David Tucker - British Social Realism in The Arts Since 1940

British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940
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British Social Realism
in the Arts since 1940
Edited by
David Tucker
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © David Tucker 2011
Individual chapters © Contributors 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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British social realism in the arts since 1940 / edited by David Tucker.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–24245–6 (hardback)
1. Social realism in the arts—Great Britain. 2. Social realism—
Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Tucker, David, 1978–
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Contents
List of Figures viii
Acknowledgements x
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction – ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ Vs ‘the

incomprehensibility of the real’: Making the Case for British
Social Realism 1
David Tucker
1 Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social

Realist Film 17
Paul Dave
2 Staging the Contemporary: Politics and Practice in Post-War

Social Realist Theatre 57
Stephen Lacey
3 Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction 81

Rod Mengham
4 ‘this/is not a metaphor’: The Possibility of Social Realism

in British Poetry 103
Keston Sutherland
5 Re-presenting Reality, Recovering the Social: The Poetics

and Politics of Social Realism and Visual Art 132
Gillian Whiteley
6 Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and

the Popular 172
Dave Rolinson
Index 212
vii
List of Figures
I.1 Humphrey Spender. Street Scene, Bolton (1937). Spender

spies a man who might be waiting for the traffic light to
change colour. c Bolton Council 7
1.1 Robinson in Ruins (2010). The wandering Robinson tracks
the survival of life in a time of crisis.
c Patrick Keiller 21
1.2 Photograph from the set of This is England (2006). Shaun
(Thomas Turgoose) is shorn in Shane Meadows’ working
class culture of mutual care. c Dean Roberts 36
1.3 Photograph from the set of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004).
Richard (Paddy Considine) and his brother Anthony
(Toby Kebbell) make their way across England’s Midlands
looking for revenge. c Dean Roberts 38
1.4 Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901),
from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. A new vision
of the working class. c BFI 42
5.1 Dame Laura Knight RA, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring,
1943, oil painting. c Imperial War Museum 139
5.2 Peter L. Péri, South Lambeth Council Estate, c. 1949. Péri
created this large concrete mural relief on the staircase
tower of a block of flats built by the London County
Council. c The Courtauld Institute of Art 141
5.3 Visitors passing Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders at the
Festival of Britain in 1951. Charoux’s large relief was at
the end of the Sea and Ships Pavilion and was part of the
River Walk at the South Bank Exhibition. c London
Transport Museum 142
5.4 Jack Smith, Mother Bathing Child, 1953, oil on board.
c The Tate Collection 145
5.5 David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire.
Photograph by Daniel Meadows from the Free
Photographic Omnibus, 1973. ‘David lived with his
father and his step-mother in a council estate at
Conanby. When he was fourteen David was playing with
a lemon-squeezer in a bus queue; some of the contents of
the lemon-squeezer sprayed over an eighteen-year-old
viii
List of Figures ix
sixth former who beat David up. He suffered a fractured

skull and a brain haemorrhage and was confined to
hospital for three months. David worked for a
coach-builder in Rotherham and managed quite well in
spite of a very pronounced limp.’ (Daniel Meadows in
private correspondence with the author July 2010).
c Daniel Meadows 157
5.6 Chris Killip, Youth, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976.
c Chris Killip 159
Acknowledgements
The editor wishes to thank the following for their generous support:
Dorothy Sheridan and James Hinton for their assistance with and
insights into the Mass Observation Archive; Catherine Mitchell at
Palgrave and Christabel Scaife for all their help in bringing the book
to print; Blunt London for help with images; Perry Bonewell at Bolton
Museum for help with and kind permission to use images from the
Humphrey Spender collection.
The editor, authors and publisher wish to thank the following for
generous permission to reproduce copyright material: Daniel Meadows
for David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire (1973), Chris
Killip for Youth, Jarrow, Tyneside (1976), the London Transport Museum
for ‘Visitors Passing Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders at the Festival of
Britain in 1951’ (1951), the Courtauld Institute of Art for South Lambeth
Council Estate by Peter L. Péri (c.1949), the Imperial War Museum Collec-
tion for Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring by Dame Laura Knight (1943),
Tate Images for Mother Bathing Child by Jack Smith (1953), Dean Rogers
for photographs from the film sets of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and
This is England (2006), Patrick Keiller for a still from Robinson in Ruins
(2010), The British Film Institute for a still from Alfred Butterworth &
Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901), from the Mitchell and Kenyon Col-
lection, Errata Editions for an extract from Walking Back Home, Bolton
Council for images from the Humphrey Spender collection, Faber &
Faber for an extract from Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, and for an
excerpt from ‘nora’s place’ c Tom Leonard from outside the narrative:
poems 1965-2009, WordPower/Etruscan Books 2009.
x
Notes on Contributors
Paul Dave is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social

Sciences, University of East London. His publications include Visions of
England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (2006) along with
other contributions to journals and edited collections on British cinema.
His current research is on British cinema and romanticism.
Stephen Lacey is Professor of Drama, Film and Television, at the Uni-

versity of Glamorgan. His publications include British Realist Theatre:
The New Wave in its Context 1956–65 (1995), Television Drama: Past
Present and Future with J. Bignell and M.K. Macmurraugh-Kavanagh
(editors) (Palgrave, 2000), Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives
with J. Bignell (editors) (2005), and Tony Garnett (2007). From 2002
to 2006 he was co-director of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Cul-
tures of British TV Drama: 1960–82’ and is currently part of another
AHRC project, ‘Spaces of Television Drama: Production, Site and Style’
(with Jonathan Bignell and James Chapman). He was also part of a
team researching the representation of Cardiff and Wales in Dr Who
and Torchwood funded by the BBC Trust and has recently completed a
monograph for the BFI/Palgrave on Cathy Come Home (2011).
Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University

of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus Col-
lege. He is the author of books on Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and
Henry Green, as well as of The Descent of Language (1993). He has edited
collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde
art, and the fiction of the 1940s. He is also the editor of the Equipage
series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of Altered
State: the New Polish Poetry (2003) and co-editor of Vanishing Points:
New Modernist Poems (2005). His own poems have been published under
the titles Unsung: New and selected Poems (1996; 2nd edition, 2001) and
Parleys and Skirmishes with photographs by Marc Atkins (2007). His most
recent books are Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction, co-written with Sophie
Gilmartin (2007) and The Salt Companion to John Tranter (2010).
Dave Rolinson is Lecturer in the Department of Film, Media and Jour-

nalism at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Alan Clarke
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
(2005), articles on British film and TV for various books and journals
including the Journal of British Cinema and Television and The Cinema of
Britain and Ireland, and booklets for DVDs including This Sporting Life. He
is writing a book on Stephen Frears, partly facilitated by AHRC research
leave, some of the findings from which appear in this book. He edits the
website www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk.
Keston Sutherland is Reader in Poetics at the University of Sussex. His

publications include Stupefaction: a radical anatomy of phantoms (2011),
essays on poetry, philosophy and social theory, and several books of
poetry, including The Stats on Infinity (2010), Stress Position (2009) and
Hot White Andy (2007). He edits the critical theory and poetics journal
Quid.
David Tucker is Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex. He has pub-

lished in the journals Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of
Beckett Studies, and collections including Publishing Samuel Beckett (2011)
and The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett (2009). He has exhibited artwork
in New York and Berlin, and is currently preparing a monograph on
Samuel Beckett’s fascinations with the seventeenth-century philosopher
Arnold Geulincx.
Gillian Whiteley is a curator and Lecturer in Critical and Historical

Studies at Loughborough University School of the Arts. Publications
include monographs Assembling the Absurd: The Sculpture of George
Fullard (1998) and Social, Savage, Sensual: The Sculpture of Ralph Brown
(2009); essays in P. Curtis(ed.), Sculpture in 20th-century Britain, (2003)
and H. Crawford (ed.), Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories and Con-
versations in Collaborative Art Practices (2008), and co-editing (with Jane
Tormey) Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film (2009).
She is currently completing a book Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash for
IB Tauris. Earlier projects include conducting interviews for the National
Sound Archives Artists’ Lives Project and contributing ‘Art for Social
Space: Public Sculpture and Urban Regeneration in Postwar Britain’ to
e-project Designing Britain 1945–75 (www.vads.ac.uk) Her curated exhibi-
tions include Radical Mayhem: Welfare State International and its Followers
(2008) at MidPennine Arts, Burnley and Pan-demonium at AC Institute,
New York (2009). She is Associate Editor of the journal, Art & the Public
Sphere. See www.bricolagekitchen.com.
Introduction – ‘an anthropology
of ourselves’ Vs ‘the
incomprehensibility of the real’:
Making the Case for British Social
Realism
David Tucker
In 1930, at the age of twenty-four and unsure where his literary

prospects lay, Samuel Beckett, the future Nobel Prize winner and leading
figure of the twentieth-century literary avant-garde, gave a term’s worth
of lectures on modern French literature at his old university, Trinity
College Dublin. Notes to these lectures survive as fragmentary transcrip-
tions taken by a small number of the students then present. One of
these students, Rachel Burrows, recalls Beckett’s thoughts on the realism
of Balzac:
He hated what he called the snowball act, which means that you
do something that has causes, causes, causes, causes so that it’s all
perfectly consistent.
(Burrows 1989, p. 5)
For Beckett, such a ‘snowball act’ of cause and effect in Balzac’s realism
fails because it falls too far short of recognizing what Beckett described
to his students as ‘the incomprehensibility of the real’ (ibid.). According
to Beckett, an author’s focus on the surface details of causal connections
between one thing and another emphatically does not get anywhere
near the heart of the matter. Beckett would later refer to fictional char-
acters in works subjected to what he called this ‘anchaînement mécanique,
fatal, de circonstances [mechanical, fatal, enchainment of circumstances]’
(Le Juez 2008, p. 28) as merely ‘clockwork cabbages’, unreal life-forms
stuttering along, half-suffocating in a ‘chloroformed world’ (Beckett
1992, p. 119).
However, Beckett also rejected wholeheartedly the option of refuge in
extreme alternatives to naturalistic realism. One of these alternatives – a
1
2 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940
formalized conceptual abstraction – came in for particularly sharp criti-

cism. Beckett wrote derisively in 1948 of what he called the ‘estimables
abstracteurs de quintessence [estimable abstractors of quintessence]
Mondrian, Lissitzky, Malevitsch, Moholy-Nagy’ (Beckett 1983, p. 135).
Yet, as Erik Tonning has argued, Beckett’s dislike of the abstract in these
painters’ works does not necessarily exclude his admiration for more
complex formulations of abstraction. Transposing the term ‘abstract’
into his own preferred vocabulary of the ‘metaphysical concrete’,
Beckett commented in his diary, while visiting Germany in 1936, on
Karl Ballmer’s painting Kopf in Rot (c.1930). According to Beckett’s note,
Kopf in Rot instances ‘fully a posteriori painting. Object not exploited
to illustrate an idea, as in say [Fernand] Léger or [Willi] Baumeister, but
primary’ (cited in Tonning 2007, p. 22). What appears to be the case
with Beckett’s critique of the ‘estimables abstracteurs’, as with that of
Balzac’s realism, is that his arguments are at least partly directed against
one-sided and simplistically inadequate genre conventions.
Beckett’s arguments against Balzac’s realism might also benefit from
their being thought of in relation to a broader literary–historical con-
text; as was the case with a number of Modernist innovators, Beckett’s
criticisms were in part a reaction against his more immediate forebears.
In a famous letter to his friend Axel Kaun of July 1937, for example,
Beckett imagines the formal literary stylistics he was so opposed to via
images of nineteenth-century social gentilities:
Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as

a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman.
A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain
circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used
where it is being most efficiently misused.
(Beckett 1983, pp. 171–2)
This might all seem a world away from British social realism. Yet what
it helps to foreground is the possibility of realism, and critiques of real-
ism, as historically determined, malleable and mutable. Moving towards
historicizing Beckett’s arguments as a microcosm of broader Modernist
aesthetics does, admittedly, rob this most individual of authors of some
of his individuality. However, it also serves to bring into focus Beckett’s
complex and ambitious polemic as one that is in part determined by
its historical context, and it thereby warns us against certain dangers
of rushing too fast to dismiss outright and for all time something that
might openly call itself, perhaps even without shame, ‘realism’.
Introduction 3
Let us take a further refracted approach to an aspect of realism, namely

that of the visible, verifiable details of a reality, via the Polish-born film-
maker Krzysztof Kieślowski. Kieślowski argues that the goal of art is ‘to
capture what lies within us’ (Kieślowski 1993, p. 194). This is something
beyond or behind the surfaces of objects, something underlying the
‘fabric of things’ that we can physically sense, as Virginia Woolf dismis-
sively described the ‘Edwardian’ novelist’s world in Character in Fiction
(Woolf 2008, p. 49). According to Kieślowski, ‘[g]reat literature doesn’t
only get nearer to it, it’s in a position to describe it’ (Kieślowski 1993,
p. 194). That might be good news for literature, but literature’s poorer
cousin – cinema – cannot, according to Kieślowski, match literature’s
access to such a ‘within’ ‘because it [cinema] doesn’t have the means. It’s
not intelligent enough. Consequently, it’s not equivocal enough’ (ibid.,
p. 195). Cinema’s natural habitat, Kieślowski goes on to claim, is a world
of prosaic reality and concomitant surface detail, a ‘fabric of things’ that
blocks access to anything beyond itself:
For me, a bottle of milk is simply a bottle of milk; when it spills, it

means milk’s been spilt. Nothing more. It doesn’t mean the world’s
fallen apart or that the milk symbolizes a mother’s milk which her
child couldn’t drink because the mother died early, for example.
It doesn’t mean that to me. A bottle of spilt milk is simply a bot-
tle of spilt milk. And that’s cinema. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean
anything else.
(Kieślowski 1993, p. 195)
Even with such a sure sense of cinema’s grounding in the detail of visi-
ble reality, however, Kieślowski describes his own continual, aspirational
drive against these essential realist strictures. The filmmaker admits that
he himself has never managed to escape cinema’s formal literalism. Yet
he does claim that such an urge against the boundaries of cinematic
form has come to succeed on a few occasions, and his list of the filmmak-
ers who have managed to somehow make cinema ‘intelligent enough’
in this regard might surprise:
Welles achieved that miracle once. Only one director in the world
has managed to achieve that miracle in the last few years, and
that’s Tarkovsky. Bergman achieved this miracle a few times. Fellini
achieved it a few times. A few people achieved it. Ken Loach,
too, in Kes.
(Ibid.)
Loach is the only director in Kieślowski’s list who is given with a

Christian name, an indication perhaps that few British filmmakers
are normally considered alongside such estimable company. However,
Kieślowski’s comments are not quoted here as an invocation of authority
for a British filmmaker by association with the giants of world cinema.
More importantly, what they point to is the notion of an escape from lit-
eralism operating in one of the films most frequently cited as typifying
genre conventions of British social realism, a film that itself tells a story
about flights of freedom and struggles against constraint, Loach’s adap-
tation of Barry Hines’s 1968 A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes (1969). Kieślowski’s
conception of realist detail is one where no access is granted to any-
thing beyond the surface displayed. It is realism without a capacity
for metonymy or metaphor. In order to attain something approach-
ing the full-blooded capabilities of literature, Kieślowski implies, film
must somehow move, or be pushed, beyond its own lack of intel-
ligence. However, as is revealed with the reference to Kes, it is not
necessary to simply turn one’s back on realism per se in order to achieve
this. Kieślowski’s comments, along with Beckett’s, pose challenges to
simplistic categorizations of realism.
These challenges point to the possibility of revealing what might be
strange and different in the otherwise seemingly ordinary and usual,
and of a need to seek precision in discussions of realism. They can be
further focused with a comparison that places them in the context of
an appreciation of social realism in its specifically British, twentieth-
century, manifestations. It is a comparison that reveals a strangeness
and ineffability indelibly tied into an otherwise realist, and avowedly
social, project, and that places us at the start of the historical period
traversed in this volume.
In 1937, Tom Harrisson, an anthropologist who had spent a num-
ber of years living with tribal groups in Borneo and claimed to have
partaken in cannibalism, along with Humphrey Jennings, co-curator
of London’s major International Surrealist Exhibition of June 1936 and a
documentary filmmaker whom Lindsay Anderson famously described
as ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’ (cited in
Jennings 1982, p. 53), and Charles Madge, a poet whose editor was T.S.
Eliot at Faber & Faber, together founded the organization they called
Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation turned just such a transcription
of surface detail, the surface detail that was rejected by the Modernist
aesthetics of Beckett and Woolf, and was cited by Kieślowski as evidence
of cinema’s innate lack of intelligence, to incredible lengths into a pro-
posal for a social science. What Harrisson called Mass-Observation’s
Introduction 5
‘anthropology of ourselves’ intended to reveal was nothing less grand

than the ‘Mass’ of Britain to itself (Mass-Observation 1943, p. 7).
The three founders had become disillusioned with what they saw
as an entrenched political and media bias, and their frustration came
to a head following media coverage of Edward VIII’s abdication crisis
of 1936. They sought, in opposition to the dominant mainstream, to
give voice to ‘the ordinary and non-vocal masses of Britain’ (Harrisson
1961, p. 14). To this professed end they followed a twofold route.
In London, Jennings and Madge concentrated on recruiting a nation-
wide panel of what they referred to as ‘observers’. These recruits were
invited to record their personal impressions of large-scale political and
cultural events, beginning with the abdication crisis, in the form of
answers to a questionnaire derived from Jennings’ and Madge’s ideas
for ‘Popular Poetry’. As Nick Hubble describes it, ‘Popular Poetry’
was ‘a surrealist-inspired social movement that would map the col-
lective mass consciousness of the nation through the establishment
of factory- and college-based ‘Coincidence Clubs’ (Hubble 2006, p. 4).
Observers also answered questions about day-to-day minutiae going on
around them, and their personal beliefs about topics such as super-
stition. Mass-Observation considered the minutiae of personal, indi-
vidual response to be the important and neglected context in which
larger-scale events took place, and those early questionnaires became
templates for what are now known as ‘directives’; sets of themed
questions still sent out to volunteers in 2010. Recent examples have
been concerned with such diverse topics as ‘Your Home’, ‘Quoting
and Quotations’, ‘Public Library Buildings’, and ‘Genes, Genetics and
Cloning’.
A second approach to data collection was founded in the group’s
northern outpost of the pen-named ‘Worktown’, so-called after Helen
Lynd’s American study Middletown, and otherwise known as Bolton,
where Harrisson was the group’s convenor. Harrisson was later to
explain his choice of Bolton as having been determined by concerns
of a global, as well as of a local nature. He wrote in a later reappraisal
of Mass-Observation entitled Britain Revisited about his anthropological
expedition to Malekula in the New Hebrides and how this had influ-
enced his choice of and research in Bolton. It had struck Harrisson that
a very specific and important ‘trail led from the Western Pacific to the
south of Lancashire’ (Harrisson 1961, p. 26):
What was there of Western civilisation which impacted into the

tremendously independent and self-contained culture of those
cannibal people on their Melenesian mountain? Only one thing,

significantly, in the mid-thirties: the Unilever Combine.
(Ibid., p. 25)
Having noted that ‘[e]ven the cannibals in the mountains of Melanesia

were touched by the tentacles of this colossus, buying copra, selling
soap’, Harrisson traced this supply back to Unilever’s beginnings in
Bolton (Harrisson 1959, p. 159). Harrisson had seemingly located, in the
birthplace of William Lever in Park Street, Bolton, nothing less than the
nascent heart of global capitalism’s Victorian birth. Setting up headquar-
ters only half a mile away at 85 Davenport Street, Harrisson proceeded
to spy on, and to encourage others to spy on, or ‘observe’, those in
most immediate physical proximity to this almost mythical centre – the
working class of Bolton.1
Research in Worktown involved some even more curious approaches
to data collection than the questionnaires being compiled under the
auspices of Jennings and Madge in London. Harrisson’s group insisted
that the information collected on members of the public must be gath-
ered, at least for the most part, surreptitiously, and various covert obser-
vational and interventionist ruses were therefore contrived. According
to these procedures few details were considered too insignificant to
escape the prying eyes of the organization’s observers. For example,
in some of their studies the observers would count the taps a person
in a pub made on a cigarette to dispel their ash. They noted where
exactly on a female partner’s body men placed their hands during pub-
lic dances. Taking their apparent fascination with forms of intimacy
beyond observation, members of the group would intervene on what
they apprised as intimate moments, physically tripping into courting
couples on Blackpool promenade and recording the results. All of this
real detail was intended by the group to form the vital material needed
in the new ‘anthropology of ourselves’. This was an anthropology that
placed a particular emphasis on the importance of single images, of sin-
gle instances of actual things happening, and being seen to happen.
Accordingly, the photographer Humphrey Spender joined the Bolton
group. Though Spender was only with the group for a short time,
many of his images have come to encapsulate the experiences of Mass-
Observation in Bolton. Spender would conceal a camera in what he
describes as a ‘very shabby raincoat’, and take pictures of people who
were unaware they were being photographed (Spender 1982, p. 18).
Mass-Observation was in one sense a very realist project, a living
archival collation where the details recorded were interpreted, if without
Introduction 7
Figure I.1 Humphrey Spender. Street Scene, Bolton (1937). Spender spies a man
who might be waiting for the traffic light to change colour.
c Bolton Council
strictly planned methodology, as a kind of cultural metonymic, the oth-

erwise overlooked physical and psychological minutiae of Britain used
to reveal the identity of a country to itself.
In another sense, the early days of the project discussed here realized
a much stranger aesthetic. Driven by Harrisson’s subjective associa-
tive procedures as they combined with the threesome’s broader remit
for the organization, the Bolton group’s focus on teaspoons, hands,
hats, cigarettes, walking, dancing, drinking, manual labour and social-
izing as images to be described, sketched or photographed, produced a
kind of archive of the imaginary, a sometimes whimsical and playfully
associative archive that tells us at least as much about the observers
themselves and their own social–historical contexts as it does of the
streets and people of Bolton. While it would be too simplistic to invoke
Jennings’ credentials in the movement and call this imaginative impetus
‘surrealist’, nevertheless there is a collision of multiple worlds and
world-views in the early days of Mass-Observation. Spender notes, for
instance, how Harrisson imported his anthropological background into
the Bolton work:
I think Tom, having worked a lot in remote parts of the world, was
perhaps anxious to find parallels in the life of this country. And so,
having observed ritualistic dancing, and the masks, the costumes and
other art connected with it, he would constantly be on the lookout
for the same sort of thing in Bolton. For example, at every possible
opportunity the children used to put on paper hats and dance about:
these were quite innocent, childish affairs, but Tom was inclined to
put rather mysterious interpretations on them. He had a tendency to
wish things on to events in that way.
(Ibid., p. 16)
In contrast to the way the realist cinema of Kieślowski would view these
dancing children, as straightforwardly just children, dancing, Spender
reveals how Harrisson’s realist anthropology was sometimes compelled
by an associative, logical yet strange and individual frame of reference.
If the soap in Bolton and Melanesia is the same, the analysis appears
to run, might the children of the two places not also be somehow
the same?
Mass-Observation has been criticized along these lines and many oth-
ers ever since the project was founded. Harrisson himself notes one such
line of detraction, for example, when he points out that the numbers of
volunteers recruited to observe the working class in Bolton expanded
greatly ‘during Oxford and Cambridge University vacations’ (Harrisson
1961, p. 26). Yet it is in its very contradictions, in its multiple concerns,
contexts and aspirations, that the Mass-Observation project mirrors a
number of the issues that are important to any critical reappraisal of
British social realism. To take just one such issue, let us look a little fur-
ther into this matter of the relative social positions of the observer and
the observed.
Such relative and relativizing positions are explored, for example, in
Alan Bennett’s early and rarely performed play Enjoy (1980). In this play
a typically Bennett-like working class elderly couple are to be rehoused
to the suburbs by the local council from their Leeds back-to-back ter-
raced house. The couple receive a silent visitor, ostensibly from the local
council, who brings a letter. This letter claims that the council are con-
cerned about the potential loss resulting from the rehousing of ‘many
valuable elements in the social structure of traditional communities
such as this’ (Bennett 1991, p. 271). These ‘valuable elements’ turn out
to be clichés of working class life such as ‘self reliance, neighbourliness,
and self-help’ (ibid). The council requests that the visitor is to be allowed
to enter the couple’s home, and to silently observe their domesticity for
the purposes of research, in order that their new housing can accommo-
date the rehoused residents with as little change as possible. The couple
Introduction 9
are instructed to ignore the visitor, whom they decide to let in, and this
visitor will record secret observations of the couple and report back to
the council in a manner not entirely unlike that of Mass-Observation,
though here granted rare access to domesticity.2 At the end of the play
the couple are moved to a zone on the outskirts of town where the
entire neighbourhood will be rebuilt brick-by-brick, reproducing exactly
the proportions and look of the original area. This zone, however, will be
made economically viable by the council’s opening it, within designated
hours, as a kind of working class theme park, where paying tourists will
look around the relics of the terraced past. These relics, however, are
only a nostalgic façade. The new suburban houses will have under-floor
heating, but use of this is strictly limited to outside the park’s opening-
hours. During opening-hours residents are requested to use the more
quaint, original, coal fire.
There are a number of intriguing characters’ perspectives in Enjoy.
First, there is that of the silent, observing visitor who arrives heralding
change from a legitimating authority. Secondly, there are the imagined
paying tourists trundling around the culture-park, around the subur-
ban masquerading as urban. These tourists might be aware they are
witnessing a façade, or they might labour under an illusion of authen-
ticity. Thirdly, there is the elderly couple who are subject to these other
multiple gazes, and whose own marginalized positions as observers of
their own being observed drive much of the play’s dialogue, anchoring
its ironies and pathos. The multiple perspectives of Enjoy, as of Mass-
Observation, play out complex and shifting dynamics of social, political,
economic and familial power, dynamics that are pertinent to the study
of social realism in Britain more broadly.
This volume avoids offering up for preservation nostalgic displays of
dilapidation in an academic equivalent of Bennett’s culture-park. The
histories that are on display in the following chapters are primarily
historicizing rather than nostalgic, whilst they also have their eyes set
keenly on the contemporary. British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940
seeks to open out, rather than close down and tightly define, social real-
ism. As Stephen Lacey argues of social realist theatre, ‘the question is
not “is this play social realist?” but rather “what is there in this play
that is social realist?”’ This is a question that emphasizes the specificity
and individuality of a given work. In a study of genre such emphasis
is a complex but vital matter. The different approaches the following
chapters take to the matter of definition reveal many divergent, sur-
prising and significant trajectories of influence, of genealogy, and of
legacy.
There are, nevertheless, certain things that should be noted here of

the term ‘social realism’ (and of what happens when we put ‘British’
alongside it). For one thing, ‘social realism’ denotes different things
across a number of disciplines. In sociology, for example, the term
derives primarily from criticism of Émile Durkheim’s views as expressed
in Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique (1895). As Robert Alun Jones
explains in a study of how Durkheim derived and developed this aspect
of his sociology, ‘social realism’ brings together ‘a constellation of ideas’
(Jones 1999, p. 1); primarily, for Durkheim, these ideas coalesce around
claims about social phenomena being subject to scientifically discov-
erable and verifiable laws. They also, interestingly in the context of a
study on realist aesthetics, seek to preserve complexity from reductive
core theses. For Durkheim this is specifically from Cartesian notions of
the ‘clear and simple’, from foundational knowledge that cannot cope
with the complexities of modern society.
Most recently, in the sociology of education the term ‘social realism’
has come to refer to a pragmatic and contextually determined paradigm
of learning. As one recent study puts it, referring back to the title of a
previous work, the contemporary usefulness of the term
signals a shift from viewing knowledge in terms of construction –

especially when this implies we can construct the world as we see
fit, free of the consequences of how the world will react back on
that construction – towards a focus on its production within relatively
autonomous fields of practice according to socially developed and
applied procedures that may have both arbitrary and non-arbitrary
bases. It thus highlights a concern with the sociality of knowledge
in terms of how knowledge is created (‘social’) and emphasizes that
knowledge is more than simply produced – its modalities help shape
the world (‘realism’).
(Maton and Moore 2009, p. 6)3
The emphasis here too is on the possibility for mutable complexity, and
the determining factors of context.
Perhaps the complexity attendant upon a multiplicity of definitions
for the contested term is one reason so few studies have been devoted
to the social realism(s) discussed in this volume. Returning to the
opening section of this introduction, however, it is more tempting to
postulate that the major barrier for social realism is that it is a sub-
set of the predominantly unfashionable, poor old problematic (but not
problematic enough) realism. Yet as a number of recent studies have
Introduction 11
shown, realism itself is well overdue important reappraisals. Notable

among these studies is Matthew Beaumont’s Adventures in Realism (2007,
reprinted and expanded with a chapter by Terry Eagleton in 2010 as
A Concise Companion to Realism).4 Beaumont’s volume makes a convinc-
ing case for its primary aim of putting realism ‘back into the critical
picture, center-stage’ (Bowlby 2007, p. xvii). Part of the problem for real-
ism, as for social realism, is one of definition. But whereas a lack of clear
boundaries for social realism presents opportunities at the same time
as it poses difficulties, the issue for realism is often one of too-simple
definitions. Descriptions of realism, Beaumont argues, have been all too
often subjected to a postmodernist caricature that tended to define real-
ism as the naïve and somewhat embarrassing aspirant to transparency
and meaning, against which subtler and more up to date isms might
measure their own excellence. Realism is also not helped by its being his-
torically stuck in a no man’s land between the more intoxicating highs
of Romanticism and Modernism, and Beaumont points out the unfor-
tunate consequence for realism according to which realism’s critical
importance derives solely from a supporting role played in a literary-
historical narrative that concentrates on its more extroverted relations.
All this, Beaumont claims, ‘has made an impatient or apathetic atti-
tude to realism seem acceptable’ (Beaumont 2007, p. 2), and it is surely
time such attitudes were rethought. Beaumont quotes Fredric Jameson
to make the case for newly invigorated approaches:
It might be more productive, as Fredric Jameson has argued, “if we

can manage to think of realism as a form of demiurgic practice; if
we can restore some active and even playful/experimental impulses
to the inertia of its appearance as a copy or representation of things”
[ . . . ].
(Beaumont 2007, p. 7)
In Signatures of the Visible Jameson describes the ‘excitement’ of Mod-

ernism as ‘demiurgic’, whereas realism ‘is conventionally evoked in
terms of passive reflection and copying, subordinate to some exter-
nal reality, and fully as much a grim duty as a pleasure of any kind’
(Jameson 1992, p. 162). It may be that learning how to reveal and revel
anew in ‘pleasure’ is the most viable route by which realism will find
its way back into the academy, and onto the bookshelves crammed,
as Beaumont describes, with the myriad introductory critical theory
books that marginalize realism, and that are so ‘assiduously marketed
at students’ (Beaumont 2007, p. 3). Beaumont reveals such playful
realist pleasure, for example, in reading the opening lines of George

Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859),5 yet the problem of ‘pleasure’, when referred
onto social realism, is a difficult one. While it would be overgeneral-
izing to claim that social realist works are consistently didactic, they
are also rarely without concern for a specific, contemporaneous con-
text, and are often educative and/or shocking. Even their humour is
frequently of an excoriating kind. With this in mind, perhaps it should
be proposed that Jameson’s hope for ‘pleasure’ in realism might be sub-
stituted by a willingness to engage with ‘the visceral’ in social realism.
Here, then, might be one way in which social realism might take its own,
different road.
Some studies have addressed the genre, though they tend to limit
their analysis to one medium or another. Samantha Lay’s British Social
Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (2002), for instance, is a short
film-based study that tracks the familiar furrows as an introductory text
aimed at students. Lay’s arguments start out from convincing proposi-
tions, such as ‘[s]ocial realism is difficult to define not least of all because
it is both politically and historically contingent’ (Lay 2002, p. 8). Yet
Lay’s approach also has drawbacks, some of which are dealt with in
Chapter 1 of this volume.
Such studies, however, are few and far between. It is therefore hoped
that British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 will not only serve to
further consolidate an exciting wider reappraisal of realism, but will
reinvigorate the study of social realism specifically, whether this is in
Britain or elsewhere.6 It certainly seems as though much critical work
is available to be done. The chapters of this volume follow a structure
based in the medium under discussion, i.e. there is one chapter each
on film, theatre, fiction, poetry, visual art, and television. Yet it is easy
to envisage a complementary approach that uses a thematic framework.
One might well enquire, for example, into the frequently foregrounded
figure of the child in social realist works. Are the children that these
works frequently call upon more than just figures of innocence against
which more sinister forces of economics, politics and sociality are con-
trasted? ‘Social realism and national identity’ is another potentially
fruitful topic, as is a rebalancing look at works of Scottish, Welsh and
Northern Irish origin. As the reader will notice in the chapters that fol-
low, this volume’s focus tends, through no preplanned design, to be on
England. There are a number of important exceptions to this – Keston
Sutherland’s close reading of work by the Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard,
for example, and Gillian Whiteley’s arguments about the international-
ism of 1950s social realist visual art. But the general emphasis remains.
Introduction 13
The subject of class, hinted at above, is also central to social realist

works, as are gender dynamics. This volume, then, does not seek to be
the final, exhaustive word on social realism in Britain. Rather it hopes
to prize open this topic for those already interested, and to enliven the
interest of those new to it.
In Chapter 1 Paul Dave addresses the medium most frequently dis-
cussed in terms of social realist aesthetics – film. Dave focuses on recent
and contemporary filmmaking, in particular that of Andrea Arnold, Nick
Broomfield, Patrick Keiller, Gary Oldman and Shane Meadows, while
also looking back at much older works such as the Mitchell and Kenyon
documentaries. In provocative and theoretically-informed arguments
Dave considers what it might be for filmmaking to engage with an ethics
of the social as a response to ‘capitalist realism’, where a turn in the
genre towards domesticity does not necessarily indicate, as some crit-
ics have proposed, an abrogation of political responsibility, but rather
instances what Dave calls a ‘re-focusing, in the context of neoliberalism,
on the crisis of the social’. Dave traces a lineage of criticism from
Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton in a concern with tragedy and the
figure of the scapegoat, and views contemporary social realist filmmak-
ing as focused on an economically and politically contextualized world
of social spaces and personal encounters.
Stephen Lacey’s chapter on theatre traces a lineage of theatrical prac-
tice that incorporates a number of hidden (because not available to
West End critics) trajectories of experimentation and alternative move-
ments. As Lacey points out, it did not all happen in 1956. While Look
Back in Anger is undoubtedly a significant play for considering social
realism in the theatre, Lacey’s genealogies of influence and appropria-
tion reveal important elements of recent and contemporary theatrical
practice deeply indebted to other earlier works. This chapter develops
a central theme of this volume by exploring the boundaries at which
explicitly anti-naturalist theatrical language can be seen to hold certain
elements in common with more explicitly and avowedly social realist
works. Referring back, as a number of the chapters do, to Williams’ ideas
of ‘social extension’, Lacey focuses on works that engage with their con-
temporaneous contexts to chart changes to post-war dramatic form in
the contexts of censorship, changing audiences and economics, cultural
preoccupations with class and motifs of escape, and feminist theatre, in
a breadth of reference that takes in over forty different plays.
Chapter 3 turns to social realism in fiction, where Rod Mengham
focuses on a seven year period of post-war fiction that includes estab-
lished classics of the genre such as John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957),
Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), David Storey’s
This Sporting Life (1960), Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960), and
Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963). Mengham explores the implications
of the social and political contexts these authors were working in and
confronting to demonstrate how they responded to and reflected a com-
plex rebuilding of national identity following the Second World War.
Mengham explores how the language of war, violence, commerce and
insecurity is laced through the emotional and familial entanglements
that the characters of these works are subject to. These well-known
realist works of fiction are then revealed to have surprising things in
common with one another – a ‘fascination with the anti-social power of
extra-marital relationships’, and the recurrence of what Mengham calls
the ‘reveries’ of a loss of self-identity.
In Chapter 4 Keston Sutherland probes boundaries of social realism
in the context of recent and contemporary poetry. Sutherland addresses
a number of significant theories of realism founded in Lukács, Brecht,
Barthes, Mayakovsky and Adorno, before going on to discuss main-
stream poetry culture, refracted through a particular focus on Philip
Larkin’s ‘Wires’. Larkin’s poem is contrasted with a close reading of part
of Tom Leonard’s nora’s place. By arguing for a social realism that is not
defined according to simple formal criteria, Sutherland wrests back a
marginalized realism from the mediocrity of the mainstream. Noting
how expressionistic impulses traditionally thought to be at odds with
realism often work in conjunction with certain political or aesthetic
commitments in common with it, Sutherland provocatively asserts that
‘the nonconformist poets of today are the real inheritors of the realist
project’.
Gillian Whiteley continues the volume’s concern with locating social
realist art ‘within distinct historical moments and locations, within par-
ticular social and political contexts’. Whiteley tracks back even earlier
than other chapters to recover important socio-economic contexts for
politically focused visual art in the 1930s, with the founding of the
Artists International Association in England, and the strictures of Social-
ist Realism. This wide-ranging and detailed chapter then progresses
through the 1940s and 1950s, with particular emphasis on the influ-
ential criticism of John Berger and the journal Realism. Whiteley then
pursues a reconsideration of British visual art of later decades, reveal-
ing social realist elements common to many artworks often categorized
and analysed without recourse to typical conventions of social realism.
Finally, Whiteley argues that social realism as a critical category can
Introduction 15
productively be brought to bear on certain contemporary visual artists

