Melvyn Bragg is one of the foremost Arts & Cultural Broadcaster/Writers over the last 40 years. His 'South Bank Show' was groundbreaking in its subject choices; everything from Mozart to Ken Russell to the Smiths. His latest outing, 'Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture' (BBC2) is an enormous overview of working, middle and upper class contributions to 20th Century British cultural life. The span of the short series (3 episodes) is ridiculously brief; how can you possibly do justice to such a huge topic? However, Melvyn gives it his best shot and 'thetvreviewguy' was impressed by the programme makers brilliant use of archive footage and assiduous use of apt quotations; Bragg is the perfect presenter for such a series having made the class journey himself; if ever the role of education in life's progress were to be doubted, look at the post-WW2 'Redbrick' university intake. A perfect contrast between society's different stations was the treatment of trauma in World War 1; if you were an Officer, you could be treated for 'shell-shock', if you were one of the 'men', i.e., working class, you could be shot for cowardice. Class is obviously not just an English issue, but they don't half think about it a lot. Bragg's contention appears to be that there's been an irreverisible drift towards middle class aspiration for much of the last 60 years - again, this is a broad statement; are we all middle class now (clearly not) and what does that even mean? While you could look back on the early BBC as an attempt to impose high or middle culture from above, Lord Reith seems like a pretty stand up guy 'thetvreviewguy' and infinitely preferable to Peter Bazalgette. Every documentary on class and culture has to feature George Orwell somewhere and sure enough, Eric Blair pops up on the Road to Wigan Pier. 'Thetvreviewguy' looks forward to the next two episodes; Bragg will take us through the 60s; expect more great footage down the line.
