Working Class IS the character, Muslim - IS the character - but thats as far as it goes, whereas another groups class or religion isn't mentioned ( as if its a 'norm' ) and their character is actually explored or developed...

Things like this always have that detached view of people as if they are in a petri dish -this perspective is never given for m/c white british or hindus ( as an example ). You never see a couple on location location who only have a 40k deposit to work with, because I guess from the media's position they want 'normal' people to be looking for houses. I think this aspect of television is very telling of the lack of class mobility and also the general sort of person in television and their views. Shameless is a perfect example of this, total tripe.

K-punk said some very interesting things about class differences in the media a while ago, something about Hugh "sternly explains it all ( to the lower breeds )" Whittingstall..... eejit.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Shameless is a perfect example of this, total tripe.
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Shameless was great when it started. Sadly it lost its soul when first James McAvoy and then Anne-Marie Duff left. Since then, any characters who rely on boring old honest humanity (like the couple next door) have been moved out and the freaks brought in.

Btw, Shameless was written by Paul Abbott. I don't think he'd appreciate being lumped in with your caricature (generally correct though it is).
 
you

you

Well-known member
Yeah, I know about Paul Abbott ( hasn't he done well! ;-) ), last episode I saw felt horrid though, alcoholism, check, gay, check, council estate, check - character depth? Why bother?

Shit - his wiki page is awful, this is what I find annoying, people from a middle t upper class background would just be referred to as a writer, not upper class writer - whereas a guy like Paul Abbott will always be mentioned as a "working class writer" - hmph.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
you said:
Yeah, I know about Paul Abbott ( hasn't he done well! ;-) ), last episode I saw felt horrid though, alcoholism, check, gay, check, council estate, check - character depth? Why bother?
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Agreed (though only on aszsumption, since I gave up at the start of series 4. Steve and Fi were the soul of the show. When they left it was just a steady slide into Carry On up the DSS.
 
hucks

hucks

Your Message Here
This book (The Likes of Us by Michael Collins) is an interesting read on what has happened to the white working class, mainly in London. Quite a personal book in parts, going through his own family history in Southwark, as I remember.

I think this series can only work if it looks at Working Class as much as it looks at White.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
hucks said:
This book (The Likes of Us by Michael Collins) is an interesting read on what has happened to the white working class, mainly in London. Quite a personal book in parts, going through his own family history in Southwark, as I remember.

I think this series can only work if it looks at Working Class as much as it looks at White.
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I agree about the Collins book, tho he is a bit of a romantic if I remember rightly. Also agree about your last point - there is a lot of potential for interesting material there.
 
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gumdrops

Well-known member
will read the CIF piece later but even the title (which might not reflect the piece accurately, i know) is 'why britain failed its white working class'. which is a bit 'hmm' really. its failed ONLY the white w/c? its failed the entire working class, regardless of race.

but if this is just about white working class britains, then yeah, i do think maybe something should be done but anxiety about english identity isnt only w/c, its across the board. theres a general insecurity at the moment i think about english national identity and when that sort of thing is happening, it makes scapegoating even more attractive/rife. english people *should* be allowed to be proud of their heritage and upper-middle classers shouldnt try and banish certain old timey things just cos they dont like them or are embarassed by w/c people, cos soon as that happens, then people start to blame immigrants when they arent the ones making these new rules...

edit - that article was quite lazy although i liked the comments about dave and how w/c communities 'live and love together' even if its hard at the end. that theres so many people with sense in the comments section was encouraging though.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
gumdrops said:
will read the CIF piece later but even the title (which might not reflect the piece accurately, i know) is 'why britain failed its white working class'. which is a bit 'hmm' really. its failed ONLY the white w/c? its failed the entire working class, regardless of race.
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It's about the perception of the working class, esp in art and media, how they went from the salt-of-the-earth in kitchen sink dramas to (in the eyes of some) embarrassing thick racists.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Thoughts on this?

I only saw the Bradford Social Club one, which was ok given its extraordinarily narrow focus.

There was some discussion on Newsnight which basically revealed that a black tory, a Sun columnist and a trade unionist had a better understanding of class than Margaret Hodge. Plus bonus loopy section featuring Nick Griffin blaming hard drugs in the UK on Islam.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
worrior said:
the sound of a nail being hit squarely on the head...
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While I broadly agree with k-punk's thesis here, viz. that the immigration 'debate' (or simple scare-mongering) is often used to whitewash issues that have more to do with class or economics, I couldn't help but be struck by this:

for all the gestures towards multiculturalism and diversity in Britain, being white remains pervasively normative.
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Eh? Might this possibly have something to do with the fact that the UK's population is over 90% white? Even if you exclude Irish and continental Europeans, that's still 86% white British.* And in any case, have you seen an information poster of some kind lately? They invariably feature one white person, one black person, one South Asian, perhaps an Arab or East Asian if space allows...and k-punk clearly doesn't recall his maths GCSE too well: "Tom, Ling and Sanjay are playing a probability game...". So on this count, ethnic minorities are drastically overrepresented in the public eye.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uk#Migration_and_ethnicity

Edit: the CIF piece is good, btw.
 
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worrior

Well-known member
I think he's referring more to how despite all the public speak of multiculturalism and the information posters you mention, whiteness is still the normative understanding of British identity and history. And as with the BBC's white working-class debate being framed by its middle-class programme controllers, self-consciously multicultural gestures are generally instigated and managed by a white political elite and commentariat.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Well yeah, I get that, but Britain is mostly white now and was virtually exclusively white until relatively recently in history. Of course, Britain has had a huge impact on and interaction with the rest of the world for hundreds of years - and this certainly hasn't gone unacknowledged, as the abundance of museum exhibitions and even entire museums dedicated to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, British colonialism and so on demonstrate. Which is all a good thing, of course.

As far as the BBC goes, I suppose its controllers are going to see things through a white middle-class perspective for as long as it takes for a significant number of non-white and/or non-working class people to become controllers. Until then, is it the case that attempts to programme 'multiculturally' are doomed to be 'self-conscious' at best, or either patronising or stereotypical at worst?
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Mr. Tea said:
Eh? Might this possibly have something to do with the fact that the UK's population is over 90% white? Even if you exclude Irish and continental Europeans, that's still 86% white British.* And in any case, have you seen an information poster of some kind lately? They invariably feature one white person, one black person, one South Asian, perhaps an Arab or East Asian if space allows...and k-punk clearly doesn't recall his maths GCSE too well: "Tom, Ling and Sanjay are playing a probability game...". So on this count, ethnic minorities are drastically overrepresented in the public eye.
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Of course the majority of people in the U.K. are white, but that's not the issue here--when k-punk says that "whiteness" is *pervasively normative*, he's saying that the cultural preferences of this white majority are not only practiced and preached by them, but that they're represented by culture at large as thee way to be, the "normal" way, the "natural" way...i thought he made good points about the slick way racists "naturalize" their norms to make them somehow more powerful tools against Others...
 
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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Don't have a telly so didn't see any of this, but it seems that's exactly the opportunity that was missed. But in principle it is something that is absolutely worth investigating.

I do find all the stuff around class, national identity, immigration very interesting especially as my own experience of these things rarely seems to fit in to what any commentators say about them. K-Punk and co. have made some really good observations though.
 
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