such as Lucy Orta, Alison Marchant and Jeremy Deller.
Social realism has always had an important part to play in the
development of British television. In this volume’s final chapter Dave
Rolinson seeks to open up a number of important questions both
for the study of social realism and for the study of television more
broadly. Accordingly, Rolinson asks questions about how television as
a medium both proscribes boundaries for social realism and simulta-
neously finds its own boundaries revealed and pushed against by that
genre, and explores how social realism might interrogate itself utiliz-
ing the medium-specific resources television provides. In a rich and
detailed chapter, Rolinson contextualises changes to television practice
and traces the forms of social realism on television from very early
incarnations to the present day, investigating how the history of social
realism on television is related to that of film and theatre.
Fundamentally, what the chapters of this volume engage with are the
boundaries and possibilities of social realism in Britain, both as these
find themselves situated within specific and divergent historical con-
texts, and as they are shaped by the specific mediums in which they
operate. The chapters demonstrate that as a probing genre term, as
political interjection, as a specific enterprise of realism, and as some-
thing much more formally complex and creatively viable than might be
expected from first impressions, social realism in Britain has been well
overdue a thorough and thoughtful reappraisal.
Notes
1. Harrisson’s stance towards Lever was not always one of free-minded anthro-
pology. It did not take Mass-Observation long before they were employed
by Lever; in 1937, Lintas, the marketing arm of Lever, commissioned
Mass-Observation to record observers’ observations of Stork margarine. The
organization’s preoccupation with Lever eventually came full-circle when
a Leverhulme grant was awarded to finance the housing of the Mass-
Observation material at the University of Sussex in the early 1970s.
2. The Mass-Observation images are nearly all of public, social spaces. Only one
of the Worktown photographs is of a Bolton resident’s domestic interior.
3. The previous study Maton and Moore refer to is Michael Young’s Bringing
Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of
Education (Young 2007).
4. Also recommended is Pam Morris’s excellent Realism (2003) and Peter Brooks’
Realist Vision (2005).
5. See Beaumont 2007, pp. 4–7.
6. See, for example, Stacy I. Morgan’s Rethinking Social Realism: African American
Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (2004) as an example of a work dealing with
similar materials in a different context.
Bibliography
Beaumont, Matthew (ed.). (2007) Adventures in Realism. Oxford, Blackwell
Publishing.
Beckett, Samuel. (1983) Disjecta – Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment.
London, Calder.
——. (1992) Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin, Black Cat Press.
Bennett, Alan. (1991) ‘Forty Years On’ and Other Plays. London, Faber & Faber.
Bowlby, Rachel. (2007) ‘Foreword’, in Beaumont, Matthew (ed.), (2007) Adven-
tures in Realism. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.
Brooks, Peter. (2005) Realist Vision. New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
Burrows, Rachel. (1989) ‘Interview with Rachel Burrows’, in Journal of Beckett
Studies. No. 11–12, pp. 5–15.
Durkheim, Émile. [1895] (2007) Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique. Paris, Presses
Universitaires de France.
Eliot, George. [1859] (1996) Adam Bede. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Harrisson, Tom. (1959) World Within: A Borneo Story. London, The Crescent Press.
——. (1961) Britain Revisited. London, Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Hubble, Nick. (2006) Mass Observation and Everyday Life. Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan.
Jameson, Fredric. (1992) Signatures of the Visible. London, Routledge.
Jennings, Mary–Lou (ed.) (1982). Humphrey Jennings: Film–Maker, Painter, Poet.
London, British Film Institute.
Jones, Robert Alun. (1999) The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kieślowski, Krzysztof. (1993) Kieślowski on Kieślowski. London, Faber & Faber.
Lay, Samantha. (2002) British Social Realism. London, Wallflower Press.
Le Juez, Brigitte. (2008) Beckett Before Beckett. London, Souvenir Press.
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Maton, Karl and Rob Moore (eds). (2009) Social Realism, Knowledge and the
Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. New York, Continuum.
Morgan, Stacy I. (2004) Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and
Literature, 1930–1953. Athens & London, The University of Georgia Press.
Morris, Pam. (2003) Realism. London, Routledge.
Spender, Humphrey. (1982) Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England
1937–38. Bristol, Falling Wall Press.
Tonning, Erik. (2007) Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen
1962–1985. Bern, Peter Lang.
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Young, Michael. (2007) Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to
Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. London, Routledge.
1
Tragedy, Ethics and History
in Contemporary British Social
Realist Film
Paul Dave
For some, social realism in British cinema is a problematic tradition, one

that is politically limited and aesthetically conservative. Boring, pious,
out of date. ‘Miserabilist’ is the term often used in critical discourses
to convey a combined impression of a political and aesthetic dead-end
(Thorpe 2005). Certainly, many critics have been worried about exam-
ples of the form from the 1990s and early 2000s – such as Brassed Off
(1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Billy Elliot (2000). Paul Marris, for
instance, argues that The Full Monty and Billy Elliot are ‘Ealing in the
North’ – conservative, backward looking elegies, steeped in masculinist
ideologies of the past (Marris 2001, p. 49). For others, whilst recognizing
the problems with the tradition, there remains a sense that significant
social realist films are still being produced.1 For example, Samantha Lay
views social realism as an open and evolving tradition, and still ‘an
important part of British film culture’ (Lay 2007, p. 231).
John Hill isolates what he sees as a more specific and worrying ten-
dency that he tracks back to the New Wave of the late 1950s, early
1960s. This is the ‘narrowing down of social space’ in the representation
of working class life, and its increasing identification ‘in domestic and
familial terms’ (Hill 2000, p. 251). This dynamic is also noted by Lay,
Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, who all point to diminishing
associations of social realism with belief in progressive social change.2
It seems that social realism’s drive towards ‘social extension’ (Williams
1974, p.63) and its association with authenticity ‘where this is identi-
fied with the most extreme of social conditions’ has, in recent times,
led to an increased focus on dysfunctions of the individual or family
in areas where precisely the social is in jeopardy, giving us, typically,
underclass dramas taking place in some infra-social space (Hill 2000,
17
p. 253). However, rather than viewing this as a process whereby the

connections between the domestic and familial on the one hand, and
the ‘larger social context’ of ‘neighbourhood, work, politics’ are lost, one
might equally see it as part of a necessary re-focusing, in the context of
neoliberalism, on the crisis of the social (ibid.).
This is perhaps something that needs emphasizing: that in the
neoliberal moment of capitalist fundamentalism, working class expe-
rience registers head-on the impact of what Raymond Williams called
the ‘defaulting’ of the capitalist order with regard to its older, post-war
social contract (Williams 2007, p. 97). Part of this process involves pre-
cisely the reconfiguration of the connections between all classes and the
stricken social sphere. I have attempted elsewhere to relate these devel-
opments to formal and generic shifts in contemporary British cinema.3
Here, using the same contextual framework of neoliberalism, I want to
consider contemporary shifts in social realism in terms of what might
be considered one of social realism’s tributary sources – the tragic form.
In 1979, on the edge of the neoliberal storm, Williams spoke per-
cipiently of a mutation in the tragic form in which ‘an inability to
communicate’ becomes central:
People still assemble or are assembled, meet or collide. A given col-

lectivity is in this way taken for granted. But it is a collectivity that
is only negatively marked. A common condition is suspected, inti-
mated, glanced at, but never grasped. The means of sociality and of
positive relationship are fundamentally discounted, but not as actual
isolation; merely as effective isolation within what is still unavoidable
physical presence.
(Williams 2007, p. 101)
After noting this distressing attenuation of the ‘means of sociality’ in

which co-presence becomes a negative, brute, proximity rather than a
positive mutuality, Williams goes on to characterize this form in terms
of a kind of ‘wry’ rather than ‘desperate’ apocalypticism – as a kind
of pleasure to be had in the anticipation of inevitable disaster (ibid.,
p. 102). He also adds that it offers ‘a reliable condition of remain-
ing indefinitely inside just such a society’ (ibid.). This combination of
a weakened social, with its disproportionate impact on the working
class on the one hand, and the amused or exhilarated sense of an end
amidst the wreckage on the other, accompanied by a deep reluctance
to muster resources that can reach beyond such an impasse, represents
a phenomenon which I have discussed elsewhere in ‘underclass’ social
Contemporary British Social Realist Film 19
realist film under the rubric of a contemporary ‘urban pastoral’ (Dave

2006, p. 84). Trainspotting (1996) would be a good example. Much in
underclass films such as Trainspotting belongs to what Imogen Tyler
refers to as ‘the dirty ontology of class struggle in Britain’, visible for
instance in the taxonomies of class abjection and contempt evoked by
terms such as ‘chav’ (Tyler cited in Biressi and Nunn 2009, p. 109). Such
attitudes and representations indicate important changes in class rela-
tionships. However, they are not the whole story. Another aspect of this
crisis of the social, as refracted through recent social realist filmmaking,
has been the attempt to explore the dynamics of what might be called
the ethics of solidarity, an ethics capable of reviving the social. It will
be argued here that such an attempt has an important role to play in
the complex and mutable relationship between left politics and social
realist cinema. That is to say, there is a necessary political dimension
to this interest in the ethical. As Terry Eagleton argues, it is a mistake
on some parts of the left to insist on a rigid gap between the ethi-
cal and the political (see Eagleton 2009b, pp. 299–300). It is in this
domain that some fascinating recent work in British social realist film
has been done. For instance, a social and ethical narrative underlies
a number of Shane Meadows’ films, in which a process of social con-
traction meets a limit and the resources of a counter-movement are
sensed. Meadows’ interest in social realism is crossed with an interest
in popular genres, particularly the gangster film with its dependence
on a tragic motif of the suffering human body (see for instance Dead
Man’s Shoes (2004)). As I will argue below, this emphasis on the qualities
of vulnerable corporeality directs our attention to an ethics capable of
sustaining a sense of solidarity. As we will see, for Eagleton there is a cru-
cial relationship between a properly ethical sense of our ‘species-being’
(Eagleton 2003a, p. 158), as effectively represented in images of human
corporeality focused on the tragic scapegoat, and the potential to realize
Williams’ ideal of a ‘common culture’ (Williams 1984, p. 318). The lat-
ter’s account of the importance of a ‘common culture’ was inspired by
the long history of the working class ethic of solidarity. First proposed
over half a century ago, it remains, as Eagleton argues, an objective
which, whilst apparently ‘quaintly residual’, nevertheless still lies ahead
of us (Eagleton 2000, p. 122).
History and ‘capitalist realism’
Looking forwards and backwards will be an important part of what fol-

lows, for one of the propositions I would like to explore is that history
has an important relationship with social realist film. Now on one level
this involves the uncontroversial assertion that social realist filmmaking
represents a tradition, however interrupted and diverse, and also that
this tradition retains a vital relationship with contemporary efforts. Take
for example Marris’s comments on northern realism. As Marris says: ‘any
new imaging of the North will be developed “in and against” the persist-
ing tradition of northern realism’ (Marris 2001, p. 50). Likewise, as David
Tucker argues in the present volume’s Introduction, if we want to avoid
perpetuating shallow oppositions between realism and modernism in
critical discussion of social realism, a historical grounding is crucial. The
historical view of the form opens up often surprising and ‘significant
trajectories of influence, of genealogy’. None of this, as I say, should be
particularly controversial – even though it is notable, as Tucker says, that
such approaches have been rare.
Most importantly, the use of history in our approach to social real-
ism – and film generally – needs to go beyond ad hoc, often token
contextualizations. And this need raises the more unfamiliar perspec-
tive of the historical longue durée. Seen in such a light, for instance,
the tradition of British social realism might be brought into contact
with historical materialist preoccupations, and in this way help to con-
struct challenging historical narratives and representations of the social
informed by an interest in the development of capitalism and class cul-
ture. This is a particularly significant possibility at the present precisely
because of the influence of what has been called our contemporary ‘capi-
talist realism’ (Fisher 2009). For Mark Fisher, capitalism under neoliberal
regimes has sought to present itself as ‘the only viable political and eco-
nomic system’ and to generate the impression that it is now ‘impossible
even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher 2009, p. 2). This is
what Daniel Bensaïd refers to as the ‘naturalisation of the economy and
a fatalization of history’ (Bensaïd 2007, p. 150).
Patrick Keiller, whose fictionalized documentaries frequently explore
national history – mediated through a historical materialist optic – as a
force to be used against manifestations of this capitalist realism, claims,
like Fisher, to have been struck by Fredric Jameson’s observation that
‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterio-
ration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism;
perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’ (Jameson
cited in Keiller 2009, p. 411). In Keiller’s work, which is very much con-
structed within the complex tradition of British social realism, history
works to fortify us against this imaginative debility. Thus, as I have dis-
cussed elsewhere, in the first two Robinson films – London (1994) and
Figure 1.1 Robinson in Ruins (2010). The wandering Robinson tracks the survival
of life in a time of crisis.
c Patrick Keiller
Robinson in Space (1997) – it is the history of the ‘peculiarly capitalist’

English culture and past that is used to challenge the neoliberal present
(Dave 2006, p. 164). This exploration looks, from Keiller’s next instal-
ment of the adventures of Robinson (Robinson in Ruins, 2010) and from
the collaborative project from which the film has emerged (The Future
of the Landscape and the Moving Image), to have been pressed further by
Keiller into a consideration of a key contradiction of neoliberalism –
the historical role of state intervention in the market and its elision in
neoliberal doctrine and ideology.4
Generally, those interested in the politics of culture on the left recog-
nize the importance of constructing, as Jeremy Gilbert puts it, popular
narratives capable of demonstrating the links between a ‘drive for lim-
itless capital accumulation and the various features of contemporary
culture which worry people’ (Gilbert 2009, p.199). On the feasibility
of mobilizing political alternatives to neoliberalism in this way, Gilbert
argues that one thing is certain; ‘such a politics could only emerge in
conjunction with some mobilization of the groups, institutions and
individuals who still, in large numbers, remain attached to, invested
in and organized by the history of social democracy and the labour
movement’ (ibid.).
Precisely here the social realist tradition has roots. Sometimes these
roots appear close to the surface – such as in the documentary tra-
dition of the 1930s and 1940s – but there remain resources, largely
neglected, which are more deeply buried. To refer to Keiller’s work

again – one of the more explicit influences upon Robinson in Space was
Humphrey Jennings’s A Diary for Timothy (1945), which is reinvoked
as a founding text of hopeful post-war social democratic humanism by
Keiller at a time when it might nourish the mood of political change
and popular discontent with the New Right in the mid 1990s. Sim-
ilarly, in the first Robinson film, London, some of Keiller’s references
match those excerpted in Jennings’s posthumously published book
Pandaemonium.5 Whilst Keiller has not systematically engaged with this
text, Pandaemonium nevertheless represents an important earlier exam-
ple within the tradition of social realism of an attempt to document the
long history of capitalist development alongside the emergence of a self-
conscious tradition of thinking about ‘culture and society’ in response
to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. We know it caught
the eye of Williams, who is reported to have been considering editing
Jennings’ manuscript in the late 1950s.6 We can perhaps best appreci-
ate Williams’ interest in Jennings in the context of his own work of
the time.7 Pandaemonium is exemplary in the importance it gives to the
reciprocal patterns in which developments of the productive forces are
linked to changing perceptions of culture and society. There is also a
connection to be made here between Jennings and the work of the post
war British Marxist Historians: although Jennings’ early death prevented
him making any final preparation of Pandaemonium for publication,
there is a clear echo in it of some of the key themes in the histori-
cal materialism of the Communist Party Historians Group.8 The latter
shared an interest in a non-reductive Marxism, expressed by Jennings
in a romantic trope of the original unity between the ‘means of produc-
tion’ and the ‘means of vision’, a unity sundered by the development
of capitalism (Jennings 1985, p. xxxviii). Bringing this tradition of his-
torical materialism up to date, I have tried to show elsewhere how Peter
Linebaugh’s histories of the Atlantic proletariat from the early modern
period onward are useful in exploring contemporary films concerned
with anti-capitalism and its relationship to post-colonial Britain – for
instance South West 9 (2001).9 It might be added here that Linebaugh’s
histories are full of what Walter Benjamin called ‘now-time’ (Benjamin
cited in Löwy 2005, p.86) in as much as his accounts of this picaresque
proletariat – ‘unrespectable’, multiethnic, male, female, of all ages, plan-
etary – offer an invaluable resource with which to contest the idea of
a ‘decline’ of the post-industrial working class into an underclass, a
development which figures so prominently as subject matter in con-
temporary social realist films (Linebaugh & Rediker 2000, pp. 332–3).
It is also interesting to note that running through Linebaugh’s writings

is a stress on an ethic of working class solidarity, sustained in the teeth
of the manifold brutalities of the long development of capitalism.
To take an example of a significant social realist film that might
respond to an interpretation informed by Linebaugh’s work, let
us briefly consider Nil by Mouth (1997). Gary Oldman’s film and
Linebaugh’s book The London Hanged (1991) (and in particular the
Punch and Judy allegory with which he concludes the book), when
brought together create what Benjamin called a ‘constellation’ or a
‘dialectical image’ (Benjamin 1999, p. 462). That is to say, they bring
the present and the past together in a moment of arresting, mutual illu-
mination. Linebaugh shows in this book that the historical distinction
between respectable and unrespectable working class formations needs to
be related to the effects of the introduction of the wage during the
eighteenth century. This deepened, and made more violent, the divi-
sions within the working class between men/women, adults/children,
slave/free, black/white. In some respects the making of the English work-
ing class (the national consolidation of a culture and politics of the
working class in the first half of the nineteenth century) was premised
on an earlier unmaking, specifically of the heterogeneous Atlantic pro-
letariat so prominent as a political force in London up to the end of the
eighteenth century. Crucial in this unmaking was the process by which
waged, working class men became ‘active disciplinarians of the wage-
less’ (Linebaugh 1991, pp. 436–7). Thus, as Linebaugh says of the figure
of Punch: ‘In exercising his murderous rage against women, children,
beggars, and black people, Punch recapitulates in the little motions of
the puppeteer, larger, actual divisions within the London working class
as a whole’ (ibid., p. 441). Although there is not really enough space to
do so here, I think it would be possible to show how in Nil By Mouth
the central character Raymond (Ray Winston) belongs to a long lineage
that includes the puppet Punch. Briefly, the conflict between Raymond
on the one hand and the women in his extended family along with
his younger underclass brother-in-law on the other, is part of Oldman’s
exploration of the psychopathologies of a certain type of respectable,
waged male working class culture (its homosociality), in an era in which
this culture was changing fast. This makes the film resonate in unex-
pected ways with the historical narrative of working class experience
provided by Linebaugh.
However apparently marginal such conjunctions of historical materi-
alism, with its long narratives of class struggle and capitalism, and the
diverse tradition of social realism appears, they remain an important
resource in helping to strengthen our sense of the finite bounds of

capitalism as a historical social form and in contesting key contem-
porary ideologies of class and myths of capitalism. To take one more
example from Keiller’s work, we can see how this interest in the history
of the development of capitalism since ‘Defoe’s time’, as the narrator in
Robinson in Space puts it, is continued in his recent return to the eigh-
teenth century with the Future of the Landscape project. Here Keiller goes
back to Karl Polanyi’s work on the rise of capitalism in order to explore
the historical contradictions of the economic doctrine of laissez-faire
as part of his broader objective – to unravel the ‘mythology of Anglo-
American capitalism’ in the light of the global financial crisis initiated
by the events of October 2008 (Keiller 2009, p. 410).10
The value of such work and the historical consciousness it stimulates –
an effect which does not have to be restricted to documentary influ-
enced forms of social realist aesthetics – can help to counter the danger
of a certain presentism in the latter. Thus, it is perhaps unfortunate
that recent critical commentary has seen the work of Bill Douglas and
Terence Davies as part of a problematic tendency towards autobiography
and looking backwards, a tendency which Lay complains is undermining
the contemporary and public view.11 This is not to say, however, that
Lay’s account does not provide any space for exploration in social real-
ist film of the historical dimension to the problem of the present. Thus,
her discussion of the relationship between present and past in such films
is in part understood in terms of a distinction between issues (often top-
ical, and captured in the ‘rise and fall’ of ‘fashion’ (Lay 2002, p. 13)
and themes (which possess deeper historical roots, and are ‘longer-lived
sets of concerns’ such as ‘the demise of the traditional working class,
changing gender roles, anti-consumerism, the negative effects of capi-
talism, and national identity’ (ibid., p. 14). This distinction, however,
can be re-worked and enriched in terms of the Benjaminian couplet
constellation/tradition, where constellations construct traditions. That
is to say, the constellating or bringing together of past battles and defeats
in the long history of class struggle with present emergencies in that
same struggle, is the method by which we put together a tradition of
the oppressed. Whilst it would be mistaken to assume some unproblem-
atic availability of this tradition (as Eagleton puts it, some ‘unbroken
continuity that “ghosts” official history’), there is in Benjamin’s model
of historical materialism a clear sense of the persistence of class strug-
gle in history and of its role as the ground on which past and present
can be brought together (Eagleton 2009b, p.178). One must, as Eagleton
warns, stay faithful to the idea of a tradition and resist any fetishizing
of the ‘present conjuncture’ or ‘presentism’ (ibid.) in which ‘the needs

of the present become the index of the truth of the past’ (ibid., p. 152).
In Benjamin’s account then, past and present come together in ways
that are mutually illuminating. A similar note is sounded by Williams in
his 1985 defence of naturalism where he talks about the simultaneous
importance of representing ‘that world in which people live as they can
as themselves’ (the subject matter of naturalism, its ‘real substance’) and
of recognizing this world as inextricably entwined with ‘long histories
of our peoples, in which movements and struggles, particular victories
and defeats, reached their own moving crises’ (Williams 2007, p. 116).
This historical dimension, as it erupts ‘within and across’ this ‘real sub-
stance’ is something the ‘serious’ socialist should be conscious of as that
which enables us to speak of a ‘human history’ (ibid.).
Tragic realism
The relationship between history and social realism can be viewed in

ways other than as a means to challenge our contemporary capitalist
realism with historicist denaturalisation. A historical materialist perspec-
tive – both conjunctural and long view – can draw our attention not just to
the problem of the concealed contingencies of social forms such as cap-
italism, it can also set off the transhistorical, or what over the length of
the human story has remained unchanged. Again, this is something that
Benjamin’s sorrowful historical vision captures – the extent to which
historical change is metamorphosed under capitalism into a hellish,
pre-historical repetition of catastrophe.12 Eagleton, whose thoughts on
history have been heavily influenced by Benjamin, is also interested in
the transhistorical, and in recent texts this interest has taken the form of
a discussion of human essence.13 As James Smith argues, such an interest
is part of Eagleton’s critique of left-historicism and its giddy celebra-
tion of human and social mutability along with its abandonment of
Marxist historical metanarratives. As Smith observes, Eagleton’s objec-
tive seems to be to offer a ‘commonality of the human as a deeper mode
of historicisation’ (Smith 2008, p. 108).
Such an emphasis might indeed serve as a valuable resource in resist-
ing the priorities of capitalist realism. As Fisher argues, one of the key
defining features of capitalist realism is what he calls ‘ontological pre-
carity’ (Fisher 2009, p.56), in which a destabilized sense of the human
essence fits with the ‘business ontology’ of neoliberalism (ibid., p. 17).
In circumstances in which we are obliged to subordinate ourselves ‘to
a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any
moment’ (ibid., p. 54) – what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘purely fungi-
ble present’ (Jameson cited in ibid.) – and in which the ‘dreaming up
and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as [. . .the. . .] production
and disposal of commodities’, any sense of a stable selfhood is under-
mined (ibid, p. 56). It is precisely this evangelical neoliberal discourse
of burst limits and infinite possibilities, with its barely disguised intoler-
ance of human or material limits, which Eagleton’s apparently perverse
adoption of a conservative vocabulary of nature, essences, limits, and
timelessness is aimed at. He appears to be seeking to arm the left’s polit-
ical project of progressive social change against circumstances in which
change is identified exclusively with the churning turmoil of neoliberal
capitalism.
Seen in this light, Eagleton’s recent writings are compelling because
they help to extend the still in many ways crucial work of Williams.
For both writers the process of progressive historical change is a com-
plex one which they explore through positing a connection between
tragedy and revolution. For Williams capitalist modernity produces a
society ‘in which the incorporation of all its people, as whole human
beings, is in practice impossible without a change in its fundamental
form of relationships’ (Williams 1979, p. 76). This intolerable situation –
tragic because ultimately, at this point in history, its supercession is pos-
sible – necessitates revolution. But revolution needs to be understood as
a ‘social reality’ – it is already all around us as ‘action now in progress’
and as ‘an activity immediately involving ourselves’ (ibid., p. 74). That
is to say, it needs to be recognized that what is called revolution is from
one perspective simply the ‘disorder’, suffering and violence of the sta-
tus quo, which we have become habituated to not seeing (ibid., p. 75).
As Eagleton says, there is nothing more revolutionary than the status
quo, especially as it is driven by the demonic, inhuman logic of capital-
ist laws (Eagleton 2005a, p. 59). But equally, understood as the effort to
bring about a just society, revolution is not just some simple, punctual,
heroic action. For Williams it involves unavoidable participation in dis-
order ‘as a way of ending it’ (Williams 1979, p.81). Revolution is tragic
in origins (capitalism), and also in action (it necessarily pits humans
against each other).
Tragedy then may well be a critical form for social realism to engage
with in so far as it remains concerned with the sense of any possi-
ble commitment to progressive, conscious change. Indeed, there are
examples of contemporary social realist filmmaking that appear self-
consciously engaged with tragic social reality. Typically this involves
a focus on the experience of those whose existence, like that of the
working class, is bound up with the suffering, frustration, waste and

deadlock of what Williams describes as an arrested humanity trapped
within the horizons of a class society that denies ‘full membership’ to
all (ibid., pp. 77–8). Williams’ double movement of the tragic form –
reproducing and struggling against tragic ‘disorder’, comprehended in
‘close and immediate experience’, is a good general description of the
social realist films which I will explore here (ibid., p. 83). Necessarily,
then, this ‘tragic’ process is complex. There is a searching out of the pos-
sibility of change, and the frequent recoil to be expected in contexts of
oppression where actions often backfire, miss their target, and can even
make things worse. Such situations are easily mocked as ‘miserabilist’, or
deprecated with recourse to off the shelf paradigms of realism as deter-
minist. But social realism’s relationship to the deep and tragic disorder of
contemporary capitalism is often tenacious, and one important way in
which we can further approach this encounter is via questions of ethics.
Ethics and social realism
This is a turn that is reflected in Eagleton’s work too. The metaphysical,

religious terms in which Eagleton chooses to explore the ethical does
not represent a turning away from the political. Indeed Eagleton insists
on their continuity (see Eagleton 2009b, pp. 299–300). Again, this has
relevance to the current critical debate on social realism in which, as
we have seen, a retreat into the politics of the personal and familial
is posed against what seems to be considered a more properly politi-
cal engagement with the public world. This way of reading the films,
despite its undoubted accuracy in charting changes in emphasis, is in
danger of confirming a conventional conception of ethics that leaves
it confined to the personal and private realm.14 It might be interest-
ing then to explore some of the most significant recent social realist
films – the work of directors such as Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows,
for instance – with an attention to the ways in which the ethical and
the political demand to be considered simultaneously. Just as Williams
linked what is, from a conventional left perspective, the unlikely cou-
ple of tragedy and revolution, so Eagleton insists not on conflating the
realms of ethics and politics, or on proposing a subordination of politics
to ethics, but on exploring the nature of their interrelationship with a
view to strengthening the resources of the political left in an era of deep
crisis.
But before we consider particular films that seem to be part of this con-
temporary encounter with such ethical questions, it might be helpful to
review the terms of this ethical enrichment of left politics attempted by

Eagleton, whose interlinked anthropological and ethical arguments are
often exemplified in his discussions of the tragic form. In his recent work
the tragic form is important because it enables a mediated encounter
with aspects of our species-being. One of Eagleton’s most effective evo-
cations of this human essence is through his discussion of the doubleness
of the body and his deconstruction of the opposition between cultural-
ism and naturalism. The body is both culturally constructed, its range
and experiences historically changing, and at the same time it is marked
by certain transhistorical universals. Crucially, the latter involve bio-
logical limits – those implied by weakness, dependency, suffering, and
death – as well as, paradoxically, the inherent ‘transgressive’ (Eagleton
2003b, p. 146) ability we possess to ‘culturally’ and historically exceed
these ‘natural’ limits both in the direction of ‘mutual injury and destruc-
tiveness’ (evil), and in creative and mutually fulfilling ways (such as
love) (Eagleton 2009b, p. 310). Thus, it is ‘in our natures to be in
excess of our natures’, and the upshot of this is that we are poised
uneasily between destructive and creative potential (Eagleton 2005a,
p. 17). Human ‘nature’ can ground a materialist ethics – we can respond
to one another’s common vulnerabilities and needs, and in such tend-
ing of our shared material, embodied conditions of existence, friendship
and love can flourish. However, the fact that love is a kind of ‘natu-
ral’ value does not make it easy to achieve (ibid.). Political love – the
extension of mutual self-fulfilment to society as a whole – is arduous.
At its most exacting, such love approaches the sacrificial, inner logic of
the tragic. That is to say its redemptive possibilities are related to the
actions of revolutionaries and martyrs whose extreme self-sacrificial acts
are offered up so that others may live.15
Related to the revolutionary and martyr is the tragic scapegoat: ‘the
guilty innocent’ whose horrific suffering (the transferred guilt of an
inhuman society) indicts the social that has inflicted it (Paul Ricoeur
cited in ibid., p. 134). In what is an allegory of Marx on the proletariat
as the universal class, Eagleton re-writes the challenge of the scapegoat.
The scapegoat’s derelict, abject, inhuman destitution, its body stripped
of cultural self-fabrication, its ability to evoke a fundamental condition
of dispossession, non-being, and death – all this can, if pitied and not
thrust from us in fear, act to transform an apparently irreparably cor-
rupted social order. This tragic scapegoat is today not the token criminal
excluded from the city as in classical drama, but the ‘garbage of global
capitalism’ (ibid., p. 133). Its very existence is a challenge so fundamen-
tal that its social inclusion (in the political language of liberalism) would
be an insufficient response. This world’s ‘most vulnerable’ victims,

‘innocent in themselves yet the most poignant signs of a more general
exploitation’, signal the terms of ‘its potential transformation’ (ibid.,
pp. 134–5).
Thus, for Eagleton, there are aspects of our human condition, brought
home to us in the tragic form in the image of the piteous spectacle of
the scapegoat, which set us what are simultaneously ethical and political
challenges – those of political love or agape. As David Alderson puts it:
‘the imperative must be to be true to our nature by continuing to create
history in ways which make that history fully respectful of our bodies,
honouring their needs and making possible the full creative potential of
all’ (Alderson 2004, p. 98). The ethics advocated here is a combination of
liberal individualism and socialist reciprocity, as captured, for instance,
by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Eagleton is wary of an
‘ideology of the ethical’, derived from Kant, in which ethics are austerely
viewed as a matter of ‘duty, obligation, responsibility’ (Eagleton 2009b,
p. 299). Instead he seeks to revive a classical eudaemonism in which
‘ethics is about abundance of life, rich and diverse self-realisation’ (ibid).
Crucially, such ethics are ‘ordinary, prosaic, everyday’ and thus presup-
pose the importance of the social (ibid.). One cannot ‘excel as a human
being in isolation’, because to lead a good life one needs ‘a good soci-
ety’ (Eagleton 2003a, p. 128). This adherence to an Aristotelian tradition
of ethics marks Eagleton’s distance from a contemporary sublime dis-
course of ethics that he calls ‘ethical Realism’ (he is thinking of Badiou,
Derrida, Žižek, Levinas).16 Like Levinas he seeks an ethics whose impact
is experienced in terms analogous to the shocking encounter with that
which is pointed to by the traumatic Lacanian Real (as glimpsed, for
instance, in the horrors of the tragic form). For Eagleton what is revealed
in this encounter with our embodied ‘creatureliness’ (Eagleton 2009b,
p. 311) can help us move towards a redeeming love for others/strangers
and an ‘inexhaustible attention’ to ‘finite, created things’ (ibid., p. 307).
With the ethical Realists, however, there is too often a break between
the awesome obligations of ethical duty and the everyday world of
politics.
An area of Eagleton’s work that is related to these arguments on
human nature and ethics is his concern with the idea of a ‘common
culture’ (Eagleton 2000, p. 119). Once again, this interest is part of his
general project to revive modes of social solidarity in an era in which,
as he bleakly puts it, the ‘sense of society’ itself has atrophied (Eagleton
2009a, p. 233). And again, Williams is a key figure. For Eagleton cul-
ture is ultimately a form of solidarity built on a communal, somatically
based human nature – ‘sociality bears in upon us at a level even deeper

than culture’ (Eagleton 2000, p. 111). Thus, it would be a mistake, from
Eagleton’s perspective, to view Williams’ regulative ideal of a ‘common
culture’, which is prefigured in the key working class contribution to
the ‘long revolution’ – its cultures of solidarity – as a suppression of
difference within an ‘organicist nostalgia’ (ibid., p. 121). Instead a com-
mon culture should be seen as providing a situation in which, with the
material means of common unity secured, the loving protection and
cultivation in common of our species-being enables the flourishing of
cultural/individual differences, unimaginable to us now struggling as we
are in the shadows of class society.
Social realism and the agonies of the working class: Ghosts
How then can we see these reflections on ethics, politics and culture
playing out in contemporary social realist film, specifically, in the latter’s
proximity to the tragic mode? One of the most noticeable developments
in recent British social realist film has been the inclusion of the figure of
the migrant worker and the asylum seeker (see for instance GYPO (2005),
Exodus (2007), It’s a Free World (2007), and Ghosts (2006)). This combi-
nation of international labour and the otherness of the stranger (not
always but usually working class), places issues of working class solidar-
ity in an ethical register. Take Ghosts, a film about the tragic drowning
of eighteen Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay. A key ques-
tion posed by the film seems to be – who are the ghosts? On one level
they are the dead Chinese workers who in the film’s narrative struc-
ture (the beginning is also the film’s end, with the workers trapped
in the rising waters) are returned to life in order to endure their suf-
fering again (in Benjamin’s work the classical experience of Hades as
torturous repetition was used as a metaphor for history under capitalism
as the eternal repetition of the same).17 These ghosts are the ‘guilty-
innocents’, they are icons of an inhuman system and the movement
and suffering of their bodies traces its interlocking structures. The film
gives us a picture of the intimate reliance of the national economy
on sweated, racially oppressed, illegal migrant labour that is seem-
ingly hopelessly ensnared within the informal networks of exploitation
linking gangmasters, international organized crime, recruitment agen-
cies and multinational corporations such as supermarkets. The classic
scapegoat was an individual wandering in exile, whereas the modern
scapegoat is composed of the vast majority – ‘whole sweated, uprooted
populations’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 296).
But the ghosts are also the white hosts (‘gwai lo’), who signify a history
of imperialism in the difference of race. The imperial historical narrative
is re-wound – from east to west – its racialized forms still active. Against
this the film suggests the need for a culture of solidarity based on val-
ues implicit in the facts of our species-being. The ‘non-being of human
deprivation’– the ghostliness of the ‘death-in-life’ existence of the eco-
nomic migrant, its exhausting agonies, is to be contrasted with the
vampiric life-through-death of neoliberal capitalism which is responsible
for this draining of labour (Eagleton 2003a, p. 221). Capitalism attacks
species-being. In a key scene, a native worker and the central charac-
ter Ai Qin (Ai Qin Lin) are prevented from talking by the machinery
of a supermarket food processing plant. Ironically the language barrier
itself (cultural difference) becomes a distant promise, something that
can only be truly accessed on the basis of a common culture of solidar-
ity that is rooted in our shared creatureliness. One of the most powerful
images of this commonality is provided by the relationship between the
migrants and the van they travel in. Its windows provide balm for their
eyes in the framed, tracking shots of a world in which their only other
form of engagement is physical brutalization; its seats hold their lolling,
exhausted bodies; its roof gives them their last refuge before the waves
overcome them. It is their only true home, a securely moving point of
easeful passage in a hostile world. At one point, we see it loaded with
mattresses on the roof – a particularly striking reminder of its protective
status in the inhospitable world of neoliberal capitalism. The opening
and ending images of the film are a remarkable condensation of global
capitalism’s sublime force. Cut off in the dark, with the tide swirling
around them, the cockle pickers stand on the roof of the submerging
van and from within the trackless maw of the sea send hopeless mayday
calls on mobile phones.
A common culture: This is England
Shane Meadows’ This is England (2006) explores the obstacles to a com-

mon culture and in doing so evokes the complexities of English working
class history. The film is set in a transitional time, during the first
Thatcher administration and the Falklands war, a moment when it had
become clear that the working class faced an implacable assault on the
conditions of its ‘common life’ (Williams 1984, p. 285). For Williams,
the ‘idea of culture’ represents an attempt to explore such moments of
change and to attempt to ‘reach again for control’ (ibid.). This is a pro-
cess he describes in terms of different class logics and opposed ideas of
‘the nature of the social relationship’ (ibid., p. 311). There are three such
key ideas: individualism, service and solidarity. The latter is historically
associated with working class culture, which, he argues, is ‘primarily
social’ (ibid., p. 313). However, this culture of solidarity has been subject
to two ‘difficulties’ (ibid., p. 318). First, it carries the scars of a ‘long siege’
concomitant with the working class’ protracted and traumatic experi-
ence of being transformed into history’s first mass proletariat (ibid.).
Secondly, ‘the defensive attitude’ (ibid) fostered by this history of bit-
ter struggle only compounds another key problem in the development
of the idea of solidarity – that of ‘achieving diversity without creat-
ing separation’ (ibid., p. 319). A ‘common loyalty’ needs to be able to
embrace difference (ibid.). However, for Williams the history of impe-
rialism and English nationalism has ‘tended to limit’ the working class
sense of community (ibid., p. 312). Finally, we also need to recognize the
historical blurring of the difference between a collectivist working class
culture and the idea of service. The latter was the ‘great achievement of
the Victorian middle class’ (ibid.). Originally opposed to ‘laissez faire’
and ‘self-service’ it imposes a duty to serve a larger good (ibid., p. 314).
However, despite the personal sacrifice such an ethic demands, it nev-
ertheless confirms in its action the status quo (that ‘larger selfishness’
which its own admirable selflessness cannot get in focus) (ibid., p. 315).
Historically, the reach of this idea of service has extended to the work-
ing class where it instils the ‘command to conformity’ and ‘respect for
authority’ (ibid., p. 316). The authoritarianism of the idea of service is
no ‘substitute for the idea of active mutual responsibility’ (ibid.). And
one can appreciate the baleful historical intersection of this notion of
service with the imperial/national restriction of solidarity.
Despite these historical difficulties, for Williams a ‘common culture’
seeks to develop the valuable resources in working class culture. It can
only be fully realized by ensuring ‘the means of life, and the means of
community’ (ibid., p. 320). The two, interlinked metaphors Williams
uses to summarize his idea of the progressive potential of a common
culture are ‘tending’ and ‘natural growth’: ‘The idea of a common cul-
ture brings together, in a particular form of social relationship, at once
the idea of natural growth and that of its tending’ (ibid., p. 322). This
social relationship has the structure of Eagleton’s concept of political
love (or ‘reciprocal self-fulfilment’) (Eagleton 1990, p. 413). That is to
say, the expansion of the potential of the self (natural growth) is saved
from ‘romantic individualism’ by a mutual encouragement (tending)
that avoids the ‘dominative’ subordination of ‘authoritarian training’
associated with the commonality of service (Williams 1984, p. 322).
Crucially then, a common culture is committed to ‘equality of being’

