Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain

David Forrest is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is the author of Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics (2013), co-editor of Filmurbia: Screening The Suburbs (2017) with Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, and is currently at work on a book entitled New Realisms: Contemporary British Cinema.Beth Johnson is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Leeds, UK. Her publications include Paul Abbott (2013) and alongside David Forrest she recently co-edited a dossier on ‘Northern English Stardom’ in The Journal of Popular Television (4/2, 2016).

“Rather than homogenise class’s meaning, the editors open the collection up to considering how television constructs its own images of class. Class is approached as a dynamic issue, present as an overt object of representation as well as a set of ideological positions which shape television’s visual address.” (Daniel Martin, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 14 (4), September, 2019)“The authors here adopt a variety of critical approaches that, while alive to the importance in itself of class visibility in contemporary television, are also alert to the problematic discourses it sometimes generates. … This is an indispensable book for anyone wanting to know more about recent British television drama, and why it remains an important subject of study.” (Neil Archer, cercles.com, July)

• 1. Introduction (David Forrest and Beth Johnson).- Part I: Authorship and Class - 2. Beth Johnson (The University of Leeds) – This is England: Authorship, Critical Contexts and Class Telly.- 3. David Forrest (The University of Sheffield) – Jimmy McGovern’s The Street and the Politics of Everyday Life.- 4. Stephen Harper (The University of Portsmouth) - High-flyers, Hooligans and Helpmates: Images of Social Class in the Television Dramas of Stephen Poliakoff.- Part II: Institutions and Structures of Class - 5. Paul Elliott (University of Worcester) - Through Class Darkly: Class in the British TV Noir.- 6. Felicity Colman and David James (Manchester Metropolitan University) - Military Class: Hearts and Minds on the Domestic Screen.- 7. Gill Jamieson (University of the West of Scotland) - Creating a Level Playing Field: ‘Honest Endeavour Together!’: Social Mobility, Entrepreneurialism and Class in Mr Selfridge.- 8. James Dalby (Universityof Gloucestershire) - Social Class and Television Audiences in the 1990s.- 9. HollyGale Millette (The University of Southampton) - Searching for Hugh Gaitskell in a Neoliberal Landscape – Masculinities and Class Mobility in Goodnight Sweetheart.- Part III: Place and Class - 10. James Leggott (Northumbria University) - From Newcastle to Nashville:  The Northern Soul of Jimmy Nail.- 11. Het Phillips (University of Birmingham) - ‘A Woman Like That Is Not A Woman, Quite. I Have Been Her Kind’: Maxine Peake and the Gothic Excess of Northern Femininity.- 12. Paul Long (Birmingham City University) – Class, Place and History in the Imaginative Landscapes of Peaky Blinders.- 13. Helen Piper (University of Bristol) - Happy Valley: Compassion, evil and exploitation in an ordinary ‘trouble town’.- Part IV: Taste and Class - 14. Phil Wickham (University of Exeter) - 21st Century British Sitcom and “the Hidden Injuries of Class”.- 15. Chris Pallant and James Newton (Canterbury Christchurch University) - Animating Class in Contemporary British Television.- 16. Antony Mullen (Durham University) - Public Property: Celebrity and the Politics of New Labour in Footballers’ Wives.- 17. Sue Vice (The University of Sheffield) - Grandma’s House and the Charms of the Petit-Bourgeoisie.