Journal of Class & Culture - Class and Film, Part 2, Apr 2024

Play for Today (PfT) (1970–84) was regarded as the BBC’s flagship strand of single television plays, largely set in contemporary Britain in geographically diverse settings. This article analyses four PfTs from 1975 to 1978 centred on house parties for their representations of class, taste and gender: The Saturday Party (1975), Tiptoe through the Tulips (1976), Abigail’s Party (1977) and Scully’s New Year’s Eve (1978). The article examines the creative input of writers, actors and the overlooked labour of production designers who created these plays’ human spaces within the BBC’s studios. Aspects of set dressing that are analysed include wallpaper, curtains, furniture, reproductions of artworks and props. Analysis is informed by an interview with Moira Tait, a BBC production designer. BBC designers created vividly realistic impressions of contemporary life, which represented structures of feeling in the changing Britain of 1975–78, where increasing home ownership, pleasure and women’s desire for autonomy were pivotal trends.

Police and crime dramas are one of the most popular forms of TV entertainment in Britain. I first show that over the course of the past few decades, policing and surveillance has become more invasive than ever before. These phenomena are strongly tied to new forms of neo-liberalism and capitalism that encourage increasingly individualistic and fragmented societies. Yet, data shows that trust in the police is high, regardless of class background: Why might this be? I turn to depictions of surveillance and policing in British crime drama, in particular, the recently highly acclaimed Happy Valley. Whilst a well-written, heart-warming and satisfying TV series, I point to several themes that illustrate how British neo-liberal societal decay, policing and surveillance culture might be apparent. Police are presented as capable of filling the void left by the neo-liberal decimation of public services and the accompanying loneliness of intense individualism in poorer towns and cities.

This article examines the significant changes in the curation of artists’ film and video that occurred at Tate from the mid-1990s. The events taking place in this publicly funded museum, which holds the United Kingdom’s national collection of modern and contemporary art on behalf of the state, are weaved together with the development of the advocacy work in favour of artists’ film and video by US collectors Pamela and Richard Kramlich. The analysis aims to better define the role of private global economic capital in shaping curatorial approaches within state-funded national institutions and, in turn, within the distinction-making processes that lead to social reproduction. Attention is given to how artists’ film and videos, despite their often progressive content and ephemeral nature, in their passage from cinema/television to the gallery, have not escaped the distinction-making role fulfilled by other more traditional art forms, thus contributing to the persistence of class distinctions.