(ibid., p. 323).
How do these old arguments of Williams help to illuminate This is
England? Meadows makes the remnants and resources of working class
sociality central, exploring them from the perspective of the domes-
tic, personal, familial and semi-autobiographical, whilst maintaining a
sense of the immediate context of political crisis. The latter is signalled
in the opening montage constructed around Thatcher’s Falklands war.
As Jon Savage remarks, the images here remind us of the intense politi-
cal struggles of the time.18 The film’s central character is the young boy
Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) whose grief and isolation after the loss of his
father in that war intensifies the sensitivity to others he possesses as
a child. His need for others and his impressionability highlight issues
of ‘tending’ and ‘growth’. It is the child’s experience that becomes the
criteria by which to judge the quality of the community offered him
by the gang of skinheads associated with Woody (Joe Gilgun). Mead-
ows quickly establishes the exhilaration of belonging to a group which
is open to the stranger. In central scenes detailing the outfitting and
initiation of Shaun, a strong affect of solidarity is generated through
music, the use of space and cinematography to the extent that when
the skinhead Combo (Stephen Graham) appears, the soundtrack tunes
out his racist provocations (Combo’s monologue fades, solemn classi-
cal music dominating in the mix) and we are left with a sense of the
unspoken opposition of Woody’s faction to Combo’s encroaching racist
nationalism.
It is in these early initiation scenes that Meadows’ perspective on
working class culture – the view from inside – is most marked. As critics
have noted, it is important to recognise that Meadows works as a ‘native
insider’ not a ‘sympathetic visitor’ (Hall 2010). This distinction can be
explored further if we consider the relationship the film maintains to the
forms of ‘moral realism’ and ‘poetic realism’ as distinctive components
of British social realism. For Andrew Higson, the combination of these
two forms in the Kitchen Sink films made between 1958 and 1963 sig-
nifies a contradictory logic of class. Higson sees a moral commitment to
the ordinary (related to the Griersonian tradition) mixed with a certain
aesthetic pleasure in the vision of the grim sublimity of the industrial
landscape (the ‘poetic’ tradition associated with Jennings). Thus, in the
critical discourse around these films, Higson points to the appearance
of the idea of ‘beautiful tragedy’, which he understands as a response to
the pleasure of a class-inflected position of spectatorship, in which spec-
tacular and secure views of lowering panoramas of urban entrapment
are navigated by the films’ lonely working class escapees (Higson 1996,
p.142). Typically then, a subjectifying appropriation of the working class
milieu gratifies a middle class curiosity with the exotic, working class
other. But this aesthetic pleasure is contained within proper bounds –
its implicitly reprehensible qualities muted by such films’ commitment
to a moral realist engagement with the everyday.
How then have the class contradictions of this aspect of British social
realism changed in the intervening years? Moral realism has weak-
ened, but not the opposition between individual and society, or the
class-inflected pleasure of tragic or sordid working class subject matter.
Trainspotting, for instance, as an example of what Murray Smith calls
the aesthetic of ‘black magic realism’ (Smith 2002, p. 75), represents the
same conjunction of a realism mixed with pleasurable fantasy, played
out via a drama of individual entrapment and escape in an environment
in which generational difference displaces and conceals class difference
(the central character, Renton, belongs to a younger generation free of
the ‘irredeemably tainted’ mass culture of his parent generation) (Higson
1996, p. 147). If social realism once sought to contain the contradic-
tion that a pleasurable view of the ‘squalor’ of working class urban areas
might be considered ‘reprehensible’ or sadistic (ibid., p. 152) when unac-
companied by a moral motive, then black magic realism self-consciously
seeks out the potential of ‘garbage culture’ to offer a springboard for
individualized, class thrills (Smith 2002, p. 25).
Returning to Meadows, we can measure the distance between his use
of the conventions of social realism and this tradition of poetic/black
magic realism. For Meadows there is no underlying structure of class
voyeurism at work, and this can be appreciated if we consider how he
handles the views from inside and outside the working class milieu he
evokes. Consider, for the purposes of contrast, this statement by Higson
on the class dynamic in the New Wave: ‘It is only from a class posi-
tion outside the city that the city can appear beautiful’ (Higson 1996,
p. 151). I think Higson may be right about the New Wave films because
here the view from within the city presumes the perspective of the
escapee/victim – ultimately, the figure of the working class individual
who seeks upward class mobility. Such a view from within is not one
that could possibly join individual and collective perspectives – as it typ-
ically does in Meadows’ films. With Meadows, such situations are never
just about the oppressiveness of the surrounding working class world
that fuels the unhappiness of the Kitchen Sink escapee. Rather, what
Meadows offers is something less legible from a bourgeois point of view,
something that the escapee could not appreciate as it involves turning
what is understood positively from such a perspective (the individual

experience) into something which is negative or lacking (individualism
as the misery of isolation if it is not simultaneously connected to the
experience of the collective). Generally in Meadows’ films the collec-
tive is in place – and therefore the view from inside can be beautiful.
Also, and as a consequence, the aesthetic qualities of a de-industrializing
working class environment (the view from outside) take on a different
feel. However derelict, the landscape is socialized, it is lived in, rather
than surveyed from a secure distance as a picturesque panorama of
disengagement. Thus, the scenes of the gang promenading within dilap-
idated local spaces, as part of the ritual celebration of Shaun’s initiation,
convey the utopian aesthetic and political charge of the grace of the
group which contrasts strongly with both the ‘poetic realism’ of the
New Wave, and the ‘black magic realism’ which has been its replace-
ment/supplement, and even with the lyrical, convulsive realism of a
director like Derek Jarman, who also uses the intense collision of sub-
cultural style and social dereliction to evoke a frenzied anti-Thatcherism
in The Last of England (1988).
To return then to the contrast between Woody and Combo, it is
Combo’s role to activate the fault line of historical weakness in the work-
ing class idea of the social – a brittle boundary whose origins are tangled
up in the uniquely long national history of capitalism and the phe-
nomenon of popular imperialism of the late nineteenth century. Combo
further compounds this weakening of the idea of common loyalty in his
confusion of solidarity with service. Thus, he can see through Thatcher’s
war, but the idea of sacrifice to some deep England (the forbidden, for-
gotten England of the National Front, a dangerous amalgam of working
class ressentiment and martial national ‘service’) seduces him.
The potential for a common culture is, however, conveyed in the
film’s representation of space. Woody’s gang inhabit spaces in such a
way as to indicate that proximity to the stranger is welcomed. Woody’s
opening speech to Shaun in the underpass where the latter is accosted
contains the fundamental invitation: ‘Sit with me’. For Woody, social
space is not empty or neutral (as it is in the tradition of liberal individu-
alism) but charged with the possibility of fulfilling mutual engagement.
Seen from the perspective of what Williams calls the individualist idea
of the social, space is always congested, full of obstacles, and carries the
potential of harm for the individual negotiating it. Placing the open-
ing encounter between Shaun and the skinheads in an urban underpass
precisely catches and reverses such expectations. As in many of Mead-
ows’ other films, space, both public and private, supports individual and
collective flourishing. One frequently repeated example of this is the

squeezing of bodies into domestic settings. Meadows’ often cramped
interiors radiate an informal ease – these are spaces in which the com-
fortable intimacy of many individuals creates an image of ‘equality of
being’, which is something Woody, with his vehement opposition to
bullying, also vocally insists on.
Finally, it is important to note that the film’s interest in a culture of
solidarity is working against an emergent culture of neoliberalism in
which the social is absorbed into the taxonomic schemas being pop-
ularized as forms of ‘urban anthropology’ in the style culture of the
period (Savage 2007, p. 40).19 Savage refers to the circulation of the dis-
course of national tribalism in 1983, the year in which the film is set.
Meadows seeks to keep us aware of the common class roots of many
of these sub-cultural styles – a commonality expressed emblematically
in the New Romantic teenager Smell being paired romantically with
Shaun the little Skin. To paraphrase Williams: diversity and difference
(growth) is premised on our ability to ensure ‘equality of being’ (tend-
ing) – something impossible within a neoliberalism in which cultural
differences grow vivid, but only against the background of an increas-
ingly polarized social landscape of deprivation and luxury. Again, it is
Figure 1.2 Photograph from the set of This is England (2006). Shaun (Thomas
Turgoose) is shorn in Shane Meadows’ working class culture of mutual care.

c Dean Roberts
Combo’s role in the film to emphasize the dead end of any response to
neoliberalism that disregards these truths. He lectures the gang about
unemployment, immigration and Thatcher’s war, and seeks to enforce a
martial ethic of service, with its ritual apparatus of terror, blood brother-
hood and authoritarianism. What he offers his troops is training based
upon the ‘command to conformity’ (Williams 1984, p. 316). His use of
Shaun as a mascot through which his authority can be asserted over the
others is part of this process.
Neoliberalism and the scapegoat: Dead Man’s Shoes
Dead Man’s Shoes displays the generic inventiveness which has become
associated with contemporary social realism. The film mixes motifs from
revenge tragedy, horror, black comedy and satire, the western, and the
gangster movie. However, as the narrative unfolds so the humour and
formal liveliness appear more clearly mobilized around a serious explo-
ration of the theme of the relationship between neoliberalism and the
working class/underclass. It is this exploration of the social and class
damage of neoliberalism which Meadows transfers from the mode of
capitalist realism (with its brutal cynicisms and black humour – see for
instance the work of Guy Ritchie) to one of tragic realism (with its con-
cern to mark, in pity and fear, a shocking sense of the plight of our
species-being, and to generate from this an awareness of the possibili-
ties of renewing the social). In Meadows’ films generally, this awareness
often hinges on the traumatic figure of the outsider: the prematurely
aged child, the simple, the outcast.
At the centre of Dead Man’s Shoes is a historically sedimented image of
the technologies and related modes of power which worked to incor-
porate the working class into the social, an image that is central to
expanding our perception of the significance of the scapegoat figure in
the film. Seen several times in the background of landscape shots of the
town; in the black and white flashbacks of many of the characters, and
finally, in colour and shot from the air and at ground level, the Devil’s
House is where Anthony, the mentally disabled brother of army veteran
Richard, is taunted and tortured into taking his own life. A large, ruined
gothic Victorian country house, which has in a previous incarnation
been used as a zoo, the Devil’s House already suggests extreme confine-
ment. Anthony’s fear of the building is linked thematically to the fear
of the freak in the human menagerie/freakshow. Richard, who returns
to avenge his brother, dresses in a gas mask to terrorise his victims –
the gang of petty drug dealers and hangers on who abused Anthony
Figure 1.3 Photograph from the set of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004). Richard (Paddy
Considine) and his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) make their way across
England’s Midlands looking for revenge.
c Dean Roberts
in his absence – a disguise referred to as The Elephant Man, thus mak-

ing the historical connection to previous regimes of power dependent
on confinement and the spectacular control of the socially subordi-
nate. That is to say, through their activation of popular cultural images
of the socially marginal, Meadows and Paddy Considine (the latter as
co-scriptwriter) bring to mind Foucault’s histories of confinement and
madness.20 Anthony’s treatment by the gang is historically reminiscent
of the treatment of the mad by their visitors in Bedlam – where they
would be goaded, plied with alcohol, gawped at and mocked.21 Cru-
cially, for Foucault this was a moment when madness was produced as
a spectacle. With the shift into modern regimes of power-knowledge,
the social visibility of madness – and of that related figure of social
marginality, the criminal – is diminished. However, as Loïc Wacquant
observes it is precisely Foucault’s prediction that the spectacular func-
tioning of technologies of punishment will continue to fade which the
neoliberalism of recent years has contradicted.
Wacquant argues that neoliberalism pioneers a politics of poverty
(Wacquant 2009, p. 287) in which punishment is post-rehabilitative
(penal policy as ‘brute neutralisation, rote retribution and simple ware-
housing’) and aligned with a social policy of welfare retrenchment and
workfare in order to coerce more of the working class into the secondary
labour market (ibid., p. 296). Crucially, the functioning of this politics of
poverty depends on a ‘law-and-order guignol’ in which punishment is
not sequestered from public view and in which society seeks to ‘drama-
tise moral norms’ (ibid., p. 298). In this way spectacular ‘authoritarian
moralism’ underscores old historical boundaries within the working
class between deserving/undeserving, respectable/unrespectable, whole-
some, working families/fearful and corrupted underclass congeries
(ibid., p. 311).
This analysis of neoliberalism provides a useful framework to under-
stand the character of Richard and the gang he ‘executes’. Richard’s rage
is intra class violence that has been captured by neoliberal’s logic of the
‘remasculinisation of the state’ (for Wacquant a neoliberal ‘daddy state’
replaces the Keynesian-Fordist welfare ‘nanny’ state) (ibid., p. 290). That
is to say, the convergence of aggressive penal and social policies – which
the figure of the ‘underclass’ perfectly encapsulates – has been used to
stoke popular resentments and fears of the derelict and deviant, welfare
recipient and street criminal, whilst at the same time compromising the
fundamental sense of ‘equality of being’ upon which democracy must
rest. Again, the dirty class ontologies of neoliberalism – the social bes-
tiaries of capitalist realism – are seen to be a vital aspect of this process.22
Richard then is in part a puppet figure possessed by a demonic logic of
destruction, which in its black ‘poetic’ justice (the creative symmetries
of revenge) reduplicates and inscribes the key neoliberal political ges-
tures of ‘decisive action’ in the flesh of the ‘underclass’. By the end he
has himself become what he sought to punish: the ‘beast’.
But the searing encounter between the gang and Anthony retains its
unanswered, tragic, ethical charge. As scapegoat, Anthony’s existence
challenges the neoliberal attack on the social and the working class.
That is to say, by embracing Anthony – as the abject, the ‘weak’ – those
around him would be capable of rediscovering the ‘equality of being’
that can remake social solidarity. What needs to be noted in this respect
is that there is a strong sense in the film of an ambivalence towards
Anthony, shown in the flashbacks which capture the gang’s uncon-
trolled swerving between rituals of solidarity and love on the one hand,
and a kind of demonic evil on the other.
Let us first consider the evil of Sonny’s gang. In his discussions of evil,
Eagleton views it as in part a form of embarrassed cynical nihilism.23
We might argue that as such it is key to capitalist realism, which seeks to
reduce all value and meaning, for instance the idea of the social, altruism,
and love, to ‘non-being’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 261). It is Anthony’s naïve,
childish belief in his ‘soldier’ brother as a paragon of civic/national

value which seems to goad Sonny into acts of obscene cruelty. Like-
wise, it is the possibility/probability of Anthony’s sexual inexperience,
metonymically his assumed innocence, which leads Sonny to sexually
abuse him. This kind of ‘demonic’ evil, as Eagleton calls it, is nauseated
by any sense of ‘obscene repleteness of human existence’ (ibid., p. 261)
or bland belief in value itself: ‘Revolted by the over-stuffed meaning of
the angelic, the demonic keels over into nihilism, levelling all values to
an amorphous shit’ (ibid., p. 260). Richard and Anthony’s childhood,
as seen through the nostalgic colour tones of Super 8 film stock in the
opening sequences, might stand then for precisely the kind of infuri-
ating blandness of the ‘angelic’ ideology of the family which appears
to provoke the cruelty of Sonny. These family-films are contrasted with
the equally informal black and white flashbacks of the gang’s sprawling
domestic spaces in which analogies of familial relationships are sug-
gested amongst the almost exclusively male group. But, as I will argue,
even in such grotesque social space, Meadows retains an impression of
a subsisting, if degraded and eventually broken, sense of solidarity.
There is then something about Anthony’s child-like condition – his
manipulability, his ‘vulgar vulnerability’, which only redoubles his tor-
mentors’ disgust, rage and cruelty (ibid., p. 283). But this ‘weakness’
of Anthony, as Richard puts it, and the abject social status that goes
with it, offers a ‘living image of injustice’ (Eagleton 2005a, p. 134).
Anthony’s wretchedness and suffering (which in the final scenes at the
Devil’s House Meadows self-consciously shoots in terms of Christ’s Pas-
sion), distils the general condition inflicted on the precarious segments
of a post-industrial working class. There is, in other words, a moment in
which the community around Anthony – Sonny’s ‘family’ – can recog-
nize themselves in him, and in this moment Anthony stands for ‘all the
discarded victims’ of neoliberalism, the ‘garbage’ of late capitalism, and
the inhuman condition which must be confronted if the ‘social order
is to be remade’ (ibid., pp. 138–9). Bullying, as something structurally
integral to neoliberalism, is thus brought into poignant focus.
It is evident that Anthony inspires in Sonny’s ‘family’ not just
demonic cruelty, but also their love. The chaotic flashback footage of
Anthony’s abuse does not prevent us from assuming that there is a
genuine desire to make Anthony part of their lives – to initiate him
into some male collective, to divert him from his family (he repeat-
edly mentions being on his way to see ‘Uncle Lenny’) into another
world. Throughout these scenes, gestures of love (protective, implicat-
ing and incorporative gestures with hands, fingers, arms; along with
hugs, backslaps, handshakes, cheek pinching, homoerotic wrestling)

keep switching into acts of evil (punches, exposure, derision, rituals of
punishment and terror). The scapegoat becomes a blurred focal point
around which the fate of the community revolves.
The film builds to a moment of ethical clarity that is summarized in
the final exchange between Richard and Mark who have returned to
the site of Anthony’s suicide. Richard asks: ‘What did you do?’ Mark
assumes this question is a quasi-juridical demand for an account of acts
committed. But it is not. Although he is the innocent man (despite
his presence, he did not actively participate in Anthony’s death), Mark
remains guilty. He admits, when he realizes the implications of Richard’s
question, that he failed to ‘stay with’ Anthony when the others aban-
doned him, terrorised and anguished. Therefore he is guilty because of
what he did not do. The ‘family man’ – who has lifted himself out of
the depraved ‘underclass’ – is indicted through his failure to act, and in
this realization, the ethical power of the film is manifested.
Social realism’s dark matter: Mitchell and Kenyon
In 2004/5, the lost Mitchell and Kenyon films emerged into public view
after close to a century in a Blackburn cellar. My interest in these films,
particularly the examples of the factory gate genre in which the sole
focus was the mass industrial workforce captured streaming out of the
factories, lies in how they represent the working class and its history in
ways relevant to an assessment of the blockages and possibilities of the
tradition of social realism. We might say that the films in the collection
represent an inaugural moment in that extension of the coverage of the
social, a moment which is so critical to the project of social realism.
As Tom Gunning points out with reference to the factory gate genre,
these films record the ‘entrance of the working class [ . . . ] onto a new
stage of visibility’ (Gunning 2004, p. 49).
How then do such films help us to address the enduring, general
problems of social realism? Critics have assigned these problems to
two main areas of concern: the ongoing weakening of the sense of
the public, collective, and social conditions of working class existence
in favour of the individualizing, domestic, and familial dimensions;
and the failure to challenge the exclusions, inequalities and divisions
that have scarred the working class, including those of race, gender
and sexuality, region and nationality. It can of course be argued that
social realism, in as much as it is identified with representations of
the working class, is in part capturing enduring historical problems in
Figure 1.4 Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901), from the
Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. A new vision of the working class.
c BFI
working class culture in these areas. Certainly, when we look at the

Mitchell and Kenyon films, taken as a whole, they provide evidence
of the existence of the injurious divisions of gender, race, and empire
in Edwardian working class culture: the many films featuring popular
imperialism and football for instance. The social rigidities, separations
and exclusions discussed by Williams are all here. But overridingly, what
one picks up from these films and in the factory gate genre specifically
is the strong sensation of the social affect of working class existence.
Or, as Gunning puts it, the ‘unpredictable vitality and motion’ of this
Edwardian world (ibid., p. 56). Gunning underscores this by quoting
a lonely bourgeois Freud commenting on the ‘community spirit’ to
be found in the working class but absent from his own (ibid., p. 49).
We might add that the films – for instance, Alfred Butterworth & Sons,
Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901) – seem to offer brief glimpses of ‘intensive’
social totalities, mobile vortices of ramifying social, economic and famil-
ial relations between the working masses converging on and around the
gates of the various factories (Lukács 1970, p. 38). In part this is a result
of the liminal structure of the films which the working class partici-
pants are crossing, thereby marking social boundaries between work,
home, urban–public space and leisure sites (these factory exits were
often filmed prior to holiday closures – Wakes Weeks – and thus the
process started with the filming requires a journey to the holiday fair-
ground, first home of the cinema, to be completed). Historically, an
image of the British working class has been passed down to us frag-
mented and distorted by these social boundaries and their apparently
sealed-off worlds – the male world of industrial production; the female
world of the home; the mass cultural arena of modern leisure, etc. The
factory gate films bring out, in intense, vibrant abbreviations, the inter-
connections between these worlds – very young children moving from
the home into the factory at lunch time, carrying food for their elders;
men, women and slightly older children emerging and mingling as
co-workers, many of them taking the time, in the public space of the
street, to express their curiosity about the new, mass entertainment tech-
nology of the Biograph: work, the reproduction of labour, consumption.
Not the faceless masses; or the traditional, culturally intact community;
or the prized figure of the toiling paterfamilias or the hearthside mother,
but a genuinely new popular cultural image of the working class as some
whirligig of energetic co-existences. In these vital, vivacious (despite the
silence) images there is sufficient explosive force to blast open the rep-
resentational solidities of the long-held English culture of capitalism
and class.
The complexity of working class co-existence demonstrated in the
films helps then to break down the dominance of the monolithic image
of male industrial labour conventionally associated with the period run-
ning from the mid nineteenth to the final quarter of the twentieth
century. The challenge to such images is crucial to the renewal of histori-
cal materialism and the sense of the centrality of the working class in the
process of historical change. Gunning’s essay shows its awareness of this
view of history in an early reference to the working class as ‘putatively
the driving force of any age’ (Gunning 2004, p. 49). Here, once again, we
might mention the work of historians such as Linebaugh whose argu-
ments about the social heterogeneity characteristic of the proletariat
of earlier historical eras is connected to an argument about recogniz-
ing the continuity-in-diversity of the contemporary planetary working
class – a recognition which forestalls any talk about its post-industrial
disappearance or decline and which draws back into the frame ejected
national fragments, such as the underclass.24 In this respect, social real-
ism’s current interest in the underclass is not necessarily a sign of a
problematic drifting away from wider social problems to blocked per-
sonal ones. On the contrary, it might be argued that the importance of
this aspect of contemporary social realism resides in its challenging of

old and disabling oppositions such as respectable/unrespectable; seden-
tary/mobile; national/international; young/old and domestic/social.
But to leave our reading of the films here would be to miss another
essential aspect of their contemporary significance. For it is difficult to
watch these films without an impinging feeling of the tragic. As we have
seen, such tragedy implies a sense of the importance of transhistori-
cal solidarity. Indeed, the tragic humanism of Eagleton suggests a way
to understand a tension implicit in Gunning’s essay between different
models of history. As Gunning puts it, considered as ‘treasure trove’ the
films contain all sorts of information potentially useful to ‘historians
of daily life, of costume, of working-class culture and even the history
of the body’ (Gunning 2004, p. 53). But such micro-historical, or New
Historicist approaches sit uneasily next to statements such as ‘They [the
factory gate films] address us directly; we participate in their human-
ity and their spontaneity. These workers still look us in the eyes [ . . . ]
It is a filmic experience, which is also a moment snatched from history’
(ibid). Such statements, whilst compatible with Eagleton’s views on the
transhistorical charge of the species-being, are harder to reconcile with
the conventional anti-essentialism of left-historicism. Throughout Gun-
ning’s remarkable essay the presence of Benjamin is to be felt. In the
above quote for instance, the idea of something precious being retrieved
from history in a chancy moment, echoes Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept
of History’. Again, Gunning talks of the faces in these films ‘calling on
us to recognise them’ and argues that ‘we have a responsibility to recall
and channel these departed voices’ (ibid.). Here too is Benjamin’s tragic,
redemptive philosophy of history. And again: ‘Many of the people in
these films look directly at the camera as if in anticipation of recognition
to come’ (ibid.).
How might we explain these features of Gunning’s response to the
films? One way would be to look at the convergence between Gunning’s
essay on the historical thesis of a ‘cinema of attractions’ and Benjamin’s
last essay on history (Gunning 1990, p. 57). The ‘cinema of attractions’
refers to the period 1895–1906. This was a largely non-narrative cinema
of spectacle that was exhibitionist in its address to the spectator. It was
thus very different from the voyeuristic, illusionistic, storytelling cin-
ema associated with Hollywood that was to dominate from the 1910s.
According to Gunning, in the cinema of attractions, the curiosity and
exuberance of the encounter between often working class audiences and
the experiences of modernity were played out explicitly in the processes
of filming and the reception of the films.
As contemporary viewers of these films, our look is inserted between

two different moments of the original gaze of subjects filmed. That is
to say, in so-called locals such as the factory gate genre, the films were
advertised to the crowds being filmed. They could come back later, when
the negatives were developed, and see themselves. Thus, we look back
at them with fascination, looking into faces which once might have
expected to be in our place, gazing on themselves as transformed by the
Biograph. The peculiar mode of address in Gunning’s ‘cinema of attrac-
tions’ (with its direct appeal to the audience) finds us, makes a claim on
us in the present, in the place of the original audience. Or rather, we
are interposed between the original subjects and themselves, unable to
extricate ourselves. Some kind of illusion is broken then by this exhibi-
tionist mode of address, but it is not so much that of narrative diegesis.
It is more the illusion of some complacent looking back into history, the
past, with the contemplative pleasure of disconnection from the spec-
tacle. Here we become entangled in a plea, which is all the stronger for
being made by those who, caught within the immediate horizons of
everyday working life, may not have had their eye on posterity. In this
strange, accidental historical displacement, it is, as Gunning says, as if
something was expected from us, some recognition. As Benjamin puts it:
‘The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemp-
tion [ . . . ] there is a secret agreement between past generations and the
present one’ (Benjamin cited in Löwy 2005, pp. 29–30).
Gunning’s thesis of a ‘cinema of attractions’ establishes a strong con-
nection between early cinema and the working class, an argument he
re-states in the essay on the factory gate films. But this is a connection
based not just in the dominance of working class audiences in the cin-
ema’s first decade. The form and style of these films, as examples of the
cinema of attractions, matched the ‘subject of representation’ – that of
the working class ‘masses’ in action, moving through modern public
spaces (Gunning 2004, p. 50). Overturning the ‘principles of selection
and hierarchy found in traditional images’ these animated photographs
embraced the complex contingencies of the modern appearances of
the mobile vulgus (ibid.). For Gunning they represented a challenge to
‘structures of social control’ and hierarchies of space, time and bod-
ily function – a challenge captured in his felicitous phrase, used to
describe the peculiar, liberating quality of these teeming images: their
‘democracy of composition’ (ibid.).
In such a cinema the emergence of the classical cinema’s extras
has not yet happened. For Georges Didi-Huberman, the extras or
figurants represent the ‘dark mass’ against which narratives centred on
the individual star/actor acquire their brilliance (Didi-Huberman 2009,

p. 19). ‘Figurants’ is a word that captures the image of people in the plu-
ral, in comparison to the individualized image of the star/actor. It is a
word, for Didi-Huberman, from the ‘labyrinths’, signifying ‘an accessory
of humanity’ which serves as a kind of ‘base’ to the story (ibid.). It is a
mass, a moving ‘mosaic’, comprised of the mute and undifferentiated,
a ‘silhouette swallowed up by shadow’ (ibid., p. 20). It also carries an
association of death – for instance, Didi-Huberman talks of the figurants
in historical epics, on battlefields, playing dead and remarks: ‘They die
forgotten, like dogs’ (ibid.).
Certainly the Mitchell and Kenyon films suggest death, somehow
intensified by the knowledge that the films were stored away unseen
for a lifetime, whilst the people whose faces where imprinted on the
emulsions faced a struggle for life amidst the dark decades of the
first half of the twentieth century. To return to Eagleton’s arguments
about the importance of a sense of transhistorical solidarity, here are
images that shock us with recognition of species-being. What is on
display is what Eagleton calls ‘[t]he suffering, mortal, needy, desiring
body which links us fundamentally with our historical ancestors, as
well as with our fellow human beings from other cultures’ (Eagleton
2000, p. 111). Thus, in the factory gate films we see the diminu-
tive bodies of working children, their heads and shoulders wrapped
in shawls, their feet shod in clogs. Cold, malnourished, tired, prema-
turely aged. And something perhaps just as hard to bear – we witness
child and adult often excited and enlivened by the promise of nov-
elty, displaying in their curiosity the unfocused but no less tangible
impression of the transformative potential sensed in the apparatuses
of modernity of which the cinematographic camera was so central
an example. Tragedy then is appropriate here because we take in all
at once this shared species-being, its mangled future in the coming
century and the historical emergence of at least the possibility of
another, better future. It is these ‘forgotten’ futures of the twentieth cen-
tury that Gunning is particularly responsive to in his essay (Gunning
2004, p. 58). It is then hard not to see these films from the perspec-
tive of Benjamin’s Angel of History, turning its sorrowful gaze back-
wards at history as ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ (Benjamin cited in Löwy
2005, p. 62).
In the same essay Benjamin talks about the messianic vision of the
chronicler in which all souls find redemption (Michael Löwy, amongst
others, relates this to Benjamin’s interest in the heretical doctrine of
apokatastasis).25 This offers another way of viewing the Mitchell and
Kenyon films as examples of the cinema of attractions. That is to say,
that quality of the image in these films which fits with Gunning’s
thesis – its teeming, polycentric, democratic compositions – seems to
demand a response which converges with Eagleton’s description of our
attention to the ‘infinite’ as ‘not that which soars beyond [ . . . ] creature-
liness, but as a quality of one’s potentially inexhaustible attention to it’
(Eagleton 2009b, p. 307).
Cinema of the figurants: Red Road
If today we can entertain the idea that the historical vicissitudes of

the Mitchell and Kenyon films suggests another cinema, a cinema of
the figurants, perhaps we can also speculate that a social realist cinema
might already contain qualities that converge with such a cinema. The
latter has an interstitial, marginal relationship with mainstream film,
both as an industrial practice (the struggle to get distribution/theatrical
exhibition, the reliance on festival circuits and television) and as an aes-
thetic/political practice (the general avoidance of the star system, the
episodic narratives in which individualizing classic narrative structures
open up to the dispersive effects of the wider social context – Didi-
Huberman’s ‘dark mass’ from whose obscurity the actors can often be
directly drawn. Thomas Turgoose, Katie Jarvis, David Bradley, Martin
Compston. The list is long.
To take this speculation further, Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) is
an interesting example of a social realist film which allegorizes the ways
in which alternative narrative fictions can be drawn out of what con-
stitutes the ‘dark mass’ of mainstream narrative. That is to say, here we
need to take the figurants as a figure of the working class itself, in its
key contemporary guise as underclass, or dark mass of the social. As we
have seen, the underclass has been a key topic of social realist films in
recent years, precisely because, it might be argued, it represents a view
of the working class typical of neoliberalism – one in which those who
find themselves periodically surplus to its economic order are deemed
to lie beyond any ‘futile or misguided’ reach of the welfare state (Burke
2007, p. 183). Often the underclass is imagined as a feral population
abandoned to decaying sites of post-war modernization – high-rise flats
such as those featuring in Red Road. The Scottish location of the implied
backstory of a failed modernity is also interesting, as it supports the
argument that it is often the Celtic fringe which serves to focus the
disillusionments of Britain’s post-war period.
The film revolves around Jackie (Kate Dickie), a bereaved mother
and wife who works as a CCTV controller. CCTV is a surveillance
technology that fits well with the neoliberal experience of a typically
fearful, segregated social, one split not just between classes but also
within them. In this instance, the split is between respectable and unre-
spectable/underclass segments of the working class. As Harun Farocki
argues in a text on his essay-film Workers Leaving the Factory (1995),
CCTV surveillance cameras ‘automatically and blindly produce an infi-
nite number of pictures in order to safeguard ownership of property’
(Farocki 2010). As a technology of social control it is well adapted to the
social polarization of neoliberalism in which a threatening underclass
thrives as a moral and political issue. In Red Road, however, CCTV
is hijacked by the private melancholia of a woman who has lost her
child and husband to a man driving a car under the influence of nar-
cotics. With those deaths, Jackie’s life has effectively ended. The afterlife
she is living is a haunted one and the precondition for any hope of
recovery will be her ability to attach herself to other narratives, any of
those unfolding daily in all their inconspicuous momentousness before
her eyes. Under her gaze CCTV security technology acquires a benign
form. She understands her job to be about rescue as she follows the
tracks of the vulnerable, and directs the protection offered by the emer-
gency services. However, with the appearance of a grainy image of Clyde
(Tony Curran), Jackie’s use of the technology becomes driven by desires
that she only appears to be in control of. That is to say, the revenge
narrative she puts into motion – entering the CCTV image herself in
order to act out the framing of Clyde for rape – is constantly being
snagged, foundering in other stories. Clyde’s adopted friends fascinate
her, especially a young girl from London, April (Natalie Press) and her
troubled partner Stevie (Martin Compston). Ultimately, Clyde fascinates
her too, but not just because of who he is, unwittingly, to her, but
because of who he is beyond her sense of his past and his once deadly
irresponsibility.
Jackie’s life then depends on characters whose emergence is mediated
through images that are conventionally steeped in the reproduction of
the pathologized symbolism of the underclass estate of Red Road. But
more than this, her will to live again leads to sex with Clyde, the inad-
vertent killer of her family. This scene is a difficult one, precisely because
it is not clear what is happening. We cannot be sure that Jackie is putting
herself through this sexual ordeal simply for the opportunity of revenge
it offers. Indeed, the grief she feels appears to compel her to grip Clyde
in shocked fascination. This is an intimacy verging on the revulsion
that causes her to retch after an earlier physically intimate encounter
with him, yet it also involves an intense desire. It seems that in part
these scenes are not just about sexual desire or revenge but also involve
a self-sacrificial logic. She seeks to suffer for those who have suffered.
Striking herself with a stone is part of this process – necessary perhaps to
support her claim of rape, but also excessive in this regard, and directed
by more purely self-destructive, sympathetic urges in the wake of deaths
she cannot reconcile herself to. Some harrowing logic of loyalty to the
dead is at work – traumatic sex with the man responsible for killing her
family becomes a way of staying true to them. However, this interpreta-
tion does not seem to exhaust the implications of the scene and Jackie’s
actions. As well as seeking vengeance, she is also giving up the dead to
whom it is offered. This is made clear later when we see her reviving an
image of her dead child from a box of clothes which she stuffs to make
a ghostly dummy. The editing implies that this act is a prelude to her
decision to exonerate Clyde and to meet him once more, this time in
her own right rather than incognito.
Crucially, I would argue that the world Jackie re-enters is lit up by polit-
ical love. As we have seen, this phrase of Eagleton’s appears paradoxical
in as much as it implies continuity between the personal and the social,
the ethical and the political. It is designed as a fundamental challenge
to both the cynicism of neoliberal capitalist realism and a certain ethical
idealism that also opposes the status quo. For the cynic the social is a
sentimental fantasy projected onto the brute reality of some Hobbesian
base. This is an aspect then of the demonic, destructive evil of the cul-
ture of neoliberalism – its persistent negation of the social as unreal,
a sham. For the ascetic idealists of the ethical Real, politics are always
compromised in as much as such activity requires a sustained engage-
ment with the everyday world after the necessary moment of impossible
revelation or extremity (the traumatic rupture of the Real in the fabric of
the ordinary) and this makes their ethics ‘too elitist and too unsociable’
(Eagleton 2009a, p. 298).26
Eagleton’s account of this encounter with the Real is variously
described through the tropes of the tragic mode, Judeo-Christian teach-
ing and revolutionary socialism.27 All are united by an experience in
which ‘strength flows from the very depths of abjection. Those who fall
to the bottom of the system are in a sense free of it, and thus at liberty to
build an alternative’ (Eagleton 2003a, p. 221). The intensity and extrem-
ity of this ethico-political discourse might be viewed as a response to the
pressure the left has been under in recent times. Indeed the flourishing
of the ‘dirty ontology of class struggle in Britain’ out of which terms
such as ‘underclass’ and ‘chav’ emerge and are sustained is met directly
in Eagleton’s political rhetoric of liberating monsters/scapegoats as ‘dirt’,
‘anawim’, the ‘shit of the earth, ‘rotting’ human bodies, ‘the dregs and
refuse of society’ (Eagleton 2003b, pp. 277–90), and ‘garbage’ (Eagleton

2005a, p. 133).
For Eagleton then, how we respond to the discourse of class disgust
is critical to our politics. He would appear to view a liberal refusal of
the extremity of this discourse as a grave mistake. That is to say, in
response to the conservative scapegoating of working class ‘monsters’,
the liberal typically denies the existence of human monstrousness,
whereas Eagleton seeks to focus on the inhuman as it is revealed to us
in the vision of the body of the tragic scapegoat. The latter is inhu-
man/monstrous in being reduced to an abject state, and stripped of the
‘decent drapery of culture’ (ibid., p. 136). Recall that part of our human
‘essence’ lies in the cultural forms we provide ourselves with. The scape-
goat’s body is ‘terrible to look on’ because in its obscene, broken and
rejected nakedness, the fragility (and thus preciousness) of meaning,
culture and difference are all exposed (ibid.). It is also a spectacle of
the inhuman because it reveals that the human essence contains an
inhuman capacity for evil destructiveness. This terrifying realm of the
inhuman within the human is something Eagleton explores, as we have
seen, through Lacan’s concept of the Real. The latter is that which is
repressed in the symbolic. It covers, amongst other things, those tragic
aspects of human existence which cannot be shifted, such as mortality,
suffering, pain, but which can, nevertheless, have their baleful powers
increased rather than mitigated in different social contexts. By con-
fronting the terror of the inhuman, it is possible to release a redemptive
power. It is not then a case of opposing the inhumanity of provocative
neoliberal political discourses with the victim’s humanity, but rather
of exceeding our conventional sense of our humanity. Specifically, in
the context being discussed here, such a recognition might enable us to
acquire the resources to challenge a political order based on the ‘non-
being of human deprivation’ (capitalism) with a political order based on
a reverent sense of mutual frailty, ‘dependency’, and suffering, which
might lead to a social characterized by loving mutual self-fulfillment
(Eagleton 2003a, p. 221).
To return then to Red Road, if the film is a social realist tragedy, an
example of a cinema of the figurants, then its boldness lies in its will-
ingness to refuse the moralization of that tragedy, and a culture of
‘individual responsibility’ (a key aspect of neoliberalism for Wacquant),
and to imagine what is strictly speaking unimaginable within a symbolic
order which has seen a proliferation of discourses of moral autonomy,
a culture of vengeance, and a political desire to use the state to pun-
ish the poor (Wacquant 2009, p. 307). That is to say, Red Road stages
an encounter, one which is fundamentally difficult to classify, between

a victim and an underclass ‘monster’ (‘Red’ being the key signifier);
a respectable mother and wife, and society’s shit, housed in society’s
dumping ground. As Eagleton argues, the strength of agape is tested
through our response to the stranger and the enemy, not the friend.
The ethical position Jackie adopts puts her self in suspension by enter-
ing the sphere of Clyde’s life, and by seeking out his embrace. Her
fascination with him, on some level, is not just pretence or solely sex-
ual. It includes something else which we might call, after Eagleton, the
unlovely compulsion of the ‘law of love’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 165). That is
to say, Jackie seems compelled to encounter her enemy in all his ‘rebar-
bative inhumanity’ and alienness (ibid.). The self-abandonment of this
ordeal is very different from the listless, loveless coupling with one of
her colleagues in an earlier scene. This is Eros as the erasure of dif-
ference, ‘ruthlessly indifferent to individual persons’ (Eagleton 2005a,
p. 31). Jackie’s face is pushed up against the window of the van, sepa-
rately framed in a close shot. The expression is unengaged, impassive,
and as such is perhaps intended in its mechanical awkwardness to con-
trast with the romantic love felt for her dead husband, or Eros as the
experience of the ‘irreducibly particular person [ . . . ] elevated to sublime
status’ (ibid.). By contrast, in her meeting with Clyde ‘the personal and
impersonal are interwoven in a different way’ (ibid.). Here, the obliga-
tion to engage with the other is of the order of an impersonal command:
like, for instance, the Christian injunction to ‘Love one another!’ How-
ever, this attentiveness must not be indifferent to its object – one must
attend scrupulously to the other in all their ‘existential unloveliness’
(Eagleton 2003b, p. 167). The love scene between Jackie and Clyde is not
for her some elemental, contingent re-awakening of a desire to live fully
through sex. It is traumatic, impersonal. But at the same time it reveals
Jackie’s resolutely unflinching need to touch Clyde’s life. Jackie’s actions
can be understood here as already coloured by a spirit of forgiveness.
The forgiveness in the scene is of course a peculiar kind, because at this
point Clyde remains unaware who Jackie is, and indeed, from Jackie’s
perspective the moment is also one of intense ambivalence. However,
in distinction to the earlier scene with her colleague, what makes the
sex with Clyde so striking is that Eros has been led, in part, by agape.
As Eagleton says, in a society that is structurally incapable of allowing
agape to flourish, Eros too suffers.28 However, if there is agape and Eros
here, then this helps to explain the end of the film. Emerging out of her
melancholic state and revealing her identity to Clyde, Jackie succeeds
in eliciting his account of the accident and helps him to re-connect
with his own, also lost, daughter. This act helps her to rediscover her
own life in ‘being the means of life for others’ (Eagleton 2005b, p. 11).
Ultimately, Red Road seeks grounds of commonality. Death haunts the
film as something that makes us all bystanders. Without diminishing his
responsibility, this applies to Clyde also. The idea of the bystander cap-
tures something of the helplessness of the situation described in the film
and it also points to the ‘ultimate unmasterability of our lives’ which
death dictates (Eagleton 2003a, p. 213). This distinguishes the film’s
position on contemporary juridical and political discourses of moral
autonomy, supported across the spectrum of the political mainstream,
which have worked hard to establish a culture of vengeance.
In the final sequence of the film we witness the redemption of the
world Jackie views through the CCTV camera. Two image formats are
on display here: film, with its detail and colour and fluid movement
(tracking shots at street level), offering an aesthetic analogy to a lov-
ing attentiveness to world; followed by the relatively fixed, high angle,
stiff-necked position of the patrolling CCTV camera. We might expect a
negative comparison here between film and CCTV along familiar lines –
see Petit and Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002), for example. However,
Arnold suspends these associations. The CCTV shot which is the film’s
final image is one in which the camera is pointed in the direction of
the sun. It is also an image which, although cropped, provides a per-
spectivally extended view not usually allotted to CCTV footage in the
film, and whilst the electronic noise of the image is still visible, the
view nevertheless creates an impression of an invitation to public space
rather than a sense of alienation within a landscape haunted by decay,
abandonment and the non being of deprivation. This is the world Jackie
willingly enters, ready to live again.
Futures
The ethico-social dimension of the class struggle which contemporary

British social realist films have brought to our attention through their
engagement with the tragic mode, is a critical aspect of what is a
defining feature of the form’s commitment to contesting that general
disregard of the ‘lives of the great majority’ in the arts (Williams 2007,
p. 116). In responding to the crisis of the social under neoliberal regimes,
social realism has focused on the working class. But what needs empha-
sizing is that this image of class is an open one. That is to say, the tragic
inflections of the representation of the working class in these films,
rather than constituting politically restricted, privatized, terminal views,
are helping to stimulate a sense of the historic centrality of the working

class experience of the contemporary crisis of the social. This centrality
is conveyed through an expansion of older, more limited conceptions
of the ‘identity’ of the working class as figures such as the migrant,
the child, and the unrespectable or rough underclass all get drawn into
the field of vision. In this respect it is interesting that in the work of
Eagleton drawn on here it is the potentially universalizing dimensions
of the tragic scapegoat which features so prominently, rather than the
more limited sounding discourse of the revolutionary proletariat. This
makes Eagleton’s work intersect with the post-Marxism of figures such
as Hardt and Negri.29 But this is a convergence which is not without
its difficulties. As Matthew Beaumont points out in conversation with
Eagleton, to identify the tragic scapegoat with the proletariat runs the
risk of implicitly transforming the latter into an idealized lumpenpro-
letariat and overstating the latter’s revolutionary potential. Beaumont
appears to suggest a similar danger in Hardt and Negri’s celebration of
the ‘multitude’, another concept which exceeds any narrow definition
of the working class.30 Regardless of the position adopted in this argu-
ment, it is clear that social realism’s turn towards the underclass is a
valuable part of this re-making of our sense of the contemporary work-
ing class, of the exploration of the widest ranges of its experience, and
of the establishing of links, both in history and across the contemporary
scene, that will support this process. It is, therefore, a form which has
the ability, intensified through what we might call its tragic extremism,
to take a significant place in an epochal debate around class, the poli-
tics of culture and the resources of resistance in the gathering neoliberal
storm.
Notes
1. See for instance Lay 2002, and Hallam & Marshment 2000.
2. See Hallam & Marshment 2000, pp. 216–17.
3. See Dave 2006.
4. The Future of the Lanscape and the Moving Image is a collaborative
research programe involving Patrick Keiller, Doreen Massey, Patrick Wright
and Matthew Flintham. See http://www.rca.ac.uk/patrickkeiller and http://
thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com
5. See Jennings (Humphrey) 1985, p. 267.
6. See Jennings (Mary Lou), ibid., p. xiv.
7. See Williams 1984.
8. See Hobsbawm 1978, p. 37. Eric Hobsbawm tells us that Williams was invited
to the key CPHG conference held in Hastings in 1954 which sought to
discuss ‘the entire history of British capitalist development’.
9. See Dave 2006, pp. 18–26.

10. Karl Polanyi’s teaching with the WEA after the war, and in particular his
pioneering interest in the historical concept of the ‘Industrial Revolution’,
provides further points of connection between the development of British
cultural studies, the work of the British Marxist Historians, and that of
Jennings and Keiller. See Steele 1997.
11. See Lay 2002, p. 19.
12. See Benjamin 1999.
13. See for instance Eagleton 1996, p. 48.
14. Gary Watson’s book on Mike Leigh, for example, places an emphasis on the
ethical dimension of the films - see in particular the chapter on All or Nothing
(2002). There are some clear overlaps between Watson’s account of Leigh
and the one given of social realism here. However, Watson omits Eagleton’s
political perspective. See Watson 2004.
15. See Eagleton 2005a, p. 129.
16. See Eagleton 2009a, pp. 223–72.
17. See Benjamin 1999, p. 119. See also Buck-Morss 1989, p. 96.
18. See Savage 2007.
19. See Dave 2006, pp. 83–99.
20. See Foucault 1977 and 1967.
21. See for example Mullan & Marvin 1987, p. 34.
22. This idea of a working class imaged as a social bestiary is something that
Andrea Arnold is clearly exploring in both Red Road and Fish Tank (2009).
23. See for instance Eagleton 2003a, pp. 208–22.
24. See Dave 2003.
25. See Löwy 2005, pp. 35–6.
26. Eagleton largely excludes Badiou from this charge of rendering the Real and
the symbolic discontinuous.
27. See Eagleton 2009a, pp. 139–316.
28. See Eagleton 1990, p. 413.
29. See for instance Hardt & Negri 2006.
30. See Beaumont in Eagleton 2009b, p. 288.
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2
Staging the Contemporary: Politics
and Practice in Post-War Social
Realist Theatre
Stephen Lacey
The death of social realism has often been announced in the period
since 1940, yet it is still very much alive and has been central to post-
war culture in general, and to the theatre in particular. As is evident from
this volume, it is a rich and complex term, able to absorb a variety of
methods and ideologies. To call a play social realist recognizes that it has
political or moral intentions, an engagement with the darker and more
controversial aspects of contemporary society and deals with recogniz-
able social issues. Social realism refers us to the world in which we live,
and access to what a play is about is achieved often by a transparency
of form. Social realism sometimes connotes mimesis and verisimilitude,
(referred to as ‘naturalism’ and the ‘naturalistic’ in post-war theatrical
debate) – an aesthetic that aims to reproduce reality by adhering to its
observable, outward forms, and which may be traced across the means
of theatrical communication and dramatic writing (colloquial language,
for example, a compressed narrative structured into three acts, fully-
realized ‘box-sets’, ‘real’ characters, lighting and sound). When social
realism is rejected, it is this sense of the term that is often meant. How-
ever, the terminology here, as with realism and naturalism generally, is
often imprecise, or at least variable and evolving. The aim of this chapter
is not to contain this profusion, but rather to trace some of its most
persistent features across a seventy-year time span and along different
paths. Although a rough chronology will be observed, the approach is
thematic, and does not seek to be comprehensive. The focus is primarily
on drama that has had prominence in the UK as a whole, and is there-
fore, reluctantly, metropolitan in its bias. In arguing that social realism
remains one of the most important traditions of dramatic and theatrical
representation available to writers and theatre practitioners since 1940,
57
this analysis will recognize that it embodies a politics and an approach

to form and method that casts a long shadow over apparently disparate
plays and productions. It will follow current practice in referring to illu-
sionist drama/theatre methods as naturalist, although older senses of
naturalism will also be relevant. There is, however, no exact template
that can be used to determine the outline of social realist stage drama.
The diversity of plays that connect to it means that the question is not
‘is this play social realist?’ but rather ‘what is there in this play that is
social realist?’
First, there is the question of realism itself. As Raymond Williams
has argued (1977), realism has been linked historically to drama that
engages with the contemporary world, as both setting and subject
matter. ‘The contemporary’ is not simply a backdrop to the action, a
necessary context for a narrative that is concerned with other things,
but is rather the focus of active investigation; social realism is about the
contemporary world in a direct way, and is seen to reflect, and reflect
on, that world, which is, generally speaking, that of its first audience.
Realism is also linked to the representation of the social experience of
marginalized groups and classes (and here the ‘social’ in social realism
becomes less an adjective than part of a compound noun). Williams
calls this aspect social extension, arguing that it derives from a move-
ment that is political and moral to enlarge the scope of the drama, first
to the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century and then to the working
class. Realism – social realism in the post-war context – was from its ori-
gins concerned with representing social experience that had not been
seen on the stage before, and each new realist wave, each moment of
realist innovation, has been achieved by remedying an absence; of the
northern working class, of young people, of sexuality, of women, of eth-
nic minorities. Social realism, therefore, claims a greater command of
the real than other representations, and asks to be judged in relation
to them.
Until 1968, such judgments were made in the context of pre-
production censorship, in which theatre was the most regulated of the
arts. Play scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office
before being produced, which had the power to impose cuts. The guide-
lines governing the criteria for censorship, in a manoeuvre typical of
the British establishment, were not based in statute and were drawn
up in 1909 and interpreted according to the discretion of the readers
employed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. References to sex were espe-
cially tightly policed, and the portrayal of homosexuality was forbidden.
Realism implies a direct engagement with that which is suppressed, but
Post-War Social Realist Theatre 59
censorship imposed limits on how much reality could be represented

before 1968. After the Lord Chamberlain’s Office had its powers of cen-
sorship rescinded, social extension was equated with the breaking of
taboos in addition to those of class – those involving the representa-
tion of gender and sexuality, for example – with considerable effect on
post-war culture generally.
Social realism foregrounds the relationship between individuals and
groups and their social environment, and this is the source of its poli-
tics. The social becomes significant, since it is in social or environmental
factors, as distinct from individualized personal attributes, that realism
is interested. The distinction is not one of binary oppositions, however,
but of emphasis and of causation, where the actions of individuals are
shaped by the determining powers of broader social, political and eco-
nomic forces. As Williams notes, realist drama reveals the ways in which
human beings are constrained by the circumstances in which they find
themselves, ‘showing a man or woman making an effort to live a much
fuller life and encountering the objective limits of a particular social
order’ (Williams 1979, p. 221). In fact, the sense of entrapment, of char-
acters shaped by forces beyond their control, is central to nineteenth
century naturalism, and is a recurrent motif of post-war social realism.
The dramatic model is one which typically ends in the containment and
defeat of the central character, which becomes in turn a challenge to the
audience to resolve the situation after the play has ended.
The drama of the ‘new wave’: points of departure
Discussion of social realism since 1940 has been dominated by the

drama of the late 1950s and early–mid 1960s. Referred to almost imme-
diately as the ‘new wave’, this realist drama has a spectacularly visible
point of origin – John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which was staged
by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in May
1956. What followed has been much mythologized, although the lus-
tre has since worn off (see Lacey 1995, Rebellato 1999 and Shellard
2000). In general terms, the history is a familiar one. The new wave was
immediately cast in terms of its relationship to realism and to represen-
tations of the working- or lower-classes and contemporary Britain in its
non-metropolitan settings, the epithet bestowed upon a number of pre-
dominantly young writers of mainly working-class origins. In addition
to Osborne, whose The Entertainer (1957) was also important to the argu-
ment, there was Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots
(1959), I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960, completing the Trilogy) and
Chips with Everything (1962)); Harold Pinter, whose early plays, notably
The Room (1960) and The Birthday Party (1958) have a relationship to
social realism that was not always apparent at the time; Shelagh Delaney
(A Taste of Honey (1958)); John Arden (always at an oblique angle to
the dominant realist forms, with Live Like Pigs (1958) and The Work-
house Donkey (1963)); Brendan Behan (The Quare Fellow (1956) and The
Hostage (1958) produced, like A Taste of Honey at the Theatre Royal); and,
more controversially, Edward Bond, whose Saved (1965), along with Joe
Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) are early examples of inversions
of social realism under pressure of new intentions. There were a host
of other, less well-known (and certainly less debated) writers, such as
Bernard Kops and Frank Norman. The new wave was also associated
with two theatre companies – the English Stage Company at the Royal
Court Theatre, and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre
Royal, Stratford East. The two companies sat, geographically, aestheti-
cally and politically, in uneasy tension at either end of London’s theatre
culture.
Social realism, even in its most capacious sense, does not adequately
define all the drama that emerged in this period, nor does it make its
first entrance with Look Back in Anger, even in the post-war context;
the further away one gets from the ‘moment’ of 1956, the clearer this
becomes. Some of the radical leftist political and moral intentions of
social realism, along with its predilection for domestic living spaces as
the location for action, can be found in J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls
(1947) and The Linden Tree (1947), for example, written in the imme-
diate aftermath of World War Two. Also, Rodney Ackland’s The Pink
Room (1952, rewritten as Absolute Hell (1988)), set on the night of the
1945 General Election, is an early attempt to use the form of single-set,
chronologically-compressed ensemble drama (with Chekhov as a refer-
ence point) to reflect on Britain at a time of historic change. Terence
Rattigan covered something of the same emotional and moral territory
as Look Back in Anger in The Deep Blue Sea (1952), with a similar squalid
setting, although he was derided as one of the enemy by the post-56 gen-
eration (according to John Russell Taylor, for example, Shelagh Delaney
saw Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme ‘and thought that if this was drama,
she could do better herself [ . . . ] the result was A Taste of Honey’ (Taylor
1978, p. 131)).
Social realism was also part of the theatre culture of (some) regional
theatres with working-class audiences, such as the Unity Theatres in
Glasgow and London. Randall Stevenson notes that Robert McLeish’s
The Gorbals Story (1946) at Glasgow Unity was seen by over 100,000
people in its first six months, appealing through its ‘accurate depiction
of working-class tenement life; humour familiar from the music-halls;
[and] a sharp edge of social commentary’ (Stevenson 1996, p. 101). Simi-
larly, Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep (1947) detailed poverty and
squalor in Glasgow’s slums, with a focus on the situation of working-
class women (the play was successfully revived – indeed, re-invented –
by 7:84 Scotland in 1982). Also, London theatregoers had seen an exam-
ple of a different kind of post-war realism, this time from North America,
in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), which brought
the themes of sex and class together in a way that no British writer had
done at the time.
Look Back in Anger may not seem as revolutionary a play as it once
did – there is little radical about its form – but it was clearly a his-
torical and cultural phenomenon, dissected by tabloid and highbrow
journalists alike, giving rise to a genuinely distinctive cultural moment.
As David Edgar has argued, whatever the shortcomings of the play itself,
a great deal of British theatre would not have taken the same path with-
out it (see Edgar 1988, pp. 137–42). The same is true of the new wave
in general. Although it did not create social realism, the terms in which
the new wave defined itself, and was defined, in critical and popular dis-
course has had considerable effect on the subsequent development of
social realist stage drama.
The success of the new wave had much to do with its appearance at
a particular moment in British history. Much of the drama of Osborne,
Wesker et al was read as oppositional and of the liberal-left, ensuring
that there was a critical disposition to read social realism as running
against the grain of established values. From 1945 to the mid 1960s,
British society seemed transformed, first by the actions of the Labour
Governments of 1945–51, which established the Welfare State and the
main architecture of the British state until the 1980s, and then by a
period of unprecedented prosperity throughout the 1950s. Unemploy-
ment hovered around a mere 1–2 per cent throughout the decade, whilst
earnings increased by 110 per cent, with the increased wealth spent on
a range of newly available consumer goods (car ownership leaped from
two and a quarter to 8 million between 1951 and 1964, whilst owner-
ship of television sets increased from 760,000 in 1951 to over 13 million
in 1964 (see Pinto-Duschinsky 1970, pp. 55–6).
In a context in which this general affluence seemed to guarantee the
end of traditional class divisions and the coming of a homogenized mass
culture, social realism’s preoccupation with the working class was anti-
hegemonic, challenging the consensus that dominated post-war public
policy and debate. However, when one looks at individual plays, rather
than critical and popular commentary, the working class is present in
diffuse and various ways. Few of the protagonists of key plays are sta-
tistical averages in the sociological sense, however the broader critical
context ensured that social realist theatre was aligned not only with
social realism in other art forms but also with documentary and socio-
logical accounts of the working class and its culture. Richard Hoggart’s
The Uses of Literacy (1957), for example, was a seminal and highly
influential account of working class culture that defined it in terms
of the ways of life of family, street and neighbourhood, which was
also the narrative territory of much social realism. For this reason, new
wave drama was often interpreted as if it were a form of sociology, or
anthropology, a first-hand account from the front-line. Characters and
settings, always potentially metonymic in social realism in its naturalis-
tic form, are charged with an additional typicality, reflecting an entire
culture from the inside. A contemporary review of A Taste of Honey
made the anthropological framework explicit, celebrating the play as
‘being almost unlike any other working-class play in that it is not schol-
arly anthropology observed from the outside through pince-nez but the
inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal’ (Brien
1959, p. 251). This way of framing the play foregrounds its social and
cultural context over the immediate concerns of its characters and sug-
gests a transparent and fixed relationship between author, play and
subject.
The political allegiances of the new wave meant that it was some-
how important to be writing about class and contemporary Britain. This
linked theatre to a broad new left politics, in which to be a realist carried
a moral imperative. Writing of British culture of the time, John Caughie
argued this was a combination of political engagement and provincial
non-conformism:
[I]t is a kind of ethical seriousness, rather than simply formal realism,

which seems to underpin the cultural movements associated with the
1950s and 1960s. This is what gives them much of their power and
their value: the sense that these things mattered and that theatre or
literature or television drama could do something about them.
(Caughie 2000, pp. 70–1)
To write about working-class culture was, therefore, a form of bearing

witness to the daily struggles of ordinary people, a fidelity to the cumu-
lative truth of everyday experience, which was often political in its
implications. This has proved to be a powerful legacy for much theatre

about class since.
As a conclusion to this section, it is worth noting that some new
wave social realism has an ambivalent attitude to its provincial set-
ting, and a fascination with the possibilities of life in the metropolis.
There is a recurrent narrative motif of escape, with protagonists having
already moved away from their home territory (the central character in
Alun Owen’s Progress to the Park (1961), for example, who is a writer in
London) or where the possibility of escape is a source of narrative inter-
est. The most obvious example is Waterhouse and Hall’s Billy Liar (1961),
where the eponymous Billy Fisher plans, but does not enact, his flight to
London, leaving Liz, his would-be girlfriend, to accomplish it for him.
London as a place of fantasy and escape relates to its position as
the cultural as well as the administrative capital of the UK. There is a
point to make here about how the inexorable pull of London impacts
on social realist theatre and its audiences. It remains the case that suc-
cess in the theatre normally means success in London, and theatre
remains amongst the most centralized of all art forms, with audiences
for working-class plays often at some remove from the cultures being
represented. The question, therefore, is who is social realism for? The
need to engage new audiences, to broaden the appeal of theatre in an
age dominated first by television and then by the internet is a perma-
nent feature on the landscape of post-war drama, and has driven some
of its most significant developments – of regional theatres in the 1960s
and 1970s, and alternative and touring theatre after 1968, for exam-
ple. Both the English Stage Company and Theatre Workshop were as
much concerned with who the new drama was for as with what it was
about. For George Devine, the Artistic Director of the ESC, a new and
socially invigorating audience was to be found amongst the provin-
cial young, reproducing the wider construction of youth as a metaphor
for social change, who ‘came streaming into the tired metropolis [and]
woke up everything they touched’ (Devine 1962, p. 12). For the writer
John McGrath, who was associated with the Court in the late 50s,
change flowed in the other direction; the ‘ “new” audience for this
kind of theatre’ he argued ‘was, if not in origin, certainly in ultimate
destination, merely a “new” bourgeoisie, mingling with the old, even
indulging in miscegenation’ (McGrath 1981, p. 12). Theatre Workshop,
however, aimed to attract a working-class audience to the Theatre Royal
in Stratford East, some way from the heart of the West End, which was a
continuation of its policy as a touring company. Paradoxically, the Com-
pany’s main successes – Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, for example – made
their biggest impact after they had transferred to the West End (a move
dictated by financial necessity, against Company policy). It is perhaps
in the repertory theatres of Britain’s provinces from the 1960s onwards
that social realist drama came closest to finding a working-class audi-
ence. Key examples would be the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent,
which, under Peter Cheeseman’s directorship, pursued a policy of com-
missioning and producing locally-oriented drama in either realist or
documentary forms for over forty years, and the Octagon Theatre in
Bolton, which throughout its post-war history has championed the
plays and adaptations of Bill Naughton’s work to local audiences.
Dramatizing the domestic and the local: social realism

in familiar places
Social realism often attracted the epithet ‘kitchen sink’, which is an

indication that it is associated with the domestic and the everyday.
A corner of contemporary Britain is viewed through the microcosm of
the living spaces of a particular social group, often a family, which func-
tions as a metonym for other families and for the wider world – the
city, class, and culture as a whole. The model is not new to the post-
war context, and has nineteenth century antecedents (in A Doll’s House
(1879), for example, Ibsen uses single-space, domestic drama to attack
the rotten heart of bourgeois society at its strongest point, the family).
Theatre space as metonym (and occasionally metaphor) is an important
part of social realist theatre, yet how this theatrical function is negoti-
ated varies, and there is no single dramatic pattern amongst post-1940s
drama. The following gives an idea of how the possibilities might be
marshalled.
A plot outline of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey gives a good idea
of why it was so readily categorized as social realism. The play con-
cerns Jo, a sixteen-year old teenager who lives with her mother, Helen
(described as a ‘semi-whore’), in a flat in Salford. Helen leaves to live
with a younger and more affluent man, Peter, leaving Jo to fend for her-
self. Jo meets, and becomes pregnant by, a black sailor, who leaves her.
She is befriended by Geoffrey, a gay art student, who comes to live with
her and support her through her pregnancy. Helen returns to resume
her maternal role, and Geoffrey leaves. As one reviewer noted, A Taste
of Honey was a play ‘ “about” a tart, a black boy giving a white girl a
baby, a queer. The whole contemporary lot, in short’ (Worsley 1959,
p. 252). Unlike many new wave plays, A Taste of Honey is female cen-
tred, with women as its main characters, as well as having a woman
writer, and director (Joan Littlewood). The narrative stance of the play is
what might be called observational, or objective naturalism (although
both terms are not without difficulty). Delaney does not exploit the
metonymic potential of the story, and there is no attempt to connect
the immediate dramatic situation to the world beyond by argument
or by investing Jo with a privileged knowledge of her situation, which
would enable her to analyze and explain her actions with reference to
a wider context. As Stuart Hall has written, in A Taste of Honey Delaney
displays an ‘extraordinarily fine and subtle feel for personal relation-
ships. No themes or ideas external to the play disturb its inner form: her
values are all intensive’ (Hall 1970, p. 215). The play’s politics, therefore,
lie not in its argument but in the way it offers complex and sympathetic
portrayals of people who are socially marginal. The position of Geoffrey
is particularly interesting, since the play had to tread a fine line regard-
ing the presentation of homosexuality in order to obtain a licence from
the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Although the script is circumspect in its
references to his homosexuality (and it was play scripts that the censor
looked at initially), in performance the audience would have been in no
doubt. A Taste of Honey, then, is social realist by virtue of the people it
represents, and its refusal to adopt a moral stance towards them. In Jo,
it also has a heroine who is not broken by her situation, who does not
follow the naturalist trajectory from misery into defeat, and who is not
a victim of her environment, or of anything else.
Arnold Wesker’s Roots shows a different way in which social realist
drama might reach out to a politics beyond its immediate domestic dra-
matic context. Roots is the second part of a trilogy of plays about the
Kahns, a politically active Jewish family from London’s East End mod-
elled on Wesker’s own. The central character across the trilogy is Ronnie
Kahn, a young man in his twenties, who was in the mould of the new
generation of post-war leftist intellectuals. In Roots, however, Ronnie
does not appear at all, and the narrative switches to his girlfriend,
Beattie Bryant, a working-class young woman from rural Norfolk who,
like some of her real-life counterparts, now lives in London. The play
concerns Beattie’s return to her parental home to prepare for Ronnie’s
visit. At the close of the play, as the family assemble for tea Ronnie sends
a telegram to say that he will not be coming. This is a narrative of the
everyday, which explores Beattie’s fractious relationship with her fam-
ily, and Wesker’s strategy is to use her as a way of debating the main
theme of the play, which is the cultural impoverishment of the work-
ing class. Ronnie is not present, but his opinions are constantly quoted
by Beattie. Ronnie’s values are those of an educated and politically and
culturally aware intelligentsia, in which art has a central place. Roots

is, therefore, very much a play of ideas, which are given full force
in Beattie’s enthusiastic espousal of high cultural values to her resis-
tant family. The central problem identified by Beattie is not so much
poverty – although the Bryants do not appear to have shared in the gen-
eral affluence supposedly available to the working class as a whole – but
rather cultural impoverishment. ‘I’m telling you something’s cut us off
from the beginning’ argues Beattie at one point, ‘I’m telling you we got
no roots’ (Wesker 1973, p. 146). This disconnection from anything that
might nourish the working class gives the play’s title its resonance. What
fills the vacuum is a meretricious mass culture of pop music and tawdry
television, and Roots voices an anxiety about the damaging effects of
newer forms of culture on the working class that also surfaces in The Uses
of Literacy and elsewhere. What prevents Beattie becoming simply an
authorial mouthpiece for these arguments is that she is wrestling with
the contradictory pressures of inherited cultural values and the pressure
to conform to Ronnie’s idea of who she should be. At the play’s con-
clusion Beattie finds her own voice at last, although the opinions she
articulates are in line with, and give final form to, the main argument
of the play.
The early plays of Harold Pinter, The Room, The Birthday Party, The
Dumb Waiter (1960) and The Caretaker (1960) are rarely discussed now in
the context of social realism. However, they look like social realism, that
is they rely on the solidity of fully-realized box-sets, lower- or working-
class characters, and narratives that – at least in some respects – could
have been wrenched out of everyday life. A few critics did, indeed,
respond to these plays in this way: Kenneth Tynan noted the ‘preva-
lent dry rot – moral as well as structural’ of the floating population of
London’s west suburbs in The Caretaker, arguing that ‘Mr Pinter captures
all this with the most chilling economy’ (Tynan 1984, p. 280), whilst
John Arden called the same play ‘a perfectly straightforward story that
might almost have been overheard in a public bar’ (quoted in Scott
1991, p. 117). Both The Room and The Birthday Party begin with an
everyday domestic routine, breakfast, and the solid familiarity that is
conjured up by the plays’ domestic settings (outlined in selective detail
in the stage directions) is as necessary as it is illusory. Pinter invests
them with new, disturbing power: a birthday party becomes a terrify-
ing, threatening ritual; a vacuum cleaner (in The Caretaker) becomes an
instrument of psychological violence.
Pinter’s dramatic practice springs from a particular view of the world.
Social realism accepts that the world is knowable, that there is an
external reality that can be represented and interrogated, and that the
function of a play is to represent and interrogate. There are many dif-
ferent political and moral possibilities that flow from this assumption.
For Pinter, reality is not as fixed or certain as the realist model allows.
He once wrote ‘I suggest that there can be no hard distinctions between
what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is
false’ (Pinter 1976, p. 11–12). The unknowability of social reality, and
the sense of menace that frequently lies in the gap between the known
and the unknown, is a recurrent theme in Pinter’s works. It is because
the familiar elements of realist staging are realized faithfully, and signify
so clearly the social world of the audience, that Pinter’s use of them has
such disturbing power.
A similar re-conceptualization of the solid domestic world is found
in Joe Orton’s plays, although here it is not so much the setting itself
as what goes on within it that is unsettling. Entertaining Mr Sloane, for
example, concerns a ménage á trois in which Sloane, an entirely amoral
young man, is the object of desire of the much older Kath, his land-
lady, and of her brother Ed. The play, which also contains a murder
(of Kath and Ed’s father, to cover up another murder), is set in a liv-
ing room, where the world of bourgeois gentility is evoked and then
subverted, as is the traditional family. As Michael Billington has noted,
‘[t]he subversiveness lies in Orton’s vision of sex as a bargaining chip and
of life as a series of tactical erotic manoeuvres’ (Billington 2007, p. 177).
The realistic solidity of the setting is part of Orton’s strategy as a writer,
which is to express the most outrageous ideas and situations through
familiar conventions (all of his full-length plays are based on farce), a
highly-formalized, elegant language, and a commitment to realism in
all aspects of performance, including the acting. As in Pinter’s plays, the
intention to subvert is most effective when there is a consensus as to
what is being subverted – the solidity of social realist settings and the
ideological underpinnings of the bourgeois family.
The critical response to Edward Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding (1962) and
Saved was similar to that which greeted Pinter – the familiar framework
of social realism was used as a way of dispelling a general bafflement.
The parallel is not entirely fanciful, since Bond also uses many of the
expected ingredients of social realism to produce very different effects.
Saved in particular can be seen as a hyper realistic description of a spe-
cific culture, that of the affluent working class of South London, mapped
by a brutally restricted language and voiced by inarticulate but recog-
nizable characters who are capable of sudden acts of violence. However,
violence is much more explicit and extreme in Saved than in any Pinter
play of the period. The infamous key episode, scene six, concerns the
stoning to death of a baby in a pram in a park by a gang of young
men, and its inclusion led to fist-fights in the auditorium during the
first production and a court case brought by the Lord Chamberlain’s
Office (the Court had attempted to circumvent the censor’s refusal to
grant a licence by turning the theatre into a private club, a ruse which
the Lord Chamberlain successfully challenged – see Elsom 1981). This
is clearly not an everyday event, yet part of the outraged response to it
was because it was presented as if it were, without authorial judgement.
There is no Beattie Bryant figure to articulate a point of view on events,
and no resonant metaphor that might connect the outrage to an expla-
nation of it. The audience is not even allowed an emotional release,
since the mother, returning to the park to collect her child, wheels
the pram offstage before realizing what has happened. There is, as one
reviewer complained, no ‘shaping power of art’ to give form to what
is read otherwise as a flat, documentary account (Elsom 1981, p. 177).
One criticism of Saved is that, despite Bond’s intention that the stoning
is to be read as the product of a restricted and violent ‘way of life’ (see
Hay and Roberts, 1978), the play does not provide the audience with
a context in which the violence could be interpreted as being socially
produced. Saved had few imitators at the time, but was an influence on
the wave of provocative, ‘In Yer Face’ (Sierz 2001) drama that emerged
in the 1990s, typified by Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995).
Saved was performed on a bare stage, with minimal props and set-
ting; and although both A Taste of Honey and Roots might be seen as
conventional naturalistic plays, they are, like Saved, good examples of
the ways in which social realist intentions might be expressed in non-
illusionist theatrical forms, since neither received full-blown naturalist
productions. Indeed, from an early point in the development of the
new wave, naturalist box sets were under attack. Wesker’s plays were
produced by the Royal Court, directed by John Dexter and designed
by Jocelyn Herbert. The ESC at this time was keen to shake off the
trappings of West End theatre, and was opposed to what it considered
to be naturalism, which often meant abandoning fully-realized sets in
favour of a more imagistic and metaphorical approach. Herbert’s design
for Roots, for example, placed its single set kitchen in the middle of
an empty stage, its walls only half constructed, with the cyclorama
(which was standard for all productions at this time) visible beyond.
Onto this were projected scenes of the countryside, out of scale with
the kitchen itself. The approach has been termed ‘poetic realism’ (see
Lacey 1995, p. 112), and the intention was to reveal the artifice of the
setting, acknowledging its status as theatre (Brecht was an influence on

