The North, the working class novel, the iplayer
For those of you with a passing interest in Northern working class culture and writings thereon (and let's face it, on this blog it's a definite benefit) there are a couple of rather interesting radio programmes on the BBC iplayer and they look like they're available for quite some time yet.
The first is Beyond the Kitchen Sink, which I must have missed last year when it was on as part of the British New Wave season. It does make the occasional reference to other programmes from the season, which I don't think are still available, but it's an enjoyable documentary in its own right. For just short of an hour, Paul Allen talks about the plays and novels of the mid-fifties to sixties which brought working class voices to the fore. There are archive contributions from the likes of John Osborne, David Storey, Stan Barstow, and clips from the film and radio adaptations of their work. A much more intelligent treatment than the BBC TV documentary from September 2010 with an overlapping focus (which I reviewed here) it asks questions like why were the writers mainly northern, mainly men, and why did it appear to be a brief trend. A suggestion for part of the answer to the last question is that writers following in their footsteps went into TV rather than writing plays or novels, which brings me neatly to the next programme.
Bingo, Barbie and Barthes: 50 Years of Cultural Studies is a dreadful title for a thought-provoking two-part documentary on the origins and legacy of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which Richard Hoggart founded in 1964 after he'd written The Uses of Literacy (which I've written about before). It features interviews with co-founder Stuart Hall who died recently, as well as other cultural studies academics past and present. It's interesting to note how far removed cultural studies now seems to be (particularly in the popular imagination) from Hoggart's intention but I do think that at its most incisive it can tell us a lot about the state of our society, for instance by examining the prevalence and format of TV talent shows or Downton Abbey or celebrity gossip magazines.
If any of that's put you in the mood for some Northern writing and you haven't sampled it already, you could try my short story collection The Little Book of Northern Women. Some of it even has a working class setting...