Thursday, 22 January 2015

Of Themselves

Bets paid out at The News Building?

The Times well and truly had by The Sun over Page 3?

Ah, you public schoolboys and your larks!
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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous22 January 2015 at 22:22

    No-one ever mentions how public school dominated the tabloid press have always been. The Sun must be 80% that way, always has been. It's as a posh as the Guardian.

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    1. David Lindsay22 January 2015 at 22:56

      All sorts of thing about it need to be seen in that light. For all my dislike of the culture of football, for example, it needs no lectures from those who sing the drinking sons of rugby, which were not written by Andrea Dworkin.

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  2. Anonymous23 January 2015 at 02:15

    It isn't just working class representation in the media that's declined-it's working class representation across all the top professions, and indeed politics.

    This all reminds me of a recent interview with leading British working-class actors in the Independent

    ""Last week the actor Stephen McGann spoke out about how difficult it is for young people like him from working-class backgrounds to enter his profession.

    "Opportunities are closing down," he told the Independent. "If you're a messy kid from a council estate today, I think the chances of you making it as a successful actor are a lot worse than they were."

    McGann, 50, youngest of the family of acting brothers, grew up on the edge of Toxteth in Liverpool and was educated at a grammar school.

    "What counted for me and my brothers – and for mates of ours like David Morrissey and Ian Hart, all growing up in Dingle and Toxteth – was the real change in education," he said. "We had one shot and we made it: none of us would be actors if we hadn't gone to that grammar school. That's where I fell in love with acting and that's why I'm here."

    McGann was echoing opinions expressed by other prominent actors recently. Brian Cox told an interviewer: "I feel awful that young people don't have the opportunities that I had when the grammar schools were here. It's like we've excluded a root element from cultural life, and I think that's very dangerous."

    ""And Julie Walters, in an interview with the Sunday Times, contrasted her youth with that of aspiring actors today. "Back then, it was still possible for a working-class kid like me to study drama because I got a Direct Grant, but the way things are now, there aren't going to be any working-class actors."

    Well done Labour. For abolishing both the Direct Grant and the grammar schools.

    What an achievement it was by Labour to drive the poor out of the media, and all the elite professions and all the elite Universities in one fell swoop.

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    1. David Lindsay23 January 2015 at 21:02

      You don't know one direct grant from another. That is rather amusing, actually.

      You have never heard of internships, either. Or of the fact that something like The Sun broadly does not recruit from the state sector on principle. Never has, never will.

      The working classes almost never went to grammar schools. And their abolition is not what has made you unsuccessful. You would have been unsuccessful, anyway.

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  3. Anonymous23 January 2015 at 02:24

    Looking at how much harder it is for the working class to get to the top today than it was in the heyday of British social mobility in the 1950's and early 60's, I was struck by this.

    ""Harold Wilson, one of the working-class boys who climbed the social ladder through a grammar school, promised that they would be abolished "over my dead body"""

    It is utterly disgusting how people like him can climb the ladder all the way to Prime Minister and then pull that ladder up behind them.

    Unforgivable.

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    1. David Lindsay23 January 2015 at 20:59

      Harold Wilson wasn't working-class!

      He went to a grammar school, for one thing. The working classes almost never went to grammar schools, indeed they were rarely entered for the exam by their middle-class teachers.

      Oxbridge was no less posh in his day than it is now. Or it is no more so now than it was then, depending on how you look at it.

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