the ESC at this time), and to look for resonant metaphors that would
also celebrate their own aesthetic form.
Joan Littlewood’s productions for Theatre Workshop at Stratford East
similarly disturbed the norms of illusionist staging. Littlewood’s ency-
clopaedic knowledge of European theatre traditions, which informed all
her work at this time, allowed her to draw confidently on both psy-
chological realism and music-hall. The film and theatre director Lindsay
Anderson enthusiastically celebrated her production of A Taste of Honey,
commending Avis Bunnage, who played Jo’s mother Helen, for com-
bining ‘the broadest eye-on-the-gallery caricature with straight-forward,
detailed naturalism’ (Anderson 1970, p. 80). The published script, which
is a record of Littlewood’s production (Delaney’s original script was
developed in rehearsal), states that a jazz band is visible on stage and
notes several points where the actors address the audience directly.
Whilst naturalistic staging methods remained a possibility after the
new wave, increasingly the ‘realism’ in social realism resided in narra-
tive, representation and acting, rather than set. If the kitchen sink was
once more banished from the stage, it was for aesthetic reasons, and
never for very long.
Social realism and politics
Social realism, as we have already noted, adopts a largely critical and

oppositional stance in relation to the UK political and class system,
and is associated, in general terms, with the left. Politics enters much
social realist drama via an agenda of ‘issues’ – abortion, racism, the fail-
ure of the education system – which are represented metonymically
and metaphorically within the dramatic action. By the late 1960s this
agenda was becoming crowded as Britain entered a different historical
phase, which produced a more politically aware and radical genera-
tion of writers and theatre practitioners. By the end of the decade,
the consensus that had dominated post-war debate, and against which
much social realism had railed, was under threat from different quar-
ters. Internationally, there was active resistance to British support for
the increasingly unpopular US presence in Vietnam, which fed the
global counter-cultural revolution that was ‘May ’68’ (and which had
its UK manifestations). Within two years, however, right-wing govern-
ments were elected in the USA and France, the liberal government of
Czechoslovakia was crushed by Soviet troops, and the Conservatives
were back in power in the UK. At home, there was a resurgence of
racism and fascism in the UK, with the National Front taking an anti-
immigrant agenda to the streets and ballot-box in the early 1970s, along
with the eruption of virtual civil war in the streets of Northern Ireland
as thirty years of ‘The Troubles’ began. Major economic crises returned
in the early part of the decade, resulting in increased industrial mil-
itancy, culminating in the Miners’ strikes of 1973 and 1974. Much
of the left, meanwhile, looked beyond established political forces, for
example to the Women’s Movement, in its many cultural, political and
economic forms.
Perhaps more than any other art form, theatre responded to the swirls
and eddies of counter-cultural energy after 1968 and to the politicization
that followed economic and political crisis in the 1970s. The fringe, or
alternative theatre movement, threatened to sweep social realism aside,
an irrelevant product of a hierarchical theatre system wedded to broken
dramatic and theatrical methods and outmoded political values. How-
ever, it is remarkable how, once again, social realism remained a possibil-
ity, one choice amongst many, for practitioners looking for appropriate
forms for a new content. Feminist theatre is a particularly good example.
Developing in tandem with the women’s movement generally, feminist
theatre developed quickly from impromptu agit-prop sketches to com-
plex drama (for sympathetic accounts of this history see Itzen (1980) and
Wandor (1986)). Social realism’s concern with the domestic chimed with
feminist politics. Women’s oppression was, it was argued, most clearly
felt in the home, in the family especially, where women’s role as the sole
bearers of domestic and familial responsibility was of particular concern.
Feminism also ensured that these concerns would not be seen as outside
‘real’ politics, since the post-68 slogan ‘the personal is political’ took on
a specific resonance, and was ‘taken up by feminists to mean that there
is no aspect of “personal” experience which cannot be analysed and
understood and changed’ (Wandor 1986, p. 14). Early 1970s feminist
theatre was, therefore, often domestic in its orientation, and ‘home and
family relationships were shown as the site of struggle in themselves’
(ibid., p. 44). The dramatic methods used borrowed both from social
realism in its naturalist form – believable characters and recognizable
situations, constructed as typical, though mostly without illusionist set-
tings – and a more Brechtian, argument-driven analysis, accompanied
sometimes by cartoon-like imagery.
Later feminist drama, for example the work of Caryl Churchill,
has become associated with formal radicalism and experiment. Yet
even here social realism is not so much abandoned as refash-
ioned and re-contextualized. Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) combines an
extraordinary range of forms, from the imagined dinner party, in which

women from history and art mingle, to the carefully-observed, sparse,
social realist Act Three, which is set in a kitchen and centres on the con-
frontation between two sisters, whose contrasting attitudes to Margaret
Thatcher define them personally as well as politically. Pam Gems draws
even more heavily on social realism in Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (1977), in
which the four eponymous characters living in a communal house rep-
resent different kinds of contemporary female experience in a narrative
that is set firmly and consistently in a recognizable present (of its first
appearance). In this ensemble cast, the central character, Fish, becomes,
like Beattie Bryant, a representative figure who carries the weight of the
play’s argument.
The use of social realism to pursue a more political agenda is evi-
dent in the plays of Trevor Griffiths, whose articulate theorization of his
position makes him a particularly good example to consider. Griffiths,
though politically very close to the socialist wing of the alternative
theatre movement, was committed to what he called ‘strategic pene-
tration’ of the main institutions of cultural power, which meant the
bastions of subsidized theatre and television. The task was to reach the
largest amount of people as possible in the struggle for ‘the popular
imagination’. He was clear that this would mean working with social
realism:
I have to work with the popular imagination which has been shaped
by naturalism. I am not interested in talking to 38 university grad-
uates in a cellar in Soho. It’s my guess that we still have to handle
realism. One of the things about realistic modes is still that you
can offer through them demystifying, undistorted, more accurate,
counter descriptions of political processes and social reality than
people get through other uses of naturalism.
(Griffiths 1976, p. 12)
Griffiths’ first play to be performed (Occupations (1971)) was produced by

the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Place, and The Party (1973) was
produced by the National Theatre and starred Laurence Olivier. Come-
dians (1975) was commissioned by Richard Eyre for the Nottingham
Playhouse. The Party is based almost entirely on argument. Griffiths’
solution to the problem of how to embody politics in a naturalistic
framework was to create a drama that was about politically committed
people, and The Party, which is set in the house of a left-wing tele-
vision producer over the course of an evening, is staged as a debate
between characters who embody different leftist positions. Although the

play does not resolve the argument, it was Olivier, who played the old
Trotskyite John Tagg, who commanded the floor in the first production.
Comedians is perhaps the better play, using the main features of social
realism to explore a contemporary response to the crisis of capitalism
in mid-70s Britain at both a personal and political level. The play is
about a school for comedians and takes place over the course of a sin-
gle evening, during which the would-be comics prepare for, perform
and then analyze their acts. It begins and ends in the classroom, with
the second act set in a local club. Comedians is partly about different
approaches to comedy and the political purpose of humour. The play’s
form allows for a range of arguments to be established in Act One, and
then tested in Act Two, when the audience’s response to each comic is
framed by what we have heard. In Act Three, the central dynamic of
the play, which is the relationship between the veteran comic, Eddie
Waters, who teaches the class, and his most unpredictable pupil, Gethin
Price, assumes centre stage. Price’s performance in the club is a mix-
ture of Dada provocation and white-face clowning, and is deliberately
unfunny. Waters is both appalled and impressed by it, and the argu-
ment between them is about two ways of responding politically to the
need for change. For Waters, a liberal humanist who cannot trust his
own responses, the way forward is dogged perseverance, in which the
school for comics kicks back against the politics of accommodation. For
Price, an instinctive anarchist, whose anger is barely containable, the
only way of being in the world is to reject it, which could lead, the play
suggests, simply to another form of inertia. Griffiths does not resolve the
tension between them, but allows the contradictions of each position to
lie open.
Comedians’ concern with education is picked up by other socialist
dramatists working in realist forms in the 1970s, notably Nigel Williams,
whose Class Enemy (1978) is set in a classroom amongst violent and
troubled teenagers, and Barrie Keeffe, who wrote a trilogy of plays per-
formed under the collective title of Gimme Shelter (1977). The first play,
Gem (1975), is set on the afternoon of the annual cricket match of a
large, local company, and focuses on four of its young employees. Nar-
rative interest hinges on an attempt by the play’s central character, Kev,
to persuade the others to find ways to subvert the match as a gesture
of class war. The second play, Gotcha (1976), shifts focus to a London
school, where the protagonist is a sixteen year-old youth who imprisons
three teachers in a storeroom by holding lit cigarettes over the petrol
tank of his brother’s motorbike. The third, Getaway (1977), brings the
protagonists of the first two plays together at the annual cricket match,
a year on. It is important to the political and dramatic impact of the
trilogy that the youth in Gotcha is never named (he is ‘Kid’ in the
script).
All three plays are rooted in the world of their first performance, and
are saturated with references to contemporary music, television pro-
grammes and personalities (Kev constantly threatens his recalcitrant
friends with quotes from Clive Jenkins, a left-wing leader of a Trade
Union at the time, for example). Gimme Shelter’s overarching theme
is the lack of life chances given to young people of the working class.
School becomes a metaphor for the broken promises made by the
comprehensive schools system, which cannot deliver on its egalitar-
ian rhetoric. As the Kid tellingly notes towards the end of Gotcha: ‘You
shouldn’t promise things what you don’t mean. That’s more wrong than
what I done’ (Keeffe 1978, p. 76). Gotcha is the most successful play of
the trilogy, and its central image of the Kid astride the bike is a startling
theatrical device and a resonant, if deliberately ambiguous metaphor.
The play does not explain why he chooses to threaten teachers, and
himself, in this way; his entire life, Keeffe seems to suggest, has brought
him to this point. It can, however, only end in defeat – either death or
surrender, as the cigarettes run out. The political logic of the play returns
it to classical naturalism, where the protagonist confronts the objective
limits of his/her power to control the situation and the audience are left
to resolve the question of what should be done.
In the 1980s, the naturalist pessimism that is evident in Gimme Shelter
takes a darker turn as economic crises return. A particularly good exam-
ple of how this is played out on the territory of social realism is Jim
Cartwright’s Road, first performed at the Royal Court in 1986. Road is
set on the familiar terrain of an unnamed street (the street sign has been
broken) in an unnamed northern town and follows the lives of its inhab-
itants over the course of a Saturday night. The audience is led through
the evening by Scullery, a wild and exuberant narrator. Road is like a
demonic Under Milk Wood, and also references television’s Coronation
Street (ITV, 1960-present), although it is much bleaker.
Road is written to be performed with a high-energy theatricality that is
some way from mimetic social realism. It is conceived for a promenade
staging, where there is no fixed seating and the audience are directed
to follow the action around an open auditorium (this is how it was first
performed at the Royal Court). The script also contains pre-show and
interval scenes, to be performed in the bar where possible. There is a
great deal of direct address to audience, not only by Scullery. The energy
of the staging sits in tension with the bleakness of the play’s action, since
the northern working class encountered here is very different to that
represented in the new wave (with the exception of Bond’s Saved). This
is a community that does not bask in the sunlight of welfare capitalism
but one which has experienced the full blast of Thatcherite economic
reform.
Road is a response to its immediate political situation. By the early
1980s, Britain was experiencing a full-blown economic recession, engi-
neered by the monetarist policies of the Conservative Government led
by Margaret Thatcher. Coming to power in 1979, the Tories announced
a wholesale restructuring of British society, which would include an
assault on the welfare state and its ideological underpinnings, the trades
unions and the mixed economy. Using the machinery of supply side
economics, which argued that the state’s main contribution to financial
policy was to restrict the money supply, the Government confronted
near-record inflation of 27 per cent by engineering a massive deflation.
The cost was the destruction of huge swathes of manufacturing indus-
try, especially in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, which were
driven to bankruptcy by high interest rates (see Gamble 1994). The result
was that unemployment rose to three million in 1983, much of it con-
centrated in the older industrial communities. The desolation that this
brought is etched into Road and occasionally commented on directly.
In one particularly harrowing sequence, a young man, Joey, and his
girlfriend Clare starve themselves to death in his bedroom, unnoticed
and unremarked. Clare articulates the despair that being without a job
creates:
I lost my lovely little job. My office job. [ . . . ] I felt so sweet and neat
in there. Making order out of things. Being skilful. Tackling an awk-
ward situation here and there. To have a destination. The bus stop,
then the office, then the work on my desk. Exercise my body, my
imagination, my general knowledge. Learning life’s little steps. Now
I’m saggy from tip to toe. Every day is like swimming in ache. I can’t
stand wearing the same clothes again and again. [ . . . ] Everybody’s
poor and sickly-white.
(Cartwright 1986, p. 32)
The language that Cartwright uses, here and throughout the play, is not
that of everyday speech, although its vocabulary is familiar. Instead, he
has created a demotic, poetic re-fashioning of colloquial speech that
both roots the speaker within his/her locale and voices a sharp, painful
response to it. The bone-hard directness of this language expresses the

poverty of their lives. The play is classically naturalist in this sense,
showing a group of people who cannot move beyond the brutality of
their immediate situation. As the night progresses, violence and alco-
holic stupor ensue. Road’s bleakness is rescued, partially, in the last
scene in which a group of young people create a ritual choric chant
of ‘Somehow a somehow a somehow – might escape!’. The image of
a group ‘pressed together, arms and legs around each other’ is both
an affirmation of mutual support in dark times, and a gesture of defi-
ance flung against the brutal indifference of Thatcherite Britain (ibid,
p. 80). Margaret Thatcher did not last long into the 1990s, but her spirit
lingered, and Road’s bleakness was a precursor to other, more extreme,
valedictions.
Social realism since the 1990s
Sarah Kane once said of her 1995 play, Blasted, which was greeted by
the kind of outrage that had been visited on Saved forty years earlier
for its highly explicit and violent imagery as a means of political and
moral provocation, ‘I suspect that if Blasted had been a piece of social
realism it wouldn’t have been so harshly received’ (Sierz 2001, p. 96).
The comment is an indication that social realism had become the most
acceptable way in which contemporary Britain and supposedly difficult
subject matter could be discussed, and the default position amongst
critics and the choice of the main subsidized theatres. Griffiths’ strate-
gic penetration seems to have worked, although it has not produced a
socialist revolution.
It has been argued that many of the new generation of writers who
came to prominence in the 1990s, such as Kane, Mark Ravenhill and
Martin Crimp, were consciously anti-political and in revolt against the
dramatic models of the new wave and their successors (see Sierz 2001
and D’Monté & Saunders 2008). The latter judgement was truer than the
former (although it was much more likely to be what Sierz has termed
a drama of ‘personal pain rather than public politics’), but certainly
the models of social realism, which were associated with the main-
stream, were challenged, if not quite abandoned (Sierz 2002: 12). It is
Edward Bond and Saved that is a point of reference, and not Wesker
and Roots – still less Griffiths and Comedians. Rabey has argued that
‘[t]he 1990s wave of British dramatists was collectively characterised
by a more widespread emphasis on challenging physical and verbal
immediacy, and bleak (arguably nihilistic) observations of social decay,
severed isolation and degradation into aimlessness’ (Rabey 2003, p. 192).

It was, in Sierz’s terms, an ‘experiential’ theatre rather than a theatre
of argument or metonymic representation (Sierz 2001, pp. 4–5), and
one which relies on an aesthetic of shock and imagistic provocation.
It is also connected to a postmodern refusal to countenance grand nar-
ratives and the left or liberal humanist certainties of an earlier age.
When contemporary politics once again occupies the stage it is in a
very different form, that of documentary or verbatim theatre. In verba-
tim theatre, reality is incorporated into drama in a direct form, often via
edited transcripts of hearings, trials and interviews. High-profile exam-
ples would be the Tricycle Theatre’s The Colour of Justice (1999), which
dramatized the transcript of the Macpherson Report into the murder of
black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and David Hare’s The Permanent Way
(2003), a dramatization of the enquiry into a train crash at Hatfield, in
which four people died.
Social realism did not, however, vacate the stage in the 1990s. Even
though the politics might have changed, the representation of marginal,
disaffected and rootless people in plays by Sierz’s ‘In Yer Face’ generation
sometimes took social realist forms. London proved to be a particular
touchstone for social realism in the nineties, especially in the plays of
Joe Penhall, whose Some Voices (1994) explored the difficulties facing a
young schizophrenic man, Ray, cut adrift in the capital. Ray is a victim
of a government policy called ‘Care in the Community’, which closed
many hospitals for the mentally ill, ostensibly to return them to a com-
munity of family and friends, but in reality often to the street. Ray’s
struggle to maintain a semblance of ordinary living is both helped and
hindered by the other, equally marginal and damaged people he meets.
Only his brother, Pete, attempts to provide some consistency in his life.
Some Voices is an example of what Penhall has called ‘London crisis
drama’ (Sierz 2001, p. 210), and its narrative unfolds in scenes that con-
tain startling and violent imagery. At one point, Ray takes a hammer
to a wildly unpredictable and violent man, Dave, who has threatened
Laura, one of the few people with whom Ray can form an attachment.
In another, Ray douses himself with petrol and threatens to set him-
self alight with a series of disposable lighters (the appearance of one
lighter after another is a source of black comedy). However, the final
scene returns us to the healing effects of domestic routine, and demon-
strates the enduring power of naturalistic detail to encapsulate complex
emotions and possibilities. Pete, who is a chef, teaches Ray how to cook
an omelette, in real time, on a portable hot plate. In this simple domes-
tic routine, the possibility of some stability in Ray’s life is imagined. This
echoes the final scene in Saved, where Len attempts to mend a broken
chair, a similar gesture of hope against hopelessness.
Elsewhere in the theatre, and especially since 2000, social realism
has a decided presence, and not only as an unexamined reflex. It is
not accidental, for example, that writers from minority ethnic back-
grounds in the UK should often turn to social realist models in order
to represent the specificity, density and complexity of their communi-
ties. Roy Williams, for example, a Londoner of Afro-Caribbean origin,
writes about working-class, black people, mainly young men, caught up
in the same reality of urban poverty and violence as Penhall’s charac-
ters, but seen from a different culture. His plays have been greeted in
precisely the terms social realism has made its own – that they engage
directly with a little-known social reality, and do so in a way that reg-
isters as more realistic than other drama, often using a street language
and patois. As Miranda Sawyer observed, ‘[h]is characters speak like real
people: in short sentences, rather than showy monologues, using mod-
ern slang (and swearing), rather than theatre speech’ (Sawyer 2008).
Williams often uses sport as a metaphor. Sing Yer Heart Out (2002) is set
in a pub during a notable football match between England and Germany
in 2000, and Sucker Punch (2010), which turned the Royal Court into a
boxing ring, examines the identity crisis that afflicts a successful black
boxer and poses questions about racist exploitation of black success.
Kwame Kwei-Armah has the distinction of being the first writer of
Afro-Caribbean descent to have a play produced in the West End. The
play in question, the award-winning Elmina’s Kitchen (2003) premiered
at the National Theatre. Elmina’s Kitchen of the title is a West Indian
fast-food restaurant in Hackney, London, and is the setting for the play,
fully-realized in naturalistic detail. The stage directions reference its pre-
cise location as ‘Murder Mile’, a local term for an actual location that
was popularized by the tabloids as the site for what they called ‘black-
on-black’ murders, and the play is a direct response to a pressing social
and political issue (Kwie-Armah 2009, p. ix). Kewi-Armah has written
that the genesis of the play lay in his witnessing the aftermath of a
fatal shooting, which was the product of inter-gang rivalry. ‘Now, young
blacks were more afraid of being attacked by someone who shared their
hue’ he observed ‘than by an extreme right-wing National Front mem-
ber, or [ . . . ] BNP skinhead’ (Kwei-Armah 2009, p. x). Black West Indian
male culture is under the microscope in the play, whose protagonist,
Deli, is now the owner of the restaurant. The central dynamic of Elmina’s
Kitchen is the struggle between Deli and Digger, a local gangster, for the
allegiance of Ashley, Deli’s son. It is played out in a context where the
attractions of easy money and status make young black men vulnerable
to the seductions of gang culture. The narrative crisis occurs when Deli
tells the police that Digger and Ashley have been involved in arson and
murder, doing a deal for his son’s future. Digger demands that Ashley
shoots his father as an informer, which he seems about to do, but in a
startling denouement Digger shoots Ashley instead. The play replays the
classic naturalist impasse, where characters cannot overcome the logic of
their circumstances. Deli has behaved honourably, but more is required
if the situation is to alter.
A final example of the vitality of social realism in the contemporary
context is Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009). A major success, Jerusalem
was premiered at the Royal Court, and transferred to the West End in
2010. The play was appreciated as a theatrical tour-de-force, not least
because of a commanding central performance by Mark Rylance as
Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, its protagonist. Using the form of the single-
set, compressed narrative, the play’s realism takes a naturalist form,
with a detailed, fully-realized set (with a front-cloth prologue to each
of its three acts). Unlike most social realism, Jerusalem’s setting is not
urban but rural. Its narrative takes place over a single day, St George’s
Day (23 April), in a wood adjacent to a housing estate, near a town
in Wiltshire. The action concerns the anticipated eviction of Byron, a
larger-than-life, middle-aged, ex-fairground showman, from his caravan
on land that he does not own. As the preparations for the annual St.
George’s Day fair gather pace, Byron’s futile attempts to stave off the
inevitable take place against the background of a search for a missing
teenage girl (to whom Byron has given shelter) and the gradual desertion
of the friends and hangers-on that congregate around him.
The action of Jerusalem is played out in a displaced domestic setting,
where the familiar signifiers of a living room – chairs, a television - are
scattered, ironically reduced largely to debris, outside the caravan. The
young people who wander through the action constitute a kind of fam-
ily for Byron, who is an unlikely, displaced father-figure to some of them.
Jerusalem exploits the metonymic potential of the form, allowing Byron
to be seen as embodying a way of life: Byron may be a dangerous and
morally ambiguous figure, but the play suggests he represents something
authentic in a world of ersatz rural nostalgia. In some ways, the play
echoes a new wave play of 1958, John Arden’s Live Like Pigs, which sim-
ilarly explores the destabilizing effect of an earlier, itinerant and largely
rural way of life on a modern one. In Arden’s play, travelling family
the Sawneys are decamped into a council house, with disastrous and
comic results. The specific narrative incidents differ, but the underlying
theme – that older, less civilized ways of living will eventually succumb
to an urban culture, with a loss to both – is the same.
Jerusalem records a moment of social transition, where the encroach-
ments of suburbanism can no longer be resisted. The fair has little to do
with the traditions of rural England. Instead, we are told, it is largely a
commercial opportunity for the local brewery. Byron does not, however,
represent an idealized view of what is being lost. He is a drug dealer and
petty criminal, and the world of the motley collection of young people
who are drawn to him is represented as mean and limited. In impor-
tant ways, this rural way of life is no different from any other. This is
encapsulated in the opening image, in which a young girl dressed as a
fairy, front cloth, sings Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’: the action then cuts to the
main stage, where a rave is in progress and the music is loud and urban.
When the inevitable happens, and Byron’s friends have deserted him
and the police have arrived, he appeals to his ancient family Gods, and
the spirits of an older England. Jerusalem evokes not only a local history
but also a national myth, which sits uneasily in the present.
In one sense, Jerusalem brings us back near to where we started in this
discussion of social realism: a recognizable social world, a fully-realized
setting and a three-act narrative played out across a compressed time
span. The history of the tradition has not been an even or linear one,
and there have been many detours over the last seventy years. Formally,
the dramatic structures have opened out, and the theatrical means of
communication have moved steadily away from an automatic illusion-
ism. However, engagement with the contemporary world is now part of
the DNA of theatre, and the gains for social extension are not perma-
nent, but must be defended and extended in each new historical period.
For these reasons, social realism has not yet run its course.
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3
Bad Teeth: British Social Realism
in Fiction
Rod Mengham
Introduction
A documentary style of realism was sponsored during the Second World

War by magazines such as Penguin New Writing, where it was deployed
in short stories that captured the unpredictable, interrupted, fragmented
temporalities of the home front during aerial bombardment. The shrink-
ing number of novels published during the war was owing partly to
the suspension of cultural continuity and of an imaginable future (see
Mengham 2001). When the post-war settlement allowed for the projec-
tion of a way of life that might integrate past, present and future, the
novel responded by replacing the experimental temporalities of mod-
ernism with a restoration of the linear conventions associated with
realism. But the realism that observed the socialist years of the late
1940s was also in place for the dramatic social changes of the con-
servative 1950s, with their redistribution of employment opportunities
and expansion of consumer choice. The meritocratic eclipse of class
privileges seemed like a spectacular reassertion of class structure to the
majority who could not benefit from it. The emergence of social real-
ism was coincident with the disillusionment of a populist culture that
had both won the war and lost the peace. The social realist novels of
the late 1950s and early 1960s documented new forms of alienation as
a result of growing income inequality and the effects of mass culture
on class, regional and gender identities. The anthropological dimension
of these fictional studies of the condition of post-war Britain echoed
the founding principles of Mass Observation and authoritative meth-
ods of the British documentary film movement, although the proleptic
assertiveness of both was replaced with an elegiac inquest into the kinds
of loss experienced in an era of affluence. In the terms proposed by Nigel
81
Balchin’s factory novel, Sundry Creditors (1953), social realist fiction was
in large measure an account of what was still owed to those whose needs
were not comprehended by the materialistic criteria of never having had
it so good.
Un-British asocial realism
Near the beginning of John Braine’s novel, Room at the Top (1957), the
protagonist, Joe Lampton, experiences a heightening of his senses, a
sharpening of attention to his surroundings, which he himself regards
as an authentic mode of realism:
I’d been sitting there for at least an hour when the wind turned cold
and I began to shiver. I left the park and crossed into the Market
Square for a cup of tea. I’d been sitting too long in the same posi-
tion; as I put my hand to the door of Sylvia’s Café I had a mild
attack of pins-and-needles and one leg gave way under me. I swayed
forward and put my other hand against the wall to steady myself.
It was the most minor of mishaps and I recovered within a second;
but the incident seemed, for the duration of that second, to jar my
perceptions into a different focus. It was as if some barrier had been
removed: everything seemed intensely real, as if I were watching
myself take part in a documentary film—a really well-produced one,
accurate, sharp, with none of the more obvious camera tricks. The
black cobbles splashed green and yellow and red with squashed fruit
and vegetables, the purple satin quilt held up in a bull-fighter’s sweep
by a fat man in his shirt-sleeves, a giggle of schoolgirls round a pile
of brightly-coloured rayon underwear, the bells of the parish church
striking the hour sad as Sunday, a small girl wearing an apron dress
with one strap fastened by a murderously big safety-pin—everything
was immensely significant, yet neither more nor less than itself. There
were no tricks with the lens or the microphone, the buildings steadily
obeyed the laws of perspective, the colours registered without smudg-
ing, the sounds were neither a symphony nor a discordance. Not one
inch, one shade, one decibel was false; I felt as if I were using all my
senses for the first time and then, turning into the café, I returned to
normality as smoothly as a ski-jumper landing.
(Braine 1957, pp. 28–9)
This passage aligns defamiliarization with authenticity, it is centred

on a recognition that one can ‘sit too long in the same position’ and
British Social Realism in Fiction 83
that this inertia can deaden awareness. On the other hand, it identifies
accuracy of perception with technological modes of registration and
recording, appearing to argue that one is most alive when most inhu-
man and mechanical. Above all it subscribes to the belief that the world
of ‘things’, of objects and actions, is most real when these things are ‘nei-
ther more nor less than [themselves]’. The focal point of the paragraph
is the concatenation of visual and aural details that are not linked to one
another outside the viewpoint of Joe Lampton, or outside the language
of his description. The realness of the real inheres in its autonomous
existence, its independence of the relationships that come into being
only with the activation of a consciousness intent on uniting what is
disparate, on making sense of the world despite its resistance to the
project of making sense. Joe Lampton returns to normality with aplomb,
with his sense of balance, his sense of being human and social, restored
and even enhanced, but the reader has been made aware of another
dimension beyond the surface of things, beyond the barrier of con-
ventional perceptions, a dimension where what is most real is what is
meaningless, because it does not signify in the complex of relationships
and transactions that composes a social reality. This confrontation with
a world that seems indifferent and even inimical to human presence
seems very un-British, and is more reminiscent of the lucid estrange-
ment of Sartre’s writing in La Nausee (1938, English translation as The
Diary of Antoine Roquentin, by Lloyd Alexander 1949) than of anything
in British fiction of the mid-twentieth century. In all of the fiction dis-
cussed in this essay, Braine’s Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning (1958), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960),
Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960), and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction
(1963), a manner of attention to British social reality is shadowed by a
suspicion, sometimes amounting to a conviction, of its inauthenticity,
its lack of depth and substance, as if it were a film of illusion covering
over an unmeasurable emptiness in which nothing joins up and makes
sense.
Towards the end of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the growing
intimacy between the protagonist Arthur Seaton and his young fiancée
Doreen seems to be pointing in the direction of conventional fulfilment
in the established forms and institutions of British social life, but it is
linked instead to a mood of withdrawal and regression, the surrender of
consciousness:
‘Nobody’s lookin’.’ He held her fast round the waist, and was cast
into sad reflection by staring at the water below, a rippleless surface
where minnows swam gracefully in calm transparent silence. White

and blue sky made islands on it, so that the descent into its hollows
seemed deep and fathomless, and fishes swam over enormous gulfs
and chasms of cobalt blue. Arthur’s eyes were fixed into the beautiful
earth-bowl of the depthless water, trying to explore each pool and
shallow until, as well as an external silence there was a silence within
himself that no particle of his mind or body wanted to break. Their
faces could not be seen in the water, but were united with the shad-
ows of the fish that flitted among upright reeds and spreading lilies,
drawn to water as if they belonged there, as if the fang-like claws of
the world would come unstuck from their flesh if they descended into
its imaginary depths, as if they had known it before as a refuge and
wanted to return to it, their ghosts already there, treading the calm
unfurrowed depths and beckoning them to follow.
(Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 206)
This paragraph is organized around the systematic confusion of surface

and depth. Mental ‘reflection’ is invoked to examine the illusion created
by physical reflections on the ‘rippleless surface’. Reflections of clouds
lend an appearance of great depth (paradoxically ‘depthless’, ‘fathom-
less’) to what is only shallow, while the reflections of the characters’
faces, that would give a sense of scale and break the illusion created
by the virtual images of clouds, cannot be seen. The willing suspen-
sion of disbelief, ‘that no particle of his mind or body wanted to break’,
indicates the strength of the desire to see the world in terms of vir-
tual images, to project depth where there is none, in a construction of
reality that is largely imaginary, creating a ‘refuge’ to which the mind
‘returns’ despite an underlying knowledge of its illusoriness. Despite its
allure, this investment in the imaginary is acknowledged to be without
substance, ghostly, involving disembodiment; not so much a detach-
ing of claws from flesh as a removal of flesh altogether. It identifies the
merging of two selves in prospective marriage with a form of extinction.
When Arthur and Doreen move away from the pool it is only to search
out another recess, another ‘earth-bowl’, in which to inter themselves:
‘They followed his short cut towards home, and came to the loneliest
place of the afternoon where, drawn by a deathly and irresistible pas-
sion, they lay down together in the bottom of a hedge’ (ibid., p.207).
The young couples’ engagement draws them into a process of demateri-
alization where the dimensions of space and time are interchangeable,
where the coordinates and conditions of individual presence seem to
disappear.
Each of the novels seems to operate with a system of distractions from

social life that has a compelling life of its own, drawing both protagonist
and reader into a contemplation of the fragility and impermanence of all
those conventional frameworks for meaning that are normally taken for
granted. At the conclusion of This Sporting Life, the protagonist is struck
by the irrelevance of his own sense of belonging to the environment in
which he lives, and vice versa:
I looked to the life that wasn’t absorbed in the futility of the game—
to the tall chimney and the two flowering cylinders of the power
station, half hidden by cloud, the tops of the buses passing the end
of the ground, the lights turned on inside the upper decks, the people
sitting uncommitted behind the windows. The houses were lit too, in
their slow descent to the valley. I moved back to the centre, imitating
the figures whose activity suddenly tired me.
(Storey 1960; 2000, p. 251)
The protagonist, Arthur Machin, experiences a sudden curiosity about

the potential for other meanings and other stories that are centred in
lives and situations he has no knowledge of. The irony of his own sit-
uation is that he is beginning to lose interest in his own story and its
conditions for meaning. The rugby game, which offers a simplification
of the demands and opportunities of the culture it is part of, depends
on teamwork but rewards those whose participation in the game is the
most aggressively competitive. Arthur’s chief motivation in pursuing his
rugby career is materialistic; unlike his friend Frank, he is focused on the
acquisition of money, status symbols, women as trophies and the adula-
tion of the fans. In the process, he has lost irrevocably the woman whose
own life epitomizes none of those things, and is left with a new under-
standing of the ‘futility of the game’. The paragraph distils the basis for
the enquiry into British social life that is revolved in all these fictions,
an enquiry that proceeds from the suspicion that British culture is sus-
tained by nothing more than an ‘imitation’ game, a set of activities with
rules and conventions in which individuals do little more than mimic
the aspirations and achievements expected of them. Each of the three
passages discussed above is concerned to disturb the habits of mind of
its protagonist and foregrounds a moment of realization, even of rev-
elation, with an effect of jarring or of visionary strangeness. But the
texts also include multiple, fragmentary instances of irregular percep-
tion that are not foregrounded, and it may be that their composition of
a persistent background noise is the more powerful for being pervasive
rather than occasionally insistent. The realism of this writing does not
rest content with the concept of social realism but is steadily addressing
the relationship between individual and social existence and the very
grounds of the social.
Sundry creditors
The grounds of the social in so-called British social realist fiction are
inescapably economic. The key texts were written just after a prolonged
period of rationing and shortages, in a culture of scarcity documented
in Nigel Balchin’s Sundry Creditors, a novel in which the factory-owner is
animated by a ‘lovely dream’: ‘the dream in which there were no short-
ages, no restrictions, no licences, no jumble of old buildings, infinite
capital and a staff capable of doing three men’s work each’ (Balchin
1953, p. 17). It is made abundantly clear that the war has been won
militarily but not economically, with the majority of British industries
under-producing and with no prospect of installing new plant. The
scope of this crisis is indicated by the novel’s application of an eco-
nomic vocabulary across a very broad spectrum of activities: ‘a national
shortage—a world shortage—a deficit of civilization—must disappear’
(ibid., p. 18). The phrase ‘deficit of civilization’ captures the sense in
which the world of British social realism is totally environed by the eco-
nomic, making it inevitable that the ethical and emotional issues faced
by the fictional protagonists should be accounted for in economic terms,
and especially in terms of debts and credits.
In Room at the Top, the action is backdated from the late 1950s to a
phase in the post-war recovery when there are still coal shortages and
clothing clubs and the most significant building in town houses the
local Food Office. When Joe Lampton arrives in Dufton to start a new job
and to occupy new lodgings, he comes equipped with a clamorous list of
material ambitions: ‘I wanted an Aston-Martin, I wanted a three-guinea
shirt, I wanted a girl with a Riviera suntan—these were my rights, I felt,
a signed and sealed legacy’ (Braine 1957, p. 31). The crucial modifier
of envy and greed in this wish-list is the insistence on the mechanisms
of inheritance. Lampton employs automatically an economic vocabu-
lary to express how his wartime service places society in debit to him.
Conversely, he employs a military vocabulary in the context of trying
to work out how the ‘material objects of our envy were attainable’:
How to attain them I didn’t know. I was like an officer fresh from
training-school, unable for the moment to translate the untidiness of
fear and cordite and corpses into the obvious and irresistible method
of attack. I was going to take the position, though, I was sure of that.
I was moving into the attack, and no one had better try to stop me.
(Ibid., p. 32)
The slightly hysterical defiance with which the decommissioned soldier

