Television is meant to be for everybody – but it isn’t. How can it be when, after nearly a century, it remains predominantly male, stale and middle-class? For decades, the industry has been talking about nurturing working-class writers at scale, rather than actually doing it. The lack of working-class voices – particularly female ones – has become so bad that the BBC admitted just two years ago that “often those from lower socio-economic backgrounds are depicted negatively, fuelled by stereotypes and seen as the object of ridicule” on screen.
But now, finally, working-class women are spearheading a big shift. So exciting is the rollcall of recent and upcoming TV shows written by working-class women that when I list them for Kit de Waal – whose BBC drama My Name Is Leon is among them – she utters two words of pure relief: “Thank fuck.”