attempts to transpose the skills learned in combat into a peacetime con-
text is edged with resentment, and an impatience at having to assert a
claim over what should fall to him by right.
Solvency is a condition whose scope expands from its economic ori-
gin to cover every dimension of British social life. Contemplating the
experience of leisure in relation to the class structure, Lampton reflects
that ‘Time, like a loan from the bank, is something you’re only given
when you possess so much that you don’t need it’ (ibid., p. 142). It is in
the experience of time as much as anything else that the protagonists
of these novels recognize the transforming value of love in a rhythm of
factory shifts and time and motion inspections. Love is precisely what
does not fit into the conventional measures, a quality that cannot be
quantified:
I had discovered what love was like, I had discovered not, as before,
its likeness to other people’s but what made it different from other
people’s. When I looked at her I knew that here was all the love I’d
ever get; I’d drawn my ration.
(Ibid., p. 199)
But Lampton’s discovery is a contradiction in terms; he recognizes the

unrepeatability of love – like a ration, it can only be drawn once – while
also, at the back of his mind, imagining its exchange value. In the very
next sentence he considers ‘it would have been more agreeable if she’d
been ten years younger and had money of her own, just as life would be
more agreeable if the rivers ran beer and the trees grew ham sandwiches’.
He discounts the train of thought that connects love with economic
partnership, but cannot efface it entirely. It is a train of thought that
is submerged, but is nevertheless behind his eventual abandonment of
the adulterous relationship with Alice, in favour of marriage with an
heiress.
In Storey’s This Sporting Life, Arthur Machin’s economic solvency
encourages him in the belief that his life can be regulated by the spend-
ing of money, even to the extent of regulating the lives of other human
beings. But the breakdown of his relationship with his landlady – a
woman he still thinks of as ‘Mrs.Hammond’, despite the intimate terms

of the relationship – undermines this belief, and forces him to realize
that the practical loss of his rented room is an index of the total loss
of his moral and emotional bearings. His seemingly secure position as a
local celebrity is a mere imitation of security, and he is made aware sud-
denly of having no more sense of belonging in his own environment
than a migrant worker:
During the next few days nobody intensified this feeling of isolation
more than the Lithuanian. I probably felt his exile more than he did.
Three days on my own were enough to change the whole shape of
things. It seemed as if the debt I’d accumulated had suddenly been
shoved on me without warning, and I’d been told to pay, or else.
The emptiness obliterated every other feeling I had for people or for
places.
(Storey 1960; 2000, p. 190)
Although Machin’s bank balance is in a healthy condition, his status as

debtor blots out every other consideration of his emplacement in the set
of relations he has been inhabiting. And his emotional account remains
in deficit for an unforeseeable period of time, since the novel ends with
Machin surviving the death of Mrs Hammond without his having found
a way to repay his debt. In the crucial exchange in which he reveals
to Mrs Hammond’s doctor the nature of his relationship with her, the
use of an economic vocabulary is pivotal to their reaching a common
understanding of what is at stake:
‘How do you feel about the situation now? I mean, are you wanting
to look after her because I’ve told you she might die? Do you feel
guilty—owe her something?’
‘You can call it that.’
‘I’m not being sentimental about it, Machin, so let’s get it straight.
Do you feel you owe her something now she’s in this condition,
something you never gave her before—or does it go deeper than
that?’ ‘I don’t know. You might be right. In any case—I feel I owe
her something.’
(Ibid., p. 232)
There is an historically precise sort of poignancy in the way that Machin

grasps the weight of his responsibility in terms that derive from his
life-long obsession with avoiding financial debt, while the nature of
that obsession has rendered him ignorant of how he might discharge

this very different kind of debt, whose exact shape, size and substance
remain unclear to him, no more precise than the frustrated inadequacy
of his gesture towards ‘something’ can reveal.
By the mid-1950s, factory workers had become fully aware of the
extent to which the market value of their labour had risen steeply in
the post-war period; and yet the precariousness of the post-war truce
between opposing Cold War powers inhibited the desire to save:
Because it was no use saving your money year after year. A mug’s
game, since the value of it got less and less and in any case you never
knew when the Yanks were going to do something daft like drop-
ping the H-bomb on Moscow. And if they did then you could say
ta-ta to everybody, burn your football coupons and betting-slips, and
ring-up Billy Graham. If you believe in God, which I don’t, he said to
himself.
(Sillitoe 1958; 2008, pp. 27–8)
The economics of spending and saving were conditioned by the past and
future shadows of war. Both military and economic command structures
interfered with the worker’s management of his own schedule for earn-
ing and disposing of his pay. The conditions of assembly line production
allowed the employers to profit from the individual worker’s efficiency,
by lowering the rate of pay per unit when the daily amount of units
produced showed a significant rise. This reduced the incentive to speed
up production and also reduced the level of trust between management
and workforce:
So when you felt the shadow of the rate-checker breathing down your
neck you knew what to do if you had any brains at all: make every
move more complicated, though not slow because that was cutting
your own throat, and do everything deliberately yet with a crafty
show of speed.
(Ibid., pp. 31–2)
This camouflaging of temporal rhythms, while it owes its inspiration

to the speeding up and slowing down of film technology, represents a
fundamental division between the interests of different classes for whom
the management of historical time is governed by opposing attitudes
towards the memory and anticipation of armed conflict.
War talk
The social imaginary in British fiction of the late 1950s and early 1960s
was formed under the influence of post-war reactions to ideas of wartime
social unity. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, nostalgia for an earlier
phase of social relations by-passes the war and reaches back to an almost
pre-modern set of conditions:
The building—you had drawn your own water from a well, dug your
own potatoes out of the garden, taken eggs from the chicken run
to fry with bacon off your own side of pig hanging salted from a
hook in the pantry—had long ago been destroyed to make room for
advancing armies of new pink houses, flowing over the fields like red
ink on green blotting paper.
(Ibid., p. 205)
The yearning for an ideal of self-sufficiency is coloured by its irrevoca-

ble loss, blamed indirectly on the war through the reference to ‘armies’
of houses that release a flow of metaphorical red ink resembling a flow
of blood. However, this pastoral vision is adulterated by its overempha-
sis on ownership (‘own water’, ‘own potatoes’, ‘own side of pig’) that
speaks to a post-war enthusiasm for middle-class priorities, in contrast
to the wartime accommodation of socialism. It is during an extended
meditation on his experience of military training that Arthur Seaton
observes that ‘out of the army it was “Every man for himself”’ (ibid.,
p. 132). In contrast to the wartime ethos of solidarity and cooperation,
Arthur announces his intention of turning his gun on his own superiors
in the event of any future outbreak of hostilities:
When I’m on my fifteen-days’ training and I lay on my guts behind a

sandbag shooting at a target board I know whose faces I’ve got in my
sights every time the new rifle cracks off. Yes. The bastards that put
the gun into my hands.
(Ibid.)
Arthur’s anti-authoritarianism is not confined to his commanding offi-

cers but is extended to anyone with a modicum of power over his
living and working conditions: the tax inspector, the rent collector, the
shop steward. There are no discriminations of class or ideology to add
any kind of refinement to this anarchistic rejection of hierarchy. The
potency of this stance is what also renders it vulnerable; its fundamental
insistence on a tactical instability, a protean readiness to hide behind a

succession of different disguises: ‘I’m me and nobody else; and what-
ever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they
don’t know a bloody thing about me’ (ibid., p. 138). Seaton reflects
the mixture of attitudes towards the Second World War typical of the
immediately post-war generation. On the one hand, he is stirred by
the patriotic rhetoric of Olivier’s 1944 film version of Henry V – ‘I saw
it about six times’ – remembering many key phrases, although always
in fragmentary form, while on the other hand he reacts cynically to
Churchill’s wartime broadcasts: ‘Churchill spoke after the nine o’clock
news and told you what you were fighting for, as if it mattered’ (ibid.,
p. 131). The final clause in this dismissal is an alteration of memory in
the light of post-war disillusionment.
Joe Lampton’s narration in Room at the Top is retrospective, recount-
ing the events of 1947 ten years after they have happened. In 1947 his
memories of the war would have been fresh: memories of the bombing
of his house and the death of his parents; memories of his internment
in Stalag 1000; memories of drinking in Berlin at the end of the war. But
in 1957 what remains of his war experience is an indelible tendency to
read the conditions of peace in military terms: ‘I wanted to sleep and
not to argue, not to lie, not to promise, not to plot my future like a
raid over the Ruhr’ (Braine 1957, p. 172). This unconscious template for
the interpretation of the present extends to both central and peripheral
objects of attention, whether it is behind the formulating of the end of
his relationship with Alice – ‘I was retreating, I wasn’t fighting; but from
where was I retreating, and who was I fighting?’ (ibid., p. 130) – or the
afterthought which describes in passing ‘an electric oven which had a
control panel like a bomber’s’ (ibid., p. 24).
Even in the late 1950s, the urban fabric continued to reflect the
impact of war, in the direct form of bomb damage or the indirect form of
adaptation to shortages: ‘the asphalt paving had been dug up to make a
V-for-Victory garden during the war’ (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 72). In This
Sporting Life, direct engagement with military destruction, or engage-
ment with the industry that served it, is linked paradoxically with a
heightened sense of being alive. Machin contemplates a photograph
of the young Mrs Hammond, seen among workmates at a bomb fac-
tory during the war: ‘She’s there, the middle of the three, leaning back
slightly, the sun on her face and mouth, her feelings unlocked and run-
ning free. A girl’s face, unmarked and spontaneous.’ (Storey 1960; 2000,
p. 134) By contrast, the post-war settlement has an increasingly deaden-
ing effect on Mrs Hammond, to the extent that nearly one year before
her actual death from a clot on the brain, Machin remarks to his friend
Maurice, ‘She’s dead’. This is his way of trying to convince himself that
she is dead to him, but a combination of social disapproval and eco-
nomic hardship has already emptied Mrs Hammond’s life of reasons to
live. War damage, whether from past or future conflicts, is constitutive
of British social reality and of British social realism in the late 1950s,
although the major part of the damage is invisible, pocking and scarring
patterns of thought and language.
Reveries
It is remarkable how many of the novels and stories associated with the
idea of British social realism feature episodes in which the protagonist
loses consciousness or experiences an alteration of consciousness, with
a consequent rediscovery and reassessment of the relationship between
the individual self and its bodily condition. The body becomes the focus
for connection with, and disconnection from, the rest of the world;
physical trauma forces the individual into a realization of his or her
essential solitude, while the ritual consumption of meals and alcohol
provides access to shared culture. Part One of Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (the much larger of its two parts) begins and ends with Arthur
Seaton losing consciousness:
Her words trailed off and, with a grin, he slipped down in a dead
faint, feeling the world pressing its enormous booted foot on to his
head, forcing him away from the lights, down into the dark comfort
of grime, spit, and sawdust on the floor.
(Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 176)
This descent into the dark is also a regression from a human to a merely
animal condition, with an implied assimilation to a kind of semi-biotic
soup that evokes the primordial mud from which life is supposed to
have been formed. From these beginnings, evolution could go in any
direction. For Seaton, it as if each renewal of consciousness offers a
chance to rebuild life in a different way.
This Sporting Life begins with a temporary loss of consciousness when
the protagonist has six of his teeth broken on the rugby field. The ensu-
ing visit to the dentist who extracts the remaining stumps, and the party
that fills the rest of the evening, comprise the passage in time around
which the narration is organized. Machin is faced with the necessity
of rebuilding his teeth, just as he attempts to repair the damage to his
emotional life. The stark reality of missing teeth and the imitation of
perfection in the substitution of false teeth bears on the novel’s discrim-
ination between authentic and inauthentic forms of experience. In Room
at the Top there is a corresponding obsession with registering the state
of people’s teeth – both Lampton and his lover are afflicted with decay
and toothache – and with seeing false teeth as part of a general construc-
tion of reality. Lampton reflects on his life in the present of 1957 as an
attempt to conform to the conventions of a magazine advertisement,
noting that ‘the room needs at least a small crack in the plaster and
a set of false teeth in a glass’, which strikes a careful balance between
the admission of moderate imperfection and the necessity to disguise its
appearance (Braine 1957, p. 200).
Toothache pulls the sufferer back into touch with reality, while the
adoption of false teeth is associated with a form of cultural unconscious-
ness, with oblivion to the real conditions that underlie the façade. Many
of the novels occupy an equivalent form of oblivion with regard to the
movement of history. They inhabit a feeling of suspension, of histor-
ical abstraction, existing in a parenthesis between vivid memories of
the last war and vivid anticipations of the next. In Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning, the narrative is punctuated by moments of ellipsis, of
stalemate, in which the sense of location and affiliation dissolves at a
touch. An act of vandalism is committed by a drunk who is apprehended
by a young servicewoman; neither has the strength to overpower the
other, and this results in a prolonged impasse:
He was neither young nor middle-aged, a man who seemed to have

a stake in two generations without being cradled and carried along
by either one. His face seemed marked by some years of marriage,
yet his bearing branded him as a single man, an odd, lonely person
who gave off an air of belonging nowhere at all, which caused Arthur
to think him half-witted. The uniformed woman looked as though
she also had never had a home and belonged nowhere, but she had
aligned herself with order and law, and sympathy was against her.
(Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 109)
These two figures, like stock characters in a Morality play, are emblem-
atic of historical uncertainty, of the uncertain legacy of the past being
mishandled by a younger generation. The inertia produced by their
confrontation seems eccentric, a bizarre sideshow to the main busi-
ness of the novel, but is in fact at the centre of its preoccupation
with historical indirection. By contrast, the major part of the factory
worker’s experience involves an evasion of the present and its material

circumstances, precisely as a means of escaping from the complexity of
relations between past and future:
Time flew while you wore out the oil-soaked floor and worked furi-
ously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures
that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid
and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination
ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what
might be your future, an amok that produced all sorts of agreeable
visions.
(Ibid., p. 39)
The vocabulary of this celebration of irresponsibility mixes allusions to

archaic and modern technologies of vision, confusing their differences
in ascribing a form of civil disorder – ‘an amok’ – to a use of time that is
also a distortion of time.
In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the present moment is inhab-
ited with a sense of release and relaxation only in the countryside,
although this slackening of tension also involves a slackening of feeling,
an ebbing of vitality:
It was a quiet and passionless place to be, where few people passed,
hemmed in by steep bush-covered banks of a cutting against which,
by the towpath, lay his bicycle. There was no sign of the city.
(Ibid., p. 129)
The varieties of reverie that punctuate these fictional narratives offer

temporal or spatial methods of withdrawal from the social. They have
the same function as the passages of distributed attention discussed in
the second section of this essay.
Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction returns repeatedly to an aural equivalent
of distributed attention, supplying chains of dialogue which consist of
disconnected remarks with speech attributions either missing or merely
desultory:
‘You work up McCrindle’s?’

‘Yeah, I’ve had a scrub, so don’t go saying you can smell the butter
on me.’
Sylvie whispers, ‘He undid me brassieres, so I told him to do them
up again.
“You certainly know where the hook is,” I says.’

’E believes in grabbin’ hold of yer and bitin’ yer ear-’ole.
‘I like it rough. You get more feelin’ out of it that way.
‘I was tuckin’ in his shirt for him and he says, “Don’t put yer hand
down there or you’ll get a shock!”’
(Dunn 1963, p. 16)
The centrifugal patterns of speech are paralleled by a narrative proce-

dure in which the description of settings has the effect of discomposing,
rather than composing, the scene of the action:
We turn a corner past a giant bulldozer crashing through the slums.

In the mud lies a split suitcase with a rag mat tied about by the Daily
Mirror. Under the tunnel trains whistle and thunder above us and
out into the Arcade. Four or five girls stand outside the shoe-shop
admiring the latest creations: ‘Handmade shoes £3 a pair’.
(Ibid., p. 22)
Even the imagery of this paragraph combines splitting with stitching,

demolition with rebuilding, variations on a theme of simultaneous dis-
mantling and assembling. In some respects, Dunn’s compositional tech-
nique reflects the absorbency of recording technology, which does not
discriminate between significant and insignificant sounds and images.
Vivid details of partly seen or partly heard situations are given in quick
succession to one another. The balance between narration and dialogue
is tipped in favour of the latter, although it would be more accurate to
characterize the relationship between separate utterances as one of inter-
cutting monologues. The procedural basis of Dunn’s writing conforms
to a poetics of overhearing.
The parallel techniques of discontinuous narration and dialogue, and
the resulting effects of omission and truncation, are confluent with an
odd obsession in the text with instances of dismemberment: of heads,
feet, arms, fingers:
‘Hear what happened to Jess? He robbed this bank and he was gettin’
away with the money over this dirty great wall when he slips and
chops the top of his finger off on the glass. So he’s there on the
ground lookin’ for it. He can’t go without it because they could get a
fingerprint off of it and do him for the bank robbery.’
(Ibid., p. 98)
In Dunn’s fiction, visible damage is the sensationally graphic correlate

to the widespread psychic and social damage that both fills and limits
the language with which her characters articulate their world.
Communing
The social relations always struggling and failing to be born in Dunn’s

fiction represent an extreme in British social realism’s account of the
shifting sands of community in the post-war period. In one respect, the
volatility of the fictional versions of community, their constant liability
to violent performances of antagonism, involves a transfer of wartime
conditions to domestic settings. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
Mrs Bull, whose incessant surveillance of her neighbours’ actions and
words functions as a perverse substitute for the ‘social glue’ validated by
nineteenth century novelists, is at once a focus for the neighbourhood’s
sense of unity and for its sense of internal friction:
She kept a chock-a-block arsenal of blackmailing scandal ready to

level with foresight and back-sight at those that crossed her path
in the wrong direction, sniping with tracer and dum-dum from
sandbags of ancient gossip.
(Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 103)
The climax of her role in the narrative involves her being sniped at
with an air-rifle, which provides a literal corollary to her metaphor-
ical ballistics while the relative harmlessness of the projectile used
contrasts tellingly with the appalling harm inflicted by tracer and
dum-dum.
Arthur Seaton’s waging war with his neighbours is partly demonstrat-
ing the existence of a front line separating those whom he can trust from
those he cannot. The front line begins and ends with family. Within the
territory circumscribed by that line, there is a remarkable cameraderie,
based more on clan loyalty than on the day-to-day obligations of life in
the nuclear family. The efflorescence of a sense of belonging occurs in
the context of Arthur’s prolonged visit to the home of his Aunt Ada dur-
ing the Christmas period. The huge numbers of members of the family
inhabiting the house on a regular basis are supplemented by cousins,
friends and even new acquaintances, on the basis of a carnivalesque
equality that is expressed in an unstoppable flow of anarchistic energy.
Although loosely attached to the family structure, this powerfully uni-
fying although ambivalent energy is identified less by its autonomous
construction of a temporary set of relations than by its destructive

opposition to dominant ideas of a civil society.
In This Sporting Life, Machin is resentfully aware that he has for-
feited the trust of his own family in proportion to his absorption in
celebrity culture and its alteration of the basis of personal and social
relations. His unwillingness to come to terms with the ethical challenge
of his parents’, and especially his father’s, disapproval of his new life-
style accounts for his failure to even acknowledge the existence of his
family until half way through his first person narration. The visit he
makes to his parents’ home culminates in a mutual recognition of totally
incompatible viewpoints and values:
‘Ideals don’t count where money’s concerned. It hasn’t got any right
and wrong. Ideals! Where do ideals get you? Where have your ideals
got you?’
‘Where?’ He stared round him as if it was only too obvious where
his ideals had got him, where Mrs Shaw’s ideals next door had got
her, and Mr Chadwick’s beyond her had got him. It was only too
obvious.
Then, just for a moment, he saw that through my eyes there was
nothing there at all. He saw the neighbourhood without its affections
and feelings, but just as a field of broken down ambition.
(Storey 1960; 2000, p. 112)
The barrier of incomprehension is a division between generations,

between a generation for whom scarcity was subsumed in a wartime
egalitarianism validated by the need to defeat fascism, and a generation
for whom scarcity is the penalty for lagging behind in ‘this sporting life’
of aggressive competitiveness. The incomprehension is described from
the point of view of the younger generation making assumptions about
the attitude of the older, but the reader can see through both sets of eyes.
Where Machin emphasizes the failure of his father’s ambitions, the syn-
tax allows the reader to give equal weight to the loss of affections and
feelings that would count much more for the father.
British social realism is precisely coincident with the growing afford-
ability of television for the majority of the population. Television offers
a means of homogenizing British cultural relations by instilling the
desirability of uniform social goals. It comes as no surprise to find that
television is dismissed and ignored by Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning, and decried by his father. It appears to offer to
their creator, Alan Sillitoe, a model for social cohesion that extends the
system of economic and temporal indebtedness; the former through

the normalizing of hire purchase arrangements; the latter by analogy
between communications and defence networks:
‘What will they think on next!’ Seaton said, after glancing upwards
and seeing a television aerial hooked on to almost every chimney,
like a string of radar stations, each installed on the never-never.
(Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 28)
In Up the Junction, the unifying factor in the lives of Battersea’s pau-

per community is the ubiquity of the Tally Man, the weekly visitor
who imposes a uniform indebtedness on a clientele with little sense of
money as the controlling element in temporal relations: ‘Most of ’em
you can make ’em buy anything. Twenty-five per cent don’t know what
they’re paying for and fifty per cent don’t want the stuff anyway.’ (Dunn
1963, p. 105) The last story in the volume, ‘The Children’, demonstrates
the early assimilation – between the ages of five and ten – of its young
characters to the facts of Battersea life, implicating in one another the
conditions of parenting, indebtedness (‘HP’) and criminality.
But it is not the case that community is simply replaced by con-
sumerism, or that the mythical solidarity of wartime is replaced by the
disaffection of the post-war settlement. In Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning, the rejection of a common cause is backdated to wartime. The
protagonist’s cousin, Dave, self-appointed member of the ‘Royal Corps
of Deserters’, is forthright in his rejection of patriotic obligation: ‘Do yer
think I’m going ter fight for them bastards, do yer?’ (Sillitoe 1958; 2008,
p. 130) For Dave, public service is synonymous with the defence of inter-
ests that should be attacked; the history of his own experience has been
one long chronicle of class hostility.
The most common thread linking all the fictions is their fascination
with the anti-social power of extra-marital relationships; adultery in
Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; a live-in rela-
tionship between the protagonist and his widowed landlady in This
Sporting Life. In Up the Junction, the oblique relationships between the
sixteen short stories included in the volume correlate with the struc-
tural divergences between individual sentences and paragraphs, but
they also match the obliquity of relationships between the male and
female characters, their constantly shifting attachments, and especially
the looseness of their correspondence with marital relations. If the rest-
less, aggressive non-conformity of the male protagonist in the works
of Braine, Sillitoe and Storey naturalizes the resistance to historical
continuity in the immediate post-war period, and its abandonment of
the wartime social contract, the break in transmission is even more

graphically illustrated by the sterility of female lives in Up the Junc-
tion, where the conversational vitality and inventiveness of the female
characters contrasts shockingly with the emotional poverty of their rela-
tionships with men. At the centre of the book is a gruelling account
of an unsuccessful abortion followed by a premature stillbirth, which
both counterpoints and puts in perspective the underlying vacuity of
the male experience that only a feverish sexual energy will disguise.
Rube, victim of this ordeal, is left in a condition that echoes the aimless
belligerence of her male counterparts in other fictions:
Gettin’ rid of that kid hasn’t half changed me. I don’t know what
I want any more. I ain’t half quick-tempered. I go off at everyone
around me. Christmas-time I smashed all the cups off of the table. . .
(Dunn 1963, p. 68)
As in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Christmas provides an obvious

occasion on which to foreground social and familial dysfunction, while
‘not knowing what you want’ becomes both a symptom of, and a stim-
ulus to, the exhausting but unproductive routines by which both male
and female characters expend energy:
I’ve got to go straight now. It just ain’t worth it. If they catch me
I do five years. So I’ve got a job in a scrapyard breaking up old cars.
I earn twelve pound’ a week. It don’t go far when you’ve bin used to
havin’ a hundred pound’ in yer pocket. The trouble with me is I don’t
really know what I want out of life except money, but I know I want
money. . .
(Ibid., p. 36)
The insatiable appetites of the male protagonists of these novels, never

sated despite the prodigious acquisition and gargantuan consumption of
sex and money, seems always on the verge of metamorphosis into spec-
tacularly anti-social forms of expression. Machin, protagonist of This
Sporting Life, recognizes in himself a condition in which demand will
always outstrip supply:
But I was really bored. It dried me up. There wasn’t a moment when
I was relaxed or satisfied. I even thought about killing somebody,
holding a bank clerk up, chasing an old tart across the park. I felt like
a big lion with a big appetite which had suddenly stopped being fed.
(Storey 1960; 2000, p. 94)
In Machin’s vocabulary, women are ‘samples’, offering themselves as

trial objects for consumption in a transaction from which the male cus-
tomer walks away without obligation. By half way through the novel,
Machin’s jaded palate is aroused only by the prospect of expensive
samples, luxury goods, the well-dressed wives of wealthy husbands:
I think about what it must be like to hold a rich sample like

Mrs Weaver—the nice smells, the soft mattress, smooth sheets; the
understanding it’s only a temporary arrangement. No clinging; the
knowing of what it is: just a sample, a nice statement between willing
people; no slush feelings; decent underwear.
(Ibid., p. 127)
However, his first opportunity to taste these fancy goods is mishan-

dled: ‘I’d made it more sordid that it ever could have been. I’d been too
clumsy. I was turning down a free sample, and she gave all the appro-
priate grimaces of the disappointed salesman’ (ibid., p. 107). The male
consumer automatically attributes a commercial attitude to his female
counterpart, a provider of goods and services. Of all the many pressures
inducing cracks in the fabric of these fictional communities it is the eco-
nomic basis of an astonishing range of predicates taken for granted that
shows up the most tellingly.
Conclusion
None of the novels so far discussed offers a compromise between the

analysis of social failure and the imagining of a creative alternative.
The most creative relationships they invent are lost in the past for the
individual characters concerned or obscured to the reader by the uncer-
tain future they address. Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960) appears
to move into the middle ground with the make-do-and-mend solution
of its protagonist’s renewal of his half-hearted marriage on the basis of
affection, shared experience of loss, and reduction of expectations: the
embrace of a ‘kind of loving’:
All this has taught me, about life and everything, I mean. And the
way I see it is this—the secret of it all is there is no secret, and no God
and no heaven and no hell. And if you say well what is life about
I’ll say it’s about life, and that’s all. And it’s enough, because there’s
plenty of good things in life as well as bad. And I reckon there’s no
such thing as sin and punishment, either. There’s what you do and
what comes of it. There’s right things and there’s wrong things and
if you do wrong things, wrong things happen to you—and that’s the
punishment. But there’s no easy way out because if you do only right
things you don’t always come off best because there’s chance. After
everything else there’s chance and you can do the best you can and
you can’t allow for that. If you say, well why does one bloke have
all bad luck and another one have all good luck when he might be a
wrong’un, well I’ll say isn’t that chance?
(Barstow 1960, p. 285)
Although literary history has often associated Barstow with the writers
discussed here, this accommodation with ‘bad luck’, while it disavows
a metaphysical scheme of explanation for the rationale of life as lived
in 1950s Britain, is also at cross purposes with the fictional narrations
of Braine, Sillitoe, Storey and Dunn, which monitor the stress-lines of
British social malaise that join up the confusingly intersecting patterns
of historical memory, economic policy, mass culture and public moral-
ity in a ferocious critique of the condition of Britain. Its removal at a
stroke of the legacy of debts and credits, common bonds and deep divi-
sions, local realities and abstract unrealities, that underlies the rapidly
transforming landscape of British social relations seems like one more
imitation of the ‘futile game’ that each of the other texts has already
refused to play.
Bibliography
Balchin, Nigel. (1953) Sundry Creditors. London, Collins.
Barstow, Stan. (1960) A Kind of Loving. London, Michael Joseph.
Braine, John. (1957) Room at the Top. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode.
——. (1962) Life at the Top, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Brook, Susan. (2007) Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950s: The Feeling Male
Body. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Connor, Steven. (1995) The English Novel in History, 1950–95. London, Routledge.
Dunn, Nell. (1963) Up the Junction. London, MacGibbon & Kee.
——. (1967) Poor Cow. London, MacGibbon & Kee.
Gasiorek, Andrzej. (1995) Post-war British Fiction: Realism and After. London,
Edward Arnold.
Gray, Nigel. (1973) The Silent Majority: A Study of the Working Class in Post-War
British Fiction. London, Vision Press.
Head, Dominic. (2002) The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction,
1950–2000. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kynaston, David. (2007) Austerity Britain 1945–51. London, Bloomsbury.
——. (2009) Family Britain 1951–1957. London, Bloomsbury.
MacKay, Marina, and Stonebridge, Lyndsey. (2007) British Fiction after Modernism:
the Novel at Mid-Century. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Marwick, Arthur. (1991) Culture in Britain since 1945. Oxford, Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Mengham, Rod. (2001) ‘Broken Glass’ in Rod Mengham and Neil Reeve (eds),
Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Morgan, Kenneth O. (1990) The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1989. Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1949) The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, tr. Lloyd Alexander.
London, John Lehmann.
Sillitoe, Alan. (1958; 2008) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London, Harper
Perennial.
——. (1959) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London, W.H. Allen.
Sinfield, Alan. (1983) Society and Literature 1945–1970. London, Methuen &
Company.
Storey, David. (1960; 2000) This Sporting Life. London, Vintage.
——. (1961) Flight Into Camden. London, Macmillan.
Sutherland, J.A. (1978) Fiction and the Fiction Industry. London, Athlone Press.
Taylor, D.J. (1993) After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945. London,
Chatto & Windus.
Waugh, Patricia. (1995) Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background
1960–1990. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
——. (2009) The Blackwell History of British Fiction 1945–Present. Oxford,
Blackwell.
Young, Michael. (1963) The Rise of the Meritocracy. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
4
‘this/is not a metaphor’: The
Possibility of Social Realism
in British Poetry
Keston Sutherland
‘Social realism’ is a name for art which insists on the complexity of

social existence. Life is too often simplified by art, too often travestied by
ideological routines that make spiritual and economic impoverishment
into a raw material to be worked up into artefacts of defensive middle
class sentiment. Social realism argues against simplification, against the
sympathetic complacencies of the middle class, and against the use of
sentiment to arrest inquiry into the causes of suffering. One purpose of
this essay is to suggest that it is now uncommonly difficult to find British
‘social realist’ poetry, not only because the poetry with a strong claim to
that title has for decades been pressed out of public view by the editors,
reviewers, broadcasters and publishers with a controlling interest in the
British literary establishment, but also for the more complex reason that
‘social realist’ poetry as I understand it is defined by the imperative to
radicalize the mode itself. Poetry will not be ‘social realist’ unless it can
make a more radically truthful picture of life than the forms of repre-
sentation that are popularly considered ‘realistic’. It is difficult to find
poetry which does that, because the poetry which may do it is always,
as a matter of principle, uncertain whether it does or not; social realism
is an intensely self-critical and sceptical mode. It is sceptical about the
value and the tendencies of poetic artifice, it is sceptical about rhetoric,
rhyme, versification and metaphor, and its scepticism is not logical or
linguistic, simply – not just a professional scepticism about semiosis and
the power of words to designate objects or ‘signifieds’ – but moral and
political. Its fundamental insistence is that poetic artifice is not morally
or politically trivial, but capable of determining moral and political atti-
tudes, by accident and by sleight as well as by open and programmatic
persuasion; and it takes a special, intense interest in damaging practices
103
of representation that make people insensitive to suffering or blind them

to the extent of suffering and its complex material causes.
Social realism has done and been all these things from its earliest
beginnings. One of the earliest critics of le réalisme in French literature,
David-Sauvageot, spelled out the conservative rejection of this art that
was ‘ugly on purpose’ (to borrow a phrase of Philip Larkin’s that I will
return to later) in his critique of realism published in 1889. Realists insist
on describing impoverished life in all its miserable and offensive detail;
they reduce art to a prurient and deliberately scandalous anatomy of
the poor. But as the great tradition demonstrates beyond dispute, there
is only one subject fit for art ambitious to know the human heart by
scaling its sublimities and plumbing its recesses. ‘The man of the upper
classes is more complex. To what he retains of his primitive nature, he
adds what is given to him by education. His virtue is refined and com-
plicated, like his vices: it is him we must know, if we will know man in
his entirety.’ (David-Sauvageot 1889, p. 325; my translation) Poor men
and women are not complicated, and so they are not substantial enough
to be the focus of a ‘realistic’ art. Suffering may indeed be complex, but
the suffering caused by impoverishment is simple.
In British poetry, it was George Crabbe who first emphatically con-
tradicted this prejudice in a realist rather than a sentimentalist attitude.
What Thomas Gray famously called ‘the short and simple annals of the
poor’ are neither short nor simple, Crabbe insisted; and ‘annals’ is in
any case an offensive metaphor, since the lives of poor people have
not been recorded.1 Crabbe’s The Village of 1783 first put the pigeon
squarely among the cats, with its irrefutable diagnosis that ‘the Muses
sing of happy swains,/Because the Muses never know their pains.’ The
principled ignorance of the Muses is their warrant for issuing elegant
simplifications of complex suffering.
From this chief cause these idle praises spring,

That themes so easy few forbear to sing;
For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask;
To sing of shepherds is an easy task:
The happy youth assumes the common strain,
A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain.
(Crabbe 1988, p. 158: ll.31–6)
The objections of the Tory critic Robert Grant in his review of 1810 are
representative of the conservative reception of Crabbe’s work. As Grant
Social Realism in British Poetry 105
saw things, ‘the realities of low life [ . . . ] are of all the others the most
disgusting. If therefore the poet choose to illustrate the department of
low life, it is peculiarly incumbent on him to select such of its features, as
may at least be inoffensive’ (Pollard 1972, pp. 121–2). Crabbe, like John
Coltrane and Ezra Pound in Larkin’s no-nonsense assessment, was being
‘ugly on purpose’. Crabbe is suspiciously motivated, envious and con-
tumacious: he has ‘a contempt for the bienséances of life, and a rage for
its realities’ (Pollard 1972, p. 128). Even the republican William Hazlitt
was unprepared to accept that Crabbe’s realism was ‘realistic’. ‘He takes
an inventory of the human heart exactly in the manner as of the furni-
ture of a sick room [ . . . ] Almost all his characters are tired of their lives,
and you heartily wish them dead.’ (‘On Thomson and Cowper’, Howe
1930, p. 97) The human heart merits an emblem, not an inventory; if, as
David-Sauvageot maintains, the poet must ‘know man in his entirety’,
he will only do it by having the good taste not to get too bogged down
in detail.
The contemptibleness of Crabbe and Zola was defined in defence of
an image of universal humanity whose power depended on the exclu-
sion of complex material detail from poetic accounts of suffering. That
image was at once commonsensical and sublime, sentimental and ‘real-
istic’; Crabbe’s filthy peasants were by contrast an insult to reality, poetic
instruments used invidiously to ‘rage’ after it. Without that distinction,
without a limit to artistic interest in the minute particulars of suffer-
ing – a limit beyond which poets cannot transgress except by ceasing
to be poets, or ceasing to be comprehensible – the image of universal
humanity defended by conservative (and by some Romantic republi-
can) critics would be immensely more vulnerable to the scepticism of
levelling types, malcontents and socialists.
The homology is of course not exact, but a careful reader of the dis-
cussions surrounding British poetry of the last 60 years may find some
interesting indications that the conservative reaction against early social
realism is still going strong, with poets of the ‘avant-garde’ or non-
conformist tendency now occupying the stocks formerly donated to
Crabbe. The twentieth century British reaction against modernism is
similar in spirit and in purpose to the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century reaction against realism. This is one bit of evidence that
the nonconformist poets of today are the real inheritors of the realist
project. Realism has always been defined not just by the scepticism and
radical self-criticism of its practitioners, but also by the defensive reac-
tion against it by critics whose concepts of art and universal humanity
reflect the interests of the most powerful class in society.
I want in this essay to make a detailed case for the realism, and social
realism, of ‘difficult’, ‘avant-garde’ or nonconformist poets, in three
ways. First, by giving a very brief summary of some of the theories of
realism that I think any serious realist art of the past 60 years has had to
contend with, whether by conscious interrogation of its own theoretical
commitments or just by occupying the same world; second, by describ-
ing mainstream British poetry culture, and the influential poetry of
Philip Larkin in particular, and specifying how that culture has imposed
a sense of what it means to be ‘realistic’ in poetry that I think has func-
tioned as a defensive screen against true realism (the reader is warned
to expect some contumacious arguing in this part of the essay, which is
‘ugly on purpose’); and third, by giving a careful reading of a poem that
I think has a strong claim to be called ‘social realist’. That last section
is the most important, in my reckoning, because it tries to define social
realist art not by establishing formal criteria, or by specifying what sort
of content must be included in it, but by experiencing the pressures on
the moral and political imagination that a poem is capable of exerting
through intense scepticism of its own artifice; my hope is that I will
show how the poem I read keeps alive the possibility of social realism
by refusing entitlement to the designation.
∗ ∗ ∗
‘There is no other true realism than that of poetry.’ (Cited in Brown

1981, p. 227) Schlegel’s pronouncement in his Ideen is characteristically
eccentric. Poetry has not been the focus of many accounts of realism.
Most accounts, since ‘réalisme’ in art was first debated in French criti-
cism of the 1820s, if indeed they do not categorically exclude poetry,
have little or nothing to say about it.2 The most important twentieth
century theorist of realism, Georg Lukács, was so preoccupied with the
novel, that Bertolt Brecht could retort, as if in answer to everything
Lukács ever wrote, ‘What about realism in lyric poetry?’ (Brecht 1967,
p. 109)3 Fredric Jameson implicitly recognizes this same limitation in
Lukács: realism for Lukács is ‘storytelling and dramatization’, ‘narration
rather than description’; it is essentially ‘antisymbolic’ (Jameson 1974,
p. 196). Brecht did not go on to enlarge this criticism of Lukács by elabo-
rating his own specific account of realist poetry, but only gave a general,
partly speculative description of Realismus which rests on a principle—
namely, the principle that ‘truthful representations of life’ must not only
be ‘suggestive and intelligible’ to ‘the broad working masses’, but, cru-
cially, ‘of use’ to them in their practical struggles for political recognition
and power—which arguably makes the great majority of poetry written

in the two hundred years since the concept of artistic ‘realism’ was
invented inadmissible to the category it defines (Brecht 2001, p. 107).4
Brecht’s account is surpassingly arduous, asking no less of the aspir-
ing realist than that her writing should ‘represent the most progressive
section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leader-
ship’; the definition becomes emphatically speculative just at the point
of its most rigorous insistence on practical effectuality (ibid., p. 108).
Could any twentieth century British poet accept this obligation, or even
recognize it?
Hugh MacDiarmid wrestled with it, and with the gigantic historical
evidence that no poet was ever likely to fulfil it, in his ‘Second Hymn to
Lenin’ of 1935. After four quatrains of troubled but upright ars poetica,
addressed familiarly to Lenin in the same brusque, colloquial manners
of Pound’s apostrophe to Robert Browning at the beginning of Canto
II (‘Ah, Lenin, you were richt’), the poem tilts into a trial by doubt in
italics:
Are my poems spoken in the factories and fields,

In the streets o’ the toon?
Gin they’re no’, then I’m failin’ to dae
What I ocht to ha’ dune.
Gin I canna win through to the man in the street,
The wife by the hearth,
A’ the cleverness on earth’ll no mak’ up
For the damnable dearth.
‘Haud on, haud on; what poet’s dune that?
Is Shakespeare read,
Or Dante or Milton or Goethe or Burns?’
—You heard what I said.
(MacDiarmid 1970, pp. 91–2)
The poet’s protest is not allowed to fill out the whole of the last quatrain
quoted here, but is made to climax prematurely in the third line, so as
not to be allowed to set itself up as a lament by accomplishing the clinch
of a rhyme; worse yet, the protest is set in speech marks which just
short of scathingly imply that the thought they contain ought to seem
a specimen of predictable melodrama. Why then should MacDiarmid
the Leninist suffer the energy-sapping protest to be heard at all? For this
reason: its bourgeois histrionics make it an instructively more plausible
and convenient candidate for ‘realism’ than the anguished confession of

failure that prompts it: it is ‘realistic’ in the false, bourgeois sense of that
word. If even Dante won’t cut it on the factory floor, then really, how
on earth should I? So runs the familiar excuse, restoring us to common
sense by mechanic adoption. But the last line of the quatrain is reserved
for the pastoral last word, MacDiarmid’s and Lenin’s at once, a scold
against the literati’s pretty skipping amphibrachs of the third line – di
dum di di dum di di dum di di dum – and their melodious settlement
into convenient despair. The scold arrives with the finality of an inter-
jection by God in a Herbert poem, the last word that was also always the
word in the beginning, stilling the mind caught up in the professionally
restless vanities of self-suspicion with a reply that no-one who was ever a
child could honestly fail to understand. The terminal italics of Herbert’s
‘Jordan (II)’ or ‘The Collar’ are not far off from MacDiarmid’s medial
italics here: ‘But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild / At every
word, / Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!’ (Martz 1992, p. 139)
Despair in self-suspicion, to the Leninist MacDiarmid as to the Christian
Herbert, is an infantile disorder. That point blank monosyllabic scold,
‘You heard what I said’, not the clever resignation by appeal to literary
authority that invited it, is the true realism, MacDiarmid stiffly main-
tains. A Leninist hymnody will refuse not only the opium of the masses,
but the opium of the intellectuals, too.
Brecht described practical effectuality not simply as the historical
measure of the success of realist art, but as its a priori condition. The
speculative element of his definition – that art must ‘represent the most
progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the
leadership’ – is not for Brecht a gamble or hyperbole intended to glam-
orize realism, but its only sufficient basis. MacDiarmid wrote lyric that
took seriously the psychological anguish of accepting that speculative
element for an iron necessity. The contradiction at the heart of the ‘Sec-
ond Hymn to Lenin’ is that its serious anguish is both the testimony
of its deep commitment to an effectual realism, and the measure of its
failure actually to be it.
Other major descriptions of realism, besides Brecht’s, have been, in
different ways, just as difficult to reconcile with poetry. Roland Barthes’s
influential account of ‘the reality effect’, the use of prolific descriptive
detail without obvious narrative significance, what Barthes typologically
called ‘détail inutile’, offers no direct comment on poetry, and seems ill
adapted to explain it (Barthes 1984, p. 181). Barthes thought, fairly inge-
niously, that the details about objects and appearances given in fictional
descriptions ‘are reputed to denote the real directly’, but that ‘all that
they do – without saying so – is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s

little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real’ (Barthes 1989,
p. 148). All the useless details are corporately eloquent, and the struc-
ture of their signifiant unanimity is realism. But that structure needs
a story to hang on, or some other device acting as the indisputable
focus for interpretation that lets the details be just details, so that they
may appear useless. Poetry worth reading at this level of intellectual
sophistication is increasingly unlikely to present a focus like that; a
Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy poem will present such a focus,
and readers will call it the theme. As John Wilkinson has argued, poetry
is usually (and prejudicially) conceived as the art in which ‘every lin-
guistic scrap must be put to work, every participant phrase must earn
its keep’ (Wilkinson 2009, p. 50); or as Hans-Georg Gadamer more
overtrustingly and overbearingly put it, it is ‘obligatory’ that a poem
‘not contain a single word standing for something in such a way that
another word could be substituted for it’ (Gadamer 1997, p. 130). The
suggestion about poems is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s about the phe-
nomena of perception in general, and paintings in particular, that the
more we look into them, the more they ‘come to form a tightly struc-
tured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is
arbitrary’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004, p. 97). Barthes’s infinitely substitutable
‘détail inutile’, the basic genetic building block of the ‘reality effect’, is
incompatible with ‘poetry’ as most critics have liked to imagine that art,
because the poem is conceived as the scene or act of language in which
detail cannot, by definition, be or even appear useless or substitutable.
There are plenty of reasons not to accept this concept of poetry, but
none of them leads to the discovery that poetry after all contains ‘détail
inutile’ in Barthes’s sense.
Barthes’s theory can be made inapplicable to poetry from the other
side, too: not by claiming that poetry is all work and no play, but by
reasoning the reverse. Michael Riffaterre has argued, in a study devoted
to poetry in particular that picks up where Barthes left off, that ‘semiosis
triumphs completely over mimesis’ when ‘the text is no longer attempt-
ing to establish the credibility of a description’, and that poetic texts in
general do not make that attempt (Riffaterre 1978, p. 10). This makes the
poetic text, in Riffaterre’s reckoning, ‘text’ perfected, text per se. ‘In all
cases the concept of poeticity is inseparable from that of the text. And
the reader’s perception of what is poetic is based wholly upon refer-
ences to texts’ (ibid., p. 22) Poems are semiotic, not mimetic; they are
instances of the concept of poeticity; and only texts can be the founda-
tion for poetic experience. As an ultra corrective to the ‘Romanticism’
of Hazlitt and Wordsworth, for whom poetry was passion and the
sky, and ‘perception of what is poetic’ was sometimes possible even in
minds ignorant of semiotics and its concept of the text, this is tolerably
beguiling. It swaps infinite humanist universals for restricted structural-
ist equivalents; the validity of universals in general is preserved by the
ruse. Riffaterre’s argument does supply a reason to think that the ‘reality
effect’ which Barthes explains is the ‘connotation’ (but not the ‘denota-
tion’) of the ‘pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’ in Flaubert’s Un cœur
simple will likewise be the connotation of the ‘parti-coloured obelisks
of mixed ices’ in the café in Baudelaire’s petit poème en prose ‘Les Yeux
des Pauvres’ only if we decide that Baudelaire’s text is en prose, not if we
decide it is a poème.5 But Riffaterre’s triumphalist account of the ‘com-
plete triumph’ of semiosis over mimesis in poetry, though absolument
moderne, is of an order of explanation long ago dismissed by Lukács as
‘scholasticism’. For Lukács the dialectician and materialist, ‘realistic lit-
erature’ is literature in which ‘each descriptive detail is both individual
and typical’, that is, roughly translated into Barthes’s general terms, both
‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’, never just one or the other (Lukács 1979,
p. 43).6 In any case, as Tzvetan Todorov explained, Riffaterre makes
poetry into a ‘genre without realist pretensions’ (Todorov 1982, p. 9;
my translation).
Vladimir Mayakovsky, arguably the greatest Marxist poet, thought
that ‘the depiction and representation of reality have no place in poetry
on their own account’, since poetry is ‘at its very root tendentious’
(Mayakovsky 1990, p. 48). Not only can poetry never be empirical
or photographic (though Marx himself once praised ‘photographical
truth’ in representation), but poets conscious of the historical mean-
ing of their labour must not fall into the ideological fantasy that it
might be photographic.7 If poetry may nonetheless be realist, it will be
by engineering the correct ideological tendencies in language, that is,
the correct exaggerations, omissions, amplifications and distortions of
reality (at whose apex the ensemble of human relations is ‘a cloud in
pants!’), not by making the incurably bourgeois claim to eschew ideol-
ogy altogether, the better to settle things as they really are and always
will be into their proper focus (Almereyda 2008, p. 80). The ‘realist’ in
St. Petersburg in 1915 will not wipe clean the window in the house of
language to get an unobfuscated view of reality outside: he will melt
the glass with his forehead (see Almereyda 2008, p. 81). The ‘funda-
mental tenet of materialism’, Lenin wrote, is ‘the existence of the thing
reflected independent of the reflector (the independence of the exter-
nal world from the mind)’ (Lenin 1967, p. 110); this conviction arises
irresistibly from ‘naïve’ experience, and materialism in Lenin’s concep-

tion ‘deliberately makes the “naïve” belief of mankind the foundation of
its theory of knowledge’; but the reflection of things in minds comes
after the existence of things, and the reflection of things in poetry
comes still later, after their reflection in minds, and that order of pri-
ority is for Mayakovsky, as for Lenin, an irreducibly historical sequence,
complex and invariable, overdetermined by class interests and political
loyalties (ibid., p.56). Realism is overdetermination by the right interests
and the right loyalties, in an active enough state of waking, responsive
not simply to real facts and objects but to real social crises and hidden
developments. There is no description that is not also a prescription
for Mayakovsky, not simply because values and norms resound under
the apparently most literal or innocuous language, but, much more
importantly, because there is a revolution to carry to the world. ‘It’s not
enough to give examples of the new poetry, or rules about how a word
should act on the revolutionary masses – one must ensure that these
words will act in such a way as to give maximum support to one’s class.’
(Mayakovsky 1990, p. 47).
‘Realism’ defined on this basis as the intensification of already tenden-
tious feeling and thinking in deliberate, but possibly complex and even
obscure, fidelity to the naïve beliefs of the proletariat, may seem coher-
ent and practicable to poets who believe in a revolution and who wish
to put their work at the service of it, as Edward Upward and Stephen
Spender once did, and as Sean Bonney does now; but it was a crucial
point of principle to Mayakovsky that the contribution of the poet to
the program of revolution should not be granted any special function
or significance essentially different from the labour of railway or factory
workers, so that his account of realism must programmatically have no
special explanation reserved uniquely for poetry. Not only must ‘real-
ism’ not be redesigned or specially elaborated to account for poetry, but
every possible claim to exceptional status made by poets must be realis-
tically thrown out and ridiculed. Only ‘sentimental-critical Philistinism’
is ever responsible for the idea that ‘only eternal poetry is safe from the
dialectical process’; and every claim to exceptional status or power of
insight by the poet, however apparently modest, is suspicious because
likely to bolster this cryptoreligious idea, if not simply to be it in disguise
(Mayakovsky 1990, pp. 42–3).8 Mayakovsky’s materio-realist attitude to
poetry involves thinking, at the very least, that poetry will become real-
ist only to the extent that it acknowledges that it must work to the same
essential end, in essentially the same social medium, and by essentially
the same inspiration to practical activity as a political speech.
Adorno’s most summary rejection of realism appeared in the essay

‘Presuppositions. On the occasion of a reading by Hans G. Helms’. ‘Real-
ism in art has become ideology’, he asserts, a little as if provocatively
making a specimen axiom while not believing in axioms (Adorno 1992,
p. 101). Adorno understands ‘realism’ not simply as a concept, but
always as a word used and misused in society, a cluster of moral con-
notations and attitudes: the special or esoteric meanings of the word are
indissolubly bound up with, and change after the fashions of, its ordi-
nary meanings in everyday conversation. ‘Realism’ as an art-theoretical
terminus technicus takes on and increasingly becomes indistinguishable
from an ideological function, blurring with
the mentality of so-called realistic people, who orient themselves by

the desiderata and the offerings of existing institutions, and do not
thereby become free of illusions, as they imagine, but only help to
weave the veil that the force of circumstances lays on them in the
form of the illusion that they are natural creatures.
(Adorno 1992, p. 101)
Realism, in other words, is the set of uncritical postures and atti-

tudes condemned by Kant and Marx alike: heteronomy, mystification,
fetishism, intellectual timidity and the deep-rooted petit bourgeois dispo-
sition to compromise and make do. No longer the anatomist of those
postures, the realist has shrunk into them by mechanical adoption;
Pécuchet casts out Flaubert. The artist who resists fading into ‘realis-
tic’ life, who will not mingle into the deceived mass but who will insist
that her art must be autonomous, who knows ‘wrong life’ for what it is,
and who will not be stupefied by her powerlessness to transcribe faith-
fully a world that cannot keep faith with humanity, – that artist will
make a truthful representation of life only negatively. ‘When literature
as expression makes itself the expression of a reality that has disinte-
grated for it, it expresses the negativity of that reality.’ (Adorno 1992,
p. 101) Expressionism, rejected by Lukács as a decadent alternative to
realism, as all immediacy and no totality, becomes for Adorno the last
realism of a really decaying world.
For Adorno, a fundamental fact for any artist who would try to make
a picture of reality is that not only the world itself, but mimesis, too,
has been radically corrupted by the violence of capitalist exchange. Art
must compulsorily keep alive ‘the dream of a world unspoilt by ends
and purposes’, or else capitulate to our waking catastrophe; but mimesis
of the dream is a mere dream of mimesis, not ‘realism’ in anything like
Brecht’s sense but an immunization against it.9 ‘Foreignness [Fremdheit]

to the world is an element of art’, Adorno wrote in Aesthetic Theory; and
‘Whoever perceives it [art] other than as foreign [Fremdes] fails to per-
ceive it at all’ (Adorno 1997, p. 241).10 Not only is naïve confidence in
verisimilitude a species of blindness, but, at the same time, the Brechtian
artist who thinks to disrupt reactionary habits of perception through
the violent and clashing introduction of foreign or alien material and
contexts into the artwork (what Brecht called his ‘Verfremdungseffekt’)
is likewise blind, to the extent that he misrecognizes how ‘foreign’ to
the world all mimesis already is, and so exaggerates and overvalues the
power of consciously engineered moments of foreignness to disrupt an
artistic spectacle that is, in fact, more profoundly continuous with the
spectacle of deception outside the theatre than he can allow himself to
admit. The problem with Lenin’s materialism, which ‘deliberately makes
the ‘naïve’ belief of mankind the foundation of its theory of knowledge’,
is that mankind does not yet possess, and is certainly not yet activated
by, naïve beliefs. ‘Realistic people’ indeed think that they are guided by
such beliefs, which they like to call common sense; but for Adorno, life
lived out under that guidance is what he liked to call stupefaction: not
the life of a subject who has the wrong standard of objectivity, even,
but the life of the subject become object, the person who, an object
himself, mistakes for ‘objectivity’ the same sort of hypnosis and super-
stition decried by Lenin and Mayakovsky as the worst sort of bourgeois
‘subjectivity’.11
∗ ∗ ∗
‘The mentality of so-called realistic people’ has been much in evidence

in British poetry of the past 60 years. In fact, that mentality, appearing
very much as Adorno diagnosed it, has dominated British poetry ever
since middle England embraced Philip Larkin as its preeminent miser-
ablist. The embrace was consolidated to a grip by successions of editors
at Faber, the most prestigious British poetry publisher because the most
realistically committed to mediocrity; by the national press, the TLS, the
LRB, and, most mortiferous of all, because most uncertain of its income
from its subscriber base, Poetry Review;12 by trivial commercial stunts like
the hailing of ‘New Generation Poets’ by the Poetry Book Society in
2004; by all of the pay-to-enter national prizes for pay-to-read-poetry;
and by much of the teaching-to-exams of poetry in secondary schools,
which too often goes on as if poems are meant to fit into a page and are
meant to have a theme which we are meant to get out of an anecdote
which must have a twist or thump at the bottom that makes us say,
after Don Paterson, ‘yes: that’s the way it is’. ‘Without that verification’,
Paterson cautions, ‘you have surrealism or nonsense.’13
Paterson’s guide to no-nonsense satisfaction follows on from his real-
istically facile and reassuring definition of what a poem does: it ‘concurs
with the reader’s experience of the world in an unexpected way, or
shows them something they hadn’t noticed about it.’ A great part of
Larkin’s legacy to British poetry is summed up in this remark. The poem
concurs with an experience of the world which it implicitly assigns to a
stencil outline designated ‘the reader’; real people who quickly see that
this is what the poem does, and who are grateful not to have to ques-
tion the transmissibility of experience or the concurrence of art with life,
project themselves into the stencil outline, to be gratified by its confir-
mation of what they decide they already know; the sensation might in
other circumstances feel like narcissism, and might profitably be exam-
ined as such, but with the sanction of art it can be just hospitality, or
empathy, or fellow-feeling instead; the person who is now definitely
coming up as ‘the reader’ savours the experience for its momentari-
ness, then for its elapsing, and this gives rise to an indistinctly elegiacal
sentiment indistinctly to do with the idea that life is ephemeral or
things don’t change; definite pleasure follows, as the poem, which at
first glance looked reassuringly short and easy to read in one go, is now,
being finished, definitely short and easy to read in one go; and the sen-
sation of gratitude which came from being told that he is right and
from not being tested or contradicted is defined by ‘the reader’ as a new
bit of knowledge or recognition, with some content to be sure (‘some-
thing he hadn’t noticed’), but nothing unwieldy or radically unnerving
or accusatory or impossible to grasp in one go; and this morsel wraps
up the consumer epiphany by satisfying ‘the reader’ that he has indeed
got something out of the poem, so that his time has not been wasted,
and so that he is not lacking the equipment or knowledge or experience
that readers are remunerated for; and so ‘the reader’ may shut the book,
let the brief high of projection fade, turn back into whoever he was,
unchanged but satisfied that he has been advantaged, and get on with
living in a world that art has again helped him to accept for what it is.
This sketch which is not a caricature would be grounds for the accu-
sation, which must seem improbable at first, that British poetry with
a ‘realistic mentality’ is a sort of formalism, in the pejorative sense of
that word as Lukács used it. It does the same thing over and over again,
distils to a small spread of essential topics, counts on its natural appeal
to natural sympathy, goes on in mechanic reiteration of cameo ideas
and plotlines, is invariable in the complacent modesty of its reality test-

ing. What the content is need not matter all that much, so long as it
quickly enough feels as though it matters, and so long as the feeling is
not too deeply strange or uneasy, but is recognizably a feeling of the
sort made by poems written by poets whose books are in the shops.
As Simon Armitage has put it, ‘a personal response rather than a critical
one’.14 Consider this poem by the most influential, most celebrated and
best of these poets, Larkin.
Wires
The widest prairies have electric fences,

For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
(Larkin 1988, p. 48)
By the easygoing standard of not too obscurely theoretical discussion

that passes for textual criticism in Poetry Review, we can say that the
‘form’ of this poem is two quatrains with a rhyme scheme that works
like a mirror. The first line rhymes with the last, the second with the
penultimate, and so on, so that the completed poem looks and sounds
as if it ought to be folded up, one quatrain on top of the other, its end
on its beginning. Its ‘form’ then is a sort of symmetry of ends, and
appropriately so, since the lesson of the poem, which is reassuringly
digestible and homiletic, is that the young steers had done better to
stay where they were, and that, painfully, they do in any case. Through
symmetry of rhymes the poem counts down to a mirage of freedom
and then counts back up again (compare the more interesting first line
of Tom Jones’s poem ‘The K Numbers’: ‘I’ll count down to your death,
overcome, and count back up again’) (Jones 2010, p. 44). The metre
is roughly iambic pentameter, and the lesson of the poem makes that
rhythm seem to derive its familiarity from inevitability as much as from
custom (‘Once you get the hang of it, you’ll hear iambic pentameter
everywhere’, the Glyndwr Award-winning poet Gillian Clarke advises
GCSE students in an online learning resource).15 What will or won’t
count as the ‘content’ of the poem depends on whether we are willing to
accept that its lesson, or ‘theme’, fills up that category. If we are willing
readers, apt to see ‘the reader’s experience of the world’ reflected in a
poem that concurs with it, we may accept the lesson as ‘content’; in
which case, the content of ‘Wires’ is a slightly awkward parable that aims
to teach us that the restlessness and ambitions of youth are a seduction
leading to momentarily violent, but not continuously violent, disillu-
sionment. Every youthful ambition is a seduction, of necessity because
by decree of metaphor; the purpose of metaphor in Larkin’s poetry is
invariably to make a depressing idea seem inevitable by seeming mor-
eishly solemn. The depressing idea in ‘Wires’ comes packaged with an
analgesic believed to be superior to a cure, namely that we are not young
for long, and that the really violent moment of disillusionment can only
happen once, and that after that moment we are old, which condition
means that we ‘know we must not stray’.
Because the idea seems to be a parable, and so of general as opposed
to pedantic application, we feel as though implicitly warned off from
trying to make it fit too exactly with any experience in particular we
may recall to mind. The structure of Larkin’s parables typically requires
‘the reader’ to conflate the particular with the pedantic (as ‘Home is so
Sad’ effectively spells out in its adroit last phrase: ‘That vase.’). What
that does for the poem in this case is keep it safely immune from being
too decisively identified as a political lesson. We know of course that it
is a political lesson, not simply a lesson about erotic naivety or intel-
lectual ambition or careerism, but it would be pedantic to insist on
it: the poem cautions us not to expect that a ‘truthful representation
of life’ should be a literal one, and asks us to see that in this case it
is better, all things considered, that the poem be broadly ‘suggestive’
than that it be strictly ‘intelligible’ (the terms are Brecht’s, from the
start of this essay). As Larkin’s admirer David Timms put it, in a remark
that he meant as criticism, but that seems to me treacherously benign,
‘ “Wires” is an intellectual apprehension of an emotional concept and
no more’ (Timms 1973, p. 71).16 A pedantic reader, but not ‘the reader’
who qualifies as such by her aptness to see concurrence, might think
that the political lesson of ‘Wires’ is an enormous one, that it is quite
extremely reactionary, and that the device of parable is inadequate to
foreclose that lesson, because none of the meanings we get from accept-
ing that the parable is the content of the poem is anything like so
important, not to say overbearing, as the political instruction to learn
our place and expect violence in reply to transgression; but the moment
we become that pedantic reader we are likely to want to throw the poem
in the bin.
We do not, in any case, need to accept that the parable is the content
of the poem. As realist readers, rather than as readers with a ‘realistic
mentality’, we might want to do what this poem phobically gambles on
our having no desire to do: we might ask what exactly is the fitness of its
specific devices, where they are drawn from, and whether they make a
truthful representation of the world, and not just a persuasive recitation
of a moral. Do the widest prairies have electric fences, in fact? Do old cat-
tle, or old people (their epigones), know they must not stray, or do they
simply not stray? Would that sort of conditioned terror of transgression
really be ‘knowledge’? Are young steers, or young people, ‘always’ scent-
ing purer water, and is the condescending ring of that word ‘always’ not
evidence that our instructor not only resents the young, as he elsewhere
gruesomely admits in any case (‘High Windows’, and passim), but that
he in fact resents a figment, sadistically generalized to a blur?17 Is it true
that the young are never able to find their ‘purer water’ here, and that
anywhere else will always do instead?18 Is it wrong to want purer water,
even if it can’t be had? Is it always uninstructed lust for something indis-
tinctly imagined that ‘leads’ the young into conflict, and do they always
‘blunder’ into violence, or do they sometimes see it coming and stand
against it anyway? If the wires give no quarter, are we to imagine that
they are capable of mercy or restraint, so that it makes sense to talk
about them as withholding it; and if they are capable of restraint, is it
not worth thinking about why they do not practice restraint, even if that
question might upset the ‘form’ of the poem or make its parable incon-
sistent? Is it true that there is one crucial moment of violence in life, and
that this moment is in every case effective in getting its lesson across?
Does every young steer learn the same lesson, or do some refuse to learn,
or simply not learn, or choose to think that the important thing is not
to learn a lesson, but to change the world that inflicts it? The poem
teaches us at last, as a sort of unappealing consolation, that the widest
senses of the old cow are, at least, just as wide as the world she is stuck
in: ‘widest prairies’ in the first line, ‘widest senses’ in the last. But is it
true that the maturity won through pain and disillusionment makes our
senses as wide as the world we live in, never any wider or narrower? Can
electric limits conceivably be the limits of vision and hearing, as well
as touch, or are these not among our widest senses? If we are supposed
to think that ‘senses’ could mean ‘meanings’, so that the last line tells
us that the violent wires are the limits of what we mean, not simply of
what we feel or where we go, then do we ‘readers’ mean everything that
is inside the wires, including all the other cattle, young and old, male
and female, dairy and meat?
These questions may seem hot-headed or unfair to admirers of Larkin

willing to take his parable on its own terms (if not nearly so virulent as
Larkin’s own assessments of authors he disliked).19 My point in asking
them is not only to explain that the poem is extraordinarily bathetic,
and to suggest that its bathos is characteristically Larkin’s type of bathos,
a type so influential on mainstream British poetry that ‘strangulating’
or ‘tyrannical’ may be a better word; I also want to argue that it is pre-
cisely by learning how to reject poems like this one, how to see through
their cramping artifice of moral instruction, how to calculate their for-
mal poverty, that we can become ‘realist readers’. Realist readers, in my
sense, will take an interest not simply in the images, diction, rhythms
and devices in a poem, but in the world of objects and social relation-
ships they are drawn from; the correlation could hardly be exact, but in
general I think it is true to say that the more complex those objects
or relationships are recognized to be, the more ‘realist’ is the act of
reading. Realist poetry not only sustains and progressively heightens
that interest without trying to box up its emotional content into the
form of a sentiment, but also (and this is the decisive thing) it passion-
ately advocates interest in the world, in the critical expectation that the
poem will encourage readers to outgo and transgress against the limits
of its own analytic competence. Realist poetry advocates and invigorates
interest in complex material relationships. Larkin’s poetry discourages
and curtails it.20
The majority of recent mainstream British poetry is still profoundly
obliged to Larkin’s antimodernism, and can be liked only on condi-
tion that realism in this implicitly political sense be abandoned and
replaced by the sort of facile pop-up reaction made into ‘the reader’s’
assay of poetry by Don Paterson: the suggestible conformist’s ‘yes: that’s
the way it is’. One payoff for that conformist intellectual frugality is a
claim to possess and be ruled by Adorno’s ‘realistic mentality’, or right-
mindedness; another is the entitlement to sneer at difficult art and make
a withering play at being baffled by it. As Walter Benjamin said when
still a young steer: ‘the philistine, you will have noted, only rejoices in
every new meaninglessness. He remains in the right.’ (Benjamin 2004,
p. 4)21
‘Wires’ has one interesting feature. ‘Not here but anywhere. Beyond
the wires’ – and then the line break and the division of stanzas, after
which we might expect, as the poem’s otherwise ordinary syntax may
lead us to expect, that the first line of the second stanza will pick up
where this previous line left off and make a sentence that seems to flow
on unambiguously to a period. Instead we get ‘Leads them to blunder
up against the wires’, and a jolt that for a moment feels disorienting.
Has a word strayed out beyond the confines of the poem and made its
escape? Beyond the wires something leads them to blunder? Perhaps the
most disappointing thing about the poem considered as strictly as pos-
sible simply as poetic artifice, is that its most interesting feature will not
sustain the interest which at first sight it seems to merit. The problem
is that the ‘realistic mentality’ rammed at us in the crude, reactionary
parable – the only ‘content’ admissible as such – is so oppressively set-
tled on, so obviously not in question, and so dogged in admiration
for the idea that an unquestioning life is the only sort in touch with
our only and unquestionable reality, that by the poem’s own lights it
seems impossible to accept transgressions in syntax for anything but
trivial examples of trivial transgression in general. Only the pedant
would make that line break the focus of her interest, the poem implic-
itly explains; but the pedant would as soon just black out the whole
dreary homily. With some refitting, Barthes’s concept of the ‘détail inu-
tile’ seems a useful description of this moment in ‘Wires’. Flaubert’s
‘pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’ says ‘nothing but this: we are the
real’; Larkin’s unexpected transgression of syntax says nothing but this:
I am the trivial.
∗ ∗ ∗
Recent British poems with a good claim to be called ‘realist’ have

been written and published beyond the wires of mainstream, commer-
cial literary culture. Perhaps no poet has so impressively confronted
the difficulties of a specifically ‘social’ realism as the Glaswegian poet
Tom Leonard. Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves are not just observing
the limits of a poetical demographic when they say that Leonard
‘developed [in the early 1960s] a poetic language that incorporated
expressive intensities and economies of information well outside the
range of popular verse in Britain at the time’ (Ladkin and Purves
2007, p. 7). They are saying that the ‘intensities’ and ‘economies’
that distinguish Leonard’s poetry could not be found in popular verse
because they were not welcome in it (they are still not). Compare
Larkin’s poem ‘Wires’ with this one by Leonard, from nora’s place, ‘a
poem in seventeen aspects’, as its title page describes it, first published
in 1990 and since included in the selection of Leonard’s work pub-
lished collaboratively by two small presses in England and Scotland,
outside the narrative (Leonard dedicates the book to ‘the smallpress
poet-publishers’).
only this particular

street to walk the length
of, this
is not a metaphor, only
being suddenly
walking down a street
in this place, having

this particular sense
not of anxiety, but
‘the fact of the presence of existence’
∗ ∗
each time it happens

it seems
that all the intervening times

have disappeared
and this
is all that nora really is
(Leonard 2009, p. 159)
The usual way that poems not belonging to mainstream culture are
dismissed by the guardians of that culture is by being called ‘incompre-
hensible’ (‘ “Incomprehensible” is how the intellectuals and ‘aesthetes’
described his work with genuine hatred’, Elsa Triolet recollects of
Mayakovsky; ‘yet they understood enough to infer that it was some-
how directed at them’); or in cases where ‘incomprehensible’ would
be too weakly derisive, ‘difficult’ may be used, as a euphemism for
either ‘meaningless’ or ‘elitist’, depending on whether the critic wishes
to be to the right of the poet or the left (Triolet 2002, p. 19).22
Larkin set the pace of reaction with his essays on jazz and mod-
ernism. With John Coltrane, Larkin wrote, ‘jazz started to be ugly on
purpose’ and could therefore only be comprehended as an insult; this
happened because ‘the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white
man’ and started trying to make a militant, exclusive musical culture
just for Negroes (Larkin 1983, pp. 293–4). Modernism in general, in
all the arts, was the same bickering and wilful falling off, Larkin dis-
covered. Poets have stopped wanting to entertain the no-nonsense
middle class reader, and have tried to make an exclusive, militant
culture just for other poets. British literary culture has never fully
recovered from this conceit, despite the manifest power and original-
ity of the work of J.H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, Denise
Riley, Douglas Oliver and others, for the good reason that lots of
editors and reviewers are in prestigious positions because they con-
tinue to repeat the conceit, and they want to stay in their positions
(‘Prynne is incomprehensible’, says John Sutherland, professor of mod-
ern English literature at University College London, in a consummately
trivial article by Maurice Chittenden in The Sunday Times on ‘the baffling
bard’).23
Tom Leonard’s poetry is plainly neither difficult, in the sense that con-
servative critics give to that word, nor ‘ugly on purpose’; it has been
available for decades to anyone interested enough in poetry to look
for it beyond retail outlets policed by their central managements; there
is certainly no poetry in English or phonetic Scots more suspicious of
and hostile toward coteries of educated literate snobs than his; yet it is
nonetheless routinely ignored in the official British organs. It is, I think,
the best – most moving, critical and technically accomplished – social
realist poetry written in English in the past 60 years.
The poem that ends nora’s place is interested in the power of sim-
ple words to specify the limits of existence. ‘only this particular/street’,
‘only//being’, ‘this place’, ‘this particular sense’, ‘this/is all’. Leonard’s
‘this’ is set down almost as if in a phantasmagorical headstone, carried
about in mental draft. It is an emphatically simple word, elemental even,
and more than usually incompatible with paraphrase. Its simplicity is
neither apologetic nor polemical: it is not an easy simplicity.24 Leonard’s
‘this’ is uneasy, partly because it is difficult. It is difficult not in the sense
that it hides its meaning or tries to confuse a reader whose intelligence it
predicts, but in an emotional sense: it is difficult to accept. There cannot
be only this particular street to walk the length of, unless ‘nora’ is just
the figurine contained by this poem who does nothing but act out its
story; if nora is real, she can always turn the corner. One tacit question
already there in the first three lines is, do I want to accept that nora is
nothing but that figurine? But I may think that there is ‘only this par-
ticular/street’ because a depressing life makes all streets seem identical,
all of them only ‘this’ one. If I do think that, I still feel uneasy accepting
it for a moral, or for an insight from despair, something I can turn to
intellectual profit by deciding that it is a ‘general’ or ‘universal’ moral or
insight, because I do not know, and have not been prompted to imag-
ine that I do know, which particular street in the world it is that might
serve in that way for the basis of a generalization. That would not be a
confounding or even a troubling lack of information in Larkin’s poetry,
where ‘not here but anywhere’ is a good enough base from which to
set out after a more broad, general view of things; but Leonard’s poem
is, among other things, a meditation on the power of specifying which
seems implicitly to recognize that specific situations in the world, like
specific lives in those situations, cannot honestly be used as platforms
for metaphors or for any other poetical device whose function is to sanc-
tion generalities. ‘Cannot honestly be used’ does not mean ‘cannot be
used’, of course; and the poem implies that distinction too.
This street then remains particular, ‘this’ one, and what it is by being
‘this’ is a street ‘to walk the length//of’: it is a particular street because
there is a particular use for it. Not until the last line of the poem do
we learn that it is ‘nora’ who walks the length of this particular street,
that it is there so that she may do that; but rereading the poem it seems
necessary to put her back into it from the start, to make that impersonal
because infinitive verb ‘to walk’ as much as possible into a personal and
definite act by this one person, nora. That is not an easy or decisive thing
to do, either: I cannot put her into the start of the poem so effectively
that she sticks there, reappearing to oblige my interpretation each time
I reread it. She is there and she is not (nora’s place is there and not
there). To begin with, and to begin again, and yet again, there is not
even certainly nora, but ‘only this particular/street’.
The second appearance of ‘this’ in the poem is complex, because the
first two lines seem to establish, or to hint at least, that things will not
change, but then there is a change in grammar. When the word ‘this’
first appears in line 1, we may feel some uncertainty as to whether it is
a pronoun or an adverb, since it cannot yet be clear from the first line
whether ‘particular’ will turn out to be an adjective or a noun: ‘only
this particular’. In the turn down into the second line this ambiguity is
resolved, quickly and slowly: ‘this’ is an adverb, ‘particular’ is an adjec-
tive: ‘only this particular/street’. The ambiguity is resolved in favour of
a concrete object; but before it is resolved, the concrete object we expect
may yet not arrive; and if it does not, we will have an abstract noun
instead; and because we might have had an abstract noun, ‘this partic-
ular’, we do actually have it, albeit only as a possibility rejected by the
poem that now shadows the concrete noun which the poem accepted
instead (this feels curiously like a chance missed, a narrowing of possi-
bility: as if the concrete object were arrived at not by distinction from
the abstract one, but by the loss of it). I think the poem asks us to expect
that the second use of ‘this’ will be resolved in the same way, and that
the turn from the third line into the fourth will make another concrete
object appear, so that the sentence will begin to steady itself, despite the
complexity of the interruptions in sense caused by the line breaks, into
a series of concrete objects that will later on add up to a scene or a place.
But the place does not come: ‘this’ – this what? this corner to turn? this
body to walk with? this direction to go in? – ‘is not a metaphor’.
We are struck with the first completed proposition of the poem,
emphatically a whole grammatical unit: ‘this is not a metaphor’. For a
moment that clause is a little stunning, partly because the poem seems
to have switched from language that seems likely to develop into a
graphic description, a tentative ‘scenography’, to the language of lit-
erary critical definition. A witty practitioner of practical criticism might
ask where this street is leading us, and whether it isn’t a blind alley into
a brick wall of metatext; but the poem doesn’t seem to elicit that sort of
verbally witty variation on its theme, for the reason that it is careful not
to have one (it would also smack, here, of what MacDiarmid in his ‘Sec-
ond Hymn’ called ‘cleverness’). The proposition ‘this is not a metaphor’
is stunning for another reason besides the switch of languages. It seems
to take up a definite attitude toward ambiguity, just as we are learning to
expect that there will be lots of ambiguity in the poem. The poem seems
to have said something decisive, a warning even, that sets conditions for
the use of figurative language. But no figurative language has yet been
used in the poem, we might think, as if in protest against being warned;
but that is exactly what the proposition in ll.3–4 makes emphatically
plain, as if to say that it may not be enough simply to avoid metaphor
without also stating that you are avoiding it. But why should that be
true? Should the poem not rather avoid explaining itself, than avoid
metaphor? The lines are not petulant or upbraiding, they are patient;
and yet they do suggest with force that it is no longer enough simply
to be plain, and that plainness will be acknowledged as literalness only
if the poem is careful to specify that that is what it is. They seem also
to suggest that learned discomfort over the impropriety of explaining
what you’re doing in poetry is a petty or even obscurantist reaction,
especially in view of how serious the thing to be explained is (only
the ‘realistic’ reader for whom it would interfere with the quick discov-
ery of ‘concurrence’ will be offended by the warning not to identify a
metaphor).25
It is difficult to decide whether the ruling out of metaphor in this case
means the redundance of metaphors in general. One thing that makes
that decision difficult is that it isn’t clear what ‘this’ refers to: ‘this/is
not a metaphor’, but what is ‘this’? It may be the lines preceding, the
description of the particular street which is defined by its use, which
may be its real use for nora. It may also be just and only what it is: the
word ‘this’. Is the poem telling us that ‘this’ is not a metaphor, that it
is not a fundamentally anonymous because infinitely transferable word
for pointing at all objects (as Hegel found in the Phenomenology of Spirit),
but a word that, ‘in this place’, sticks to the one object it points at? ‘This’
would then be an act of specifying, an act by a living person, specifi-
cally as opposed to a bare unspoken word. It would be a sort of basic
guarantee for literalism, whatever the linguistic arguments outlawing
unslipping signification.26
It suits the poem to bring in the perspectives of philosophy and lin-
guistics for a moment, because the poem is not simply in plain language,
it is in language that is defiantly plain. It is shadowed throughout by a
language that it will not admit into its content. Not, at least, until the
line propped up in quotation marks, ‘the fact of the presence of exis-
tence’. That looks to be a specimen of what the poem will not do, but
what it knows someone else is likely to say about it (a critic, probably).
Whether or not it is a direct quotation may not be a negligible question
(I suspect it is not), but neither does it seem one to which the poem is
particularly anxious that we should know the answer. It is enough that
the language quoted should obviously be the sort of language designed
to be quoted, that is, to be used in proof or disproof, or as a token of
knowledge and learning. It invokes a higher sort of speculative accoun-
tancy, the sort that will be set over against what it names – ‘the fact
of the presence of existence’ – as if by naming it in a locution with
such a tidy professional appearance the ‘fact’ could be more impres-
sively known or grasped. The poem suggests the opposite, of course, not
simply by letting the language of quotation show itself for what it is,
without comment, but by then immediately breaking for a bit of typo-
graphical light relief: ‘∗ ∗’. It is difficult to decide if those asterisks are
really as comical as they might be, an emblem for cogitatus interruptus, or
if they are more neutral than that, simply the recognition that a pause
does come.
‘each time it happens/it seems’ By this point we know that this
couplet makes an ambiguity: both ‘it seems that each time – nora?
anyone? – does this, it happens’ and, letting ourselves look ahead,
‘each time it happens/it seems//that all the intervening times/have
disappeared’. We have learned to accept that the line breaks will mul-
tiply sense by interrupting it; they will do that not only because line
breaks in general tend to do it, but because these particular line breaks,
in this particular poem, do it. They do it slowly, not by a rush or over-
spill that makes meaning seem unstable, but by steadying meaning as
they go. We know the type of ambiguity this is: it is not a metaphor
for disorientation, but an opening on uncertainty that leads to a closing
down into certainty. The intervening senses disappear as the poem goes
on. Until at last we get to the only part of the poem that is certainly
nora’s place: the end. ‘and this/is all that nora really is’. She is other
things, perhaps, only not really; ‘this’ is all she really is. The pathos of
the last couplet is the most difficult thing to accept in this poem full
of difficult acceptances. It is not difficult to accept because it is over-
done, garish or confabulated; nor because it seems a cover for a moral, a
way of sugaring some homiletic assurance with the bitters of sentiment;
nor because it is obscure. It is painful, and the pain of it is partly that
it seems true by being not only simple but also simplistic. nora’s place
is a simplification, ‘only this’. The realism of the poem shines in that
last difficult acceptance, that to specify reality must compulsorily be to
simplify it, not simply because language in general, or in this particular
case, is somehow inadequate to the job of specifying reality, but because
reality itself is complex precisely in how it coerces us into simplifying it.
The poem advocates and invigorates interest in complex material rela-
tionships: what is it about the reality I only partly share with nora,
whose place I will never occupy quite as she does, that coerces me into
simplifying it? Do I simplify her, too? How does ‘this place’ get to be so
decisively inhospitable or immune to metaphor? Who makes metaphor
so inept, or so incompatible with what I do when I walk, or when nora
walks the length of this particular street? What is it about society that
makes times seem merely to ‘intervene’, and seem disastrously to have
disappeared? The poem encourages readers, about whom it has no sense
that they ought to be ‘the reader’, to outgo and transgress against the
limits of its own analytic competence. ‘it seems’ this way, reality seems
this way, only as this particular poem can know it; and all its difficul-
ties of acceptance make the poem stand off from a reader, invite her to
think about it and, if she likes, to disagree with it, without the least for-
mal or rhetorical attempt to predict or manage her feeling. There is not
a lesson to be learned, all set up and worked out in advance. Neither
is there an ending of the sort reiterated with programmatic obstinacy
in Larkin’s poems, and in the majority of British mainstream poetry
from and for a ‘realistic mentality’: one that contrives an intimation of
destiny by fitting all its intelligence into a sentiment. ‘Larkin’s endings
are finely judged’, Christopher Ricks judges; ‘The Whitsun Weddings’
‘ends consummately’ (Ricks 1995, p. 274). nora’s place does not end con-
summately, but only by invoking consummation: ‘this/is all’; and the
invocation is inordinately powerful because so ordinary in its specific
inadequateness, so much just the simplification that reality coerces us
to, ‘social realism’ at the end of its wit without end.
Notes
1. On Gray as a reactionary sentimentalist, see William Empson, Some Versions
of Pastoral. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995, Ch.1.
2. On the earliest uses of ‘réalisme’ in French criticism, see E. B. O. Borgerhoff,
‘Réalisme and kindred words: their use as terms of literary criticism in the
first half of the nineteenth century’. PMLA, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Sept. 1938),
pp. 837–43.
3. Cf. George Bisztray, Marxist Models of Literary Realism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978, p. 44, where Lukács is described as having a ‘sur-
prisingly deterministic, insensitive, simplified view of poetic language’.
For an example of Lukács’s comprehensive indifference to the formal
aspects of poetry, see his discussion of Rilke in ‘Marx and the Problem
of Ideological Decay’ (1938), Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism. Ed. Rodney
Livingstone. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980,
pp. 131–2.
4. Brecht did write a short account of his practice of versification,
‘On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms’, which describes his ‘attempt
to show human dealings as contradictory, fiercely fought over, full of vio-
lence’ in terms that reassert the principle common to both his dramatic and
poetic practices; but he offers no special or refined concept of realism in
poetry. Brecht on Theatre, 2001, pp. 115–20.
5. T.J. Clark finds ‘various versions or echoes of Realism in Baudelaire’s work’
which now and then come close to ‘Courbet’s variety’. The Absolute Bourgeois.
Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999,
p. 164.
6. Lukàcs always insisted that characters in realist fiction must be ‘typical’,
and criticised what he called ‘formalist’ literature (Joyce, Kafka, the major-
ity of ‘modernism’) for failing to create typical characters. Lukàcs is reusing
the view of Engels. The only ‘clear-cut definition of literary realism in all
the writings of Marx and Engels’, according to George Bisztray, is a remark
by Engels in a letter of 1888 to the British author Margaret Harkness (the
pseudonym of Joan Law). Engels wrote: ‘Realism, to my mind, implies,
besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under
typical circumstances.’ Marxist Models of Literary Realism, p. 17. Cf. an ear-
lier letter by Engels to Minna Kautsky from 1885: ‘Each person [in Kautsky’s
story Die Alten und die Neuen] is a type, but at the same time a distinct per-
sonality, ein dieser as old Hegel would say.’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
On literature and art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York:
International General, 1977, pp. 113–14. A useful summary of the meaning
of ‘typicality’ in Marxist aesthetics is Jameson, Marxism and Form pp. 191–5.
7. Marx praised the ‘photographical truth’ of the scenery in a staging of a

‘deadly’ ballet he saw in Berlin, in a letter of 1861 to Nanette Philips.
On Literature and Art, p. 113.
8. Mayakovsky of course loved to boast of his exceptionalism, partly because it
was a principle for him that he must not.
9. The quotation by Adorno is from a letter to Thomas Mann of 3 June 1945,
cited in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. One Last Genius. Trans. Rodney
Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2008, p. 123. Cf. Kevin Nolan’s
excellent essay on J.H. Prynne, ‘Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview’,
Jacket 24 (Nov. 2003), online at http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html
[unpaginated]: ‘Prynne’s dialectic has sought, as high art must, always to
recover the shining of this life, and has moved, consistently, avengingly,
away from the underworld, towards the overview of our everlasting terra nul-
lius. That this could not have been achieved without massive sacrifice, and
that the purpose of the sacrifice is not vengefully exceeded by the arrogation
of its power, is the first and final paradox of Prynne’s singularity.’
10. Cf. p. 233: ‘All artworks, even the affirmative, are a priori polemical. The idea
of a conservative artwork is inherently absurd. By emphatically separating
themselves from the empirical world, their other, they bear witness that that
world itself should be other than it is; they are the unconscious schemata of
that world’s transformation.’
11. The suggestion that capitalist society has caused the poles of ‘subjectivity’
and ‘objectivity’ to switch round appears a number of times in Adorno’s
writing. Its most straightforward reiteration is in the seventh of his lectures
on history, given on 1 December 1964. See Theodor Adorno, History and Free-
dom. Lectures 1964–1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Rodney Livingstone.
Cambridge: Polity, 2006, p. 64.
12. The exceptional moment was David Herd’s and Robert Potts’s interregnum as
editors at Poetry Review from 2002 to 2005; normal service was resumed with
the accession of Fiona Sampson. Potts’s criticism in the TLS and elsewhere
has been consistently admirable for its unintimidated and useful accounts of
Prynne and other ‘difficult’ poets.
13. ‘Don Paterson: Interview with Marco Fazzini’, online at http://www.
donpaterson.com/interviews.htm# [unpaginated].
14. ‘The Saturday Interview: Simon Armitage’, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/
The+Saturday+Interview%3A+Simon+Armitage+-+Funny+job+poetry%3
B+Caroline. . .-a0109236460 [unpaginated]
15. Gillian Clarke, ‘Iambic Pentameter’, http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/gcse/
gillian-clarke/the-language-of-poetry/iambic-pentameter [unpaginated]
16. Robert von Hallberg comments intelligently on this passage by Timms: ‘This
formulaic reasoning does not take into account that abstraction and gener-
alization are indispensable to Larkin, even though apologists for modernist
poetry gladly dispense with them.’ ‘Review’ of David Timms, Philip Larkin.
Modern Philology, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb., 1976), pp. 325–28: p. 327.
17. On Larkin’s ‘harsh and superficial’ representation of young people, see
Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008, p. 84; but cf.
his fondness for the ‘negro’s childlike beauty’, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin,
1940–1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber, 1992, p. 20.
18. Elsewhere, ‘here is unfenced existence’. But alas, ‘out of reach’ too. ‘Here’,
Collected Poems, p. 137.
19. For a useful roundup and consideration of Larkin’s exceptionally aggressive
remarks on ‘modernist’ authors and others (‘Katherine Mansfield is a cunt’),
see Joseph Bristow, ‘The Obscenity of Philip Larkin’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21,
No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 156–81.
20. Andrew Duncan, himself a notable social realist poet, writes that ‘poetry
is made up of information, and this information has an existence out-
side poetry’, so that ‘we can write part of the history of poetry by writing
the history of the objects or the knowledge which poetry includes.’ Ori-
gins of the Underground. British poetry between apocryphon and incident light,
1933–79. Cambridge: Salt, 2008, p. 109. What Duncan calls ‘poetry’, I would
call ‘realist poetry’. We would not get far in a description of Larkin’s
poetry by writing the history of cattle, or electric fences, or for that mat-
ter the history of being fucked up by your mum and dad, or of ‘wearing’
diaphragms.
21. On right-mindedness and its poetical opposite, see Keston Sutherland,
‘Wrong poetry’, Textual Practice 24(4), 2010, 773–91. For a rich vein in rejoic-
ing by sneering, see the literary roundup by ‘J.C’ on the back page of any
issue of the TLS.
22. Drew Milne makes some astute comments on ‘the scorn shown to contem-
porary poetry by British academic literary critics’ and ‘demagogic disgust
with the dreaded hierarchies of elitism’ in ‘Agoraphobia, and the embarrass-
ment of manifestos: notes towards a community of risk’, Jacket 20 (December
2002) [online: unpaginated]; first published in Parataxis: modernism and mod-
ern writing 3 (Spring 1993), pp. 25-39. Cf. Mayakovsky, The workers and
peasants don’t understand you (1928): ‘There’s all sorts of demagogy and
speculation on the theme of Incomprehension.’ Cit. in Triolet, Mayakovsky,
p. 21.
23. Maurice Chittenden, ‘Oxbridge split by the baffling bard’, The Sunday
Times, 22 February 2004. Chittenden calls Prynne’s poetry ‘abstract’, Larkin’s
‘straightforward’; Roger McGough, a poet ‘praised for challenging con-
vention’, very conventionally finds Prynne ‘difficult’, Larkin ‘accessible’.
On Larkin’s reputation for being unabstract, see Robert von Hallberg,
‘Review’ of David Timms, Modern Philology, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb., 1976).
24. For an interesting description of ‘polemic’ as an uncritical mode, see Henri
Meschonnic, La rime et la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 2006, p. 70ff.
25. Cf. ‘Ugly Poem’ by Douglas Oliver, another Scottish poet, fully as inter-
esting a realist as Leonard, if not so obviously a ‘social realist’: ‘I am
protected from the night by shining glass/but protection and shine refuse
all metaphors./This poem has no poem within it. . .’ Douglas Oliver, Kind.
London, Lewes and Berkeley: Allardyce, Barnett and Agneau 2, 1987,
p. 166.
26. Mention of Phenomenology of Spirit makes me wonder if Leonard’s ‘par-
ticular/street to walk the length//of’ might echo a moment from Hegel’s
‘Preface’: ‘The goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience
demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without the
means. But the length of this path has to be endured, because, for one thing,
each moment if necessary; and further, each moment has to be lingered
over.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1977, p. 17. Later on Hegel names this path ‘the way of despair’
(p. 49).
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5
Re-presenting Reality, Recovering
the Social: The Poetics and Politics
of Social Realism and Visual Art
Gillian Whiteley
In 1990, in a short essay re-evaluating art’s exploration of social reality

and the multifarious critical approaches this has elicited through the
twentieth century, John Roberts noted that much of the debate had been
coloured by a fundamental flaw: the conflation of realism in art with
a naturalistic rendering of the world of appearances. He argued that,
whether we are considering painting or documentary photography, the
linking of social realism with resemblance and truth needed to be seen
as a mere convention. For Roberts, one thing that united a good deal of
the artwork described as social realist in the exhibition he was reviewing
was that, fundamentally, it shared a political understanding of a world
capable of social transformation:
a singular commitment to the view that art’s critical recovery of the

external world needs to be linked to an understanding of that world
both structured and differentiated and characterised by emergence
and change.
(Roberts [1990] 1992, p. 212 (my italics))
Any re-consideration of the usefulness of the term social realist for

understanding and interpreting visual practices as cultural production
since the 1940s must, as Roberts suggested, get beyond the idea that
it refers to work which merely depicts, as this implies that social real-
ists represent a static unchanging world, a status quo. Drawing on
Roy Bhaskar’s emphasis on a ‘transformational conception of social real-
ity’, Roberts provides us with a dynamic, and emphatically political,
interpretation of the term.1
132
Social Realism and Visual Art 133
Social realism needs to be viewed and understood within distinct his-

torical moments and locations, within particular social and political
contexts. Particularly in terms of the visual arts, the 1950s represents
what we tend to think of as the classic period of social realism. Dur-
ing the Cold War, John Berger, then the Marxist art critic for the New
Statesman, played a crucial role in the critical and political positioning
of social realism as a humanist alternative to the aesthetic conventions
of modernist abstraction. However, the partisan nature of these debates
was shaped by earlier histories, and the 1950s social realism advanced
by Berger and others needs to be situated within a broader context of
international leftist politics. But if social realism is inexorably linked to
a specific time and place, perhaps one consequence of such historicizing
is that the genre could, and should, be dismissed as a redundant histori-
cal cliché, with little relevance for contemporary visual practices beyond
that of historical curiosity.
Certainly, since the 1950s, many British artists – and artists working in
Britain2 – have used their practices, both individually and collectively, to
explore the transformational capacities of social realities. In the decade
or so post-1968, culminating in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, the UK
witnessed a wave of oppositional activism and unprecedented indus-
trial militancy.3 In his survey of radical art practices in Britain in the
1970s, John Walker traces the political contexts for cultural develop-
ments, outlining the ‘left shift’ in an artscene influenced – and in some
cases, dominated – by a host of splinter groups of various leftist, Marxist
and Maoist persuasions (Walker 2002). In addition, from the end of
the 1960s, with the ‘dematerialisation’ of art and the inception of con-
ceptual, interventional and performative practices, the emphasis on the
visual within art practice became less important whilst at the same time
it was dominated by explorations of the social.4 Explorations of social
realities migrated from solely visual representations into multimedia,
performative, text-based discursive and interventionist practices.
Since the 1950s, photography in particular has continued to offer an
ideal visual medium for the exploration of the social.5 In the 1980s,
photographers such as Chris Killip were overtly concerned with social
deprivation, whilst others, such as Martin Parr and, more recently,
Richard Billingham, have explored both the kitsch and poetic banali-
ties of everyday and anecdotal experience. These different, perhaps in
a sense oppositional, perspectives open up vital questions about the
position of contemporary photography and its capacity to be simultane-
ously poetic and political, even if sometimes the politics is ambiguous
or noncommittal.
Despite the development of a plethora of interventionist art prac-

tices, conventional artforms including representational painting have
persisted. George Shaw’s realist paintings depicting neglected council
house estates produced a poetics of the mundane, poignantly evoking
the inhabited spaces of working-class life. His paintings declare a disin-
terested but aesthetic curiosity in the ordinary and the everyday. But is
this kind of poetics political? If there is a continual oscillation between
these two registers, can we consider such imagery through the historical
lens of a decidedly politically grounded social realism? Or in its aes-
theticization, does it eschew social interaction? Is it merely nostalgic?
Is it apolitical?
Such questions cannot be considered in isolation from postmodern
sensibilities about authorship and viewer subjectivities for, of course,
their answers depend less on who is doing the painting, but arguably
more on who is doing the viewing.6 Victor Burgin, a key figure in
the development of contemporary cultural theory and discursive forms
of politically engaged photographic practice concerned with social
realities, articulated this plainly in an interview in 1979:
The meaning isn’t ‘in’ the work, like a lump of cheese in a wrapper;
nor is the meaning somehow ‘behind’ the work: in the mind of the
author, for example, or in ‘reality’. Meanings are the product of an
individual’s particular biography and upon his or her social, cultural
milieu. So it’s always a question of a shifting plurality of meanings
which vary within the individual and between individuals. It’s an
enormously complex process.
(Burgin [1982] 1986, p. 81)
Significantly, in the last decade or so, critics have identified a further

‘social turn’ in art and there have been many contemporary practices
that might be said to reflect a singular commitment to ‘art’s critical
recovery’ of the social world.7 Indeed, once we relinquish art’s link to
resemblance and focus on its capacity to offer a critique of the social
world regardless of figuration, the multi-media practices of contempo-
rary British artists as diverse as Lucy Orta, Sonia Boyce, Jeremy Deller,
Mark Wallinger and Grayson Perry – none of whom make visual rep-
resentations of the world their central focus – might all be considered
in the context of contemporary social realisms. But how valid is it to
relate the term to these practices? Is there anything particularly useful in
considering an ongoing specifically (or peculiarly) British form of social
realism?
This chapter addresses the historical roots and the contemporary lega-
cies of social realism, focusing the term in its utilizations as a critical
discourse in visual art. It concentrates predominantly on conventional
forms such as painting, sculpture and photography, but also looks
beyond those to the more diverse set of practices that constitute art
today. Particular emphasis is given to the classic period of social realist
art in Britain by exploring the intersections of art and politics through
the lens of Berger’s criticism in the 1950s. It is imperative, however, that
such mid 20th century social realist art also be situated within histor-
ical narratives of activist art and broader cultural (and trans-national)
discourses of commitment. Tracing such a genealogy of the intersection
of left politics and art must therefore go back to the Artists Interna-
tional Association (AIA) founded in the UK in the 1930s, and, crucially,
must also contextualize this exploration in relation to the cultural dic-
tates on Socialist Realism that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1934.
The discussion will go on to consider a range of media, examining spe-
cific instances of art’s engagement with ideas of social purpose through
the 1970s and 80s. Finally, giving consideration to related modes such
as critical realism and dialogic realism, I will identify a diverse set of
strategies and activities in contemporary practice, the ‘new forms of
sociability in art’, that might, I argue, be considered legitimate heirs
of historical forms of British social realism (Roberts 2009, p. 353).
A ‘new socialist art’: the historical polemics of realism

in the 1930s
A socially focussed form of artistic realism related to political radicalism,

as distinct from the figurative tradition of the Academy, was firmly
established in Britain well before the Second World War, and drew cer-
tain impetuses from even earlier. As new realist modes emerged in the
1930s, various leftist writers referred back to the radical realist traditions
of nineteenth century artists such as the Belgian sculptor Constantin
Meunier (1831–1905), the French sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou (1838–
1902) and painter-sculptor Honoré Daumier (1808–1879). Anthony
Blunt, for example, in articles for Left Review and in his contribution
to a collection of essays edited by C. Day Lewis, identified a lineage of
what he called the New Realism in art.8 In ‘Art under Capitalism and
Socialism’, Blunt argued of Hungarian émigré sculptor Peter Laszlo Péri
(1899–1967):
An artist like Péri is in the straight line from Daumier and Dalou;
[Diego] Rivera and [Gabriel] Orozco are doing on a grand scale what
Courbet tried to do for a few years and in a smaller way [ . . . ] real art
of the socialist state will be evolved by the most progressive sections
of the proletariat who will have shaken off the most vicious effects of
bourgeois culture [ . . . ] The new art will be less sophisticated but more
vital than the old.
(Blunt [1937] 1972, p. 118–19)
Although Blunt and others often carefully avoided directly promot-

ing Soviet-style Socialist Realism, undoubtedly it was Andrei Zhdanov’s
statement at the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934 that
provided the impetus for these major aesthetic debates about realism
and abstraction which went on in artistic and critical circles in Britain.
Socialist Realism, Zhdanov declared, was the ‘true and historically con-
crete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development [aimed at]
educating the workers in the spirit of Communism’ (Zhdanov cited in
Valkenier 1977, p. 166). Two years earlier Russia’s state apparatus had
assumed increasing control over culture by banning all artistic groups
and setting up the monolithic Union of Artists. Of course, some Soviet
artists sought to circumvent and defy the Zhdanovite strictures, but the
majority conformed by making realist art that was both political and
easily read. As John Milner has noted, nineteenth century devices and
techniques were harnessed here too to create an authoritatively opti-
mistic, heroic and always successful image of Russian Soviet Realism.9
As Charles Harrison and Paul Wood have acknowledged, ‘the identi-
fication of Realism with Communism became a cliché of art-critical
discourse on both the Left and the Right during the 1930s’ (Harrison &
Wood 1992, p. 334). Britain was no exception.
In particular, Artists International (AI), later the Artists Interna-
tional Association (AIA), founded in Britain in 1933, played a key role
in setting up ideological and aesthetic debates surrounding Commu-
nism and Realism. In its first published statement the AI described
itself as ‘the International Unity of Artists against Imperialist War on
the Soviet Union, Fascism and colonial oppression’ (cited in Radford
1987, p. 22). In 1934, a manifesto at the AIA’s first major exhibi-
tion, The Social Scene, declared an equally uncompromising Marxist
perspective:
Today, when the Capitalist system and Socialists are fighting for
world survival, we feel that the place of the artist is at the side of
the working class. In this class struggle, we use our abilities as an
expression and as a weapon, making our first steps towards a new

socialist art.
(Cited in Radford 1987, p. 23)
Importantly, however, the ‘new socialist art’ AIA advocated was not nec-
essarily realist, and AIA exhibitions showed a diverse range of work.10
Figurative sculptures of founder member of the AIA Betty Rea and the
New Realist work of Péri featured alongside more academic painters
of the Euston Road school such as William Coldstream and Claude
Rogers, and modern abstractionists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth
and Ben Nicholson. Furthermore, AIA exhibitions, documents and
publications such as the collection of polemical essays Five on Revo-
lutionary Art (1935) provided a forum for the central question that
was being asked: which art form was most revolutionary – abstract or
realist.11
Alongside advocating New Realism in Left Review, Francis Klingender
was one of these five voices represented in the AIA’s book. Later, in
Marxism and Modern Art, Klingender made a point of condemning both
Herbert Read’s modernist plea for the social significance of abstraction
and Roger Fry’s formalism. Klingender believed that the artist had a
moral responsibility to communicate with the layman, and that accord-
ingly, the aesthetic value of a work of art was directly related to the
effect it produced ‘whether it stirs to action, whether it soothes and
refreshes, or whether, on the other hand it opiates’ (Klingender 1943,
p. 9). For Klingender, ‘modern movement’ was a pejorative term. Using
it to describe artists and critics pursuing and supporting abstract art
forms, for him it represented a retreat from life, detachment from society
and an abdication of social responsibilities.
Broadly speaking, the debates of the 1930s in Britain were largely
dominated by the quest for a politically progressive art, yet with the
whole matter addressed somewhat narrowly as a formal problem with
formal solutions. In short, the form-content dichotomy eclipsed many
other issues, and the politicized artistic ‘left’ tended to argue for a kind
of realism that was figurative in style, with a communicable subject or
social content.
Being social and realist in the 1940s: documentary

and the ‘symbolic reinstatement’ of community
With the Soviet Union initially agreeing to a non-aggression pact

with Germany in 1939, the Socialist Realist viewpoint of Communists
and sympathisers such as Klingender was problematic and unlikely to

gain popular support. However, as Donald Egbert pointed out later
in his flawed but useful historical survey of radicalism and the arts,
Klingender’s persuasive little booklet Marxism and Modern Art was not
published until 1943 – significantly, after Stalin’s pivotal volte-face.12
By that time there was widespread admiration for the Soviet Union’s
role and perhaps this made the visual language of Socialist Realism
more palatable. Indeed, through the 1940s, art in Britain that dis-
played social concerns and realist qualities played two vital roles that
bore comparison with Socialist Realism. Firstly, it contributed greatly
to the documentation of the social, cultural and industrial activities
of a country at war. Secondly, particular art forms such as public
sculpture provided a vehicle for what Margaret Garlake has called ‘the
visual, symbolic reinstatement of a sense of community’ (Garlake 1998,
p. 213).
The Second World War brought unprecedented levels of destruc-
tion on the urban environment. Conscription, not just into the armed
services but also into the Land Army, the coalmines and the bomb fac-
tories, along with enforced deportation and evacuation of communities,
involved the dislocation of civilians on a scale previously unknown.
Individuals, communities and society needed to integrate these dislocat-
ing experiences and their emotional and psychological legacies, and art
played a key role in this. More specifically, the war invoked a heightened
social awareness in the British art world, and many artists responded by
producing accessible artworks that could speak to the traumatised and
the war-weary.
Yet the war also had conflicting consequences for the democratiza-
tion of visual art in Britain. On one hand, access to artworks inevitably
became more restricted. For safety and security reasons whole collec-
tions were dispersed across Britain to be re-housed in country houses,
underground shelters and even quarries.13 At the same time, this dis-
persal of artworks greatly stimulated arts activities in the provinces. The
Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) made a
major contribution to this localized wartime upsurge of interest in the
arts, organising popular temporary exhibitions and lunchtime concerts
in galleries. Furthermore, the powerful imagery of Official War Art and
projects like Recording Britain brought record numbers of ordinary peo-
ple into provincial galleries.14 The war, then, developed a new thirst for
accessible art that expanded art’s audience far beyond its pre-war elitist
base. James Boswell’s slim volume, The Artist’s Dilemma, published in
1947, recognized what he called this ‘boom in art’:
Something has happened in the last six years that has changed the
artist’s world. The war has given him a public. Perhaps not as simply
as that but it was only under the impact and the deprivations of war
that the public became aware of their need of him.
(Boswell 1947, p. 9)15
Essentially, Official War Art was commissioned to document, and so

it tended to be realist in style and social in subject. Before the war,
Henry Moore’s abstract sculptural forms had been subject to public
ridicule, but his more figurative wartime drawings of coalminers and
people sleeping in underground shelters attracted huge popular sup-
port, greatly contributing to his becoming a cultural ambassador for
Britain from 1948.16 Works such as Laura Knight’s Ruby Loftus Screwing a
Breech-ring (1943), commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Commit-
tee and now referred to as ‘a defining propaganda image of the era’,
was similarly social in focus and realist in style.17 Designed to help
the government recruit women for factory work, Ruby Loftus depicts
a young woman in paint-spattered overalls, her dark curls tied up in
a green scarf, working intently with heavy machinery. A Ministry of
Figure 5.1 Dame Laura Knight RA, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, 1943, oil
painting.
c Imperial War Museum
Information newsreel showed the real Ruby Loftus, a 21-year-old worker

at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Newport, accompanying the artist to
see the painting on show at the Royal Academy in London. Indeed,
Knight’s painting has all the characteristics Milner allots to Soviet Social-
ist Realism, successfully producing an authoritative, optimistic, heroic
and popular inspirational image.
Of course, it might be expected that officially commissioned artwork
such as this, which incorporated both the social and the realist, had
a propaganda role, but it was also just one contribution to a range of
envisioned models of national and social identity. Other forms of envi-
sioning, such as the Mass Observation project18 and wartime cinema
newsreels, played an important part in keeping the domestic popula-
tion informed, similarly playing a sociological and ideological role in
reflecting a positive image of the audience back to itself. A broadly social
realist approach, then, had a place in documenting Britain at war. But,
arguably, it also reflected the burgeoning anthropological and sociolog-
ical interests of a population keen to see and construct itself through
a multitude of mass media possibilities and public forums, including
through visual art.
In 1945, the incoming Labour government was tasked with capitaliz-
ing on the momentum of enthusiasm for the arts that CEMA had built
up during the war. One of its first measures was to set up the Arts Council
of Great Britain (ACGB), which played a key role in the commission-
ing of artwork for new public sites. In 1948, London County Council
(LCC) collaborated with the ACGB on the first of the open-air shows
in Battersea Park, attracting over 170,000 visitors, and ACGB organized
various open-air exhibitions in public parks from 1948 onwards.
LCC also played a key role in the literal rebuilding process, demol-
ishing bomb-damaged housing and redeveloping new communities
around housing estates, schools, community centres and public spaces.
In conjunction with the ACGB and other agencies LCC commissioned
sculptures, outdoor murals and mosaics from prominent and lesser-
known artists for a number of these public spaces. Later, under a special
LCC scheme from 1957 to 1959, artists approached included Willi
Soukop, Franta Belsky, Reg Butler, Siegfried Charoux, Robert Clatworthy,
Karin Jonzen, Uli Nimpsch, Eduardo Paolozzi and Leon Underwood.19
Charoux’s huge cemented iron group, The Neighbours, sited on the Quad-
rant Estate in Highbury, was one of the earliest works acquired by
the scheme. The British art periodical Studio praised the scheme for
its Keynesian aspirations that art could recreate a ‘communal civilised
life’, highlighting Charoux’s piece as a sculpture that fostered ‘social
Figure 5.2 Peter L. Péri, South Lambeth Council Estate, c. 1949. Péri created this
large concrete mural relief on the staircase tower of a block of flats built by the
London County Council. c The Courtauld Institute of Art
cohesion’: ‘This rugged creation gives a sense of comradeship to the local

inhabitants.’ (Sandilands 1960, p. 45)
An interesting and pertinent point here, though, is that many of these
commissions were carried out not by native British artists but by émi-
gré artists who had settled in Britain. Significantly, these artists created
works that were not just realist in an academic figurative sense but often
reflected communitarian and realist concerns originating in other coun-
tries. For example, in 1945 Péri was held up as an exemplary realist artist
capable of conveying the plight and suffering of native Britons at war.
As a Communist and Béla Kun supporter, Péri had been forced to seek
political refuge in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. Finally abandoning the Con-
structivist style of fellow avant-garde artists such as Moholy-Nagy, Péri
condemned what he perceived as bourgeois aestheticism, and adopted
a realist style before he left Berlin for London in 1933. There, Péri made
coloured wall reliefs and small free-standing sculptures in the cheapest,
versatile industrial material he could find – concrete. Aptly, Péri’s New
Realist sculptures conveyed and documented the quotidian resilience of
an ordinary civilian population on the Home Front.20
A major locus for a communitarian aesthetic at the start of the fol-

lowing decade was the Festival of Britain (1951). The Festival showcased
British design for industry and the home, and introduced contemporary
abstract art to a popular audience. It also commissioned a substantial
amount of work from these same émigré artists. Despite the Festival’s
Figure 5.3 Visitors passing Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders at the Festival of
Britain in 1951. Charoux’s large relief was at the end of the Sea and Ships Pavilion
and was part of the River Walk at the South Bank Exhibition. c London Transport
Museum
preoccupation with national identity and narratives of Britishness,

artists such as Péri, Charoux, Anna Mahler, Hans Tisdall and Karel Vogel
all contributed work to the Southbank site.21 Arthur Fleischmann, for
example, who created Miranda, the mermaid fountain, had worked on
various social housing projects in Vienna in the 1920s.22
One of the most iconic visual images of the Festival was Charoux’s
The Islanders. Charoux was a Viennese sculptor who had sought political
refuge in London in the 1930s. His enormous stone relief that domi-
nated the riverfront was mounted on the wall of the ‘Sea and Ships’
pavilion. The Islanders purported to symbolize British resilience and
defence of the family through the war years. It did so using a visual lan-
guage not far removed from that of the Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina
in her iconic Socialist Realist monument of 1937, Worker and Kolkhoz
Woman. Topping the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition in
Paris, Mukhina’s two heroic figures had represented an optimistic per-
spective of a future social reality.23 The Islanders too provided a vehicle
for ‘the visual, symbolic reinstatement of a sense of community’. In this
context, the politicization of a social realist aesthetic was compounded
ahead of the beginning of its major decade, the 1950s.
Looking forward in the 1950s: the artistic ‘moment’ of Social

Realism
The realist is fundamentally optimistic [ . . . ] he may well face up to

ugliness or injustice more squarely than most, but because he is con-
cerned with dealing with the world as it exists, and not comparing it
to romantic ideals, or with seeking consolation for its shortcomings
in private dreams, he need never give way to despair.
(Berger 1952)
‘There is something even more fundamental than sex or work,’ he

said. ‘The great universal, human need to look forward. Take the
future away from a man, and you have done something worse than
killing him.’
(Berger [1958] 1976, p. 18)24
As indicated at the outset of this chapter, the 1950s was the most impor-
tant era for British social realism in the visual arts. However, this is
due less to the extent to which it was adopted as a visual aesthetic
by artists working in Britain, and more to its centrality within critical
debates in cultural circles and its relationships to political discourses
and attendant world events. It is significant that, despite the ‘Kitchen
Sink’ painters’ acclaim at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1956, up

to the 1980s art-historical accounts rarely addressed social realism and
continued to be dominated by Greenbergian readings of British art with
a major focus on developments in abstraction and, subsequently, con-
ceptualism. In 1980, Lynda Morris commented on this ‘modernist bias’,
arguing that her research showed that realism was ‘not the minority atti-
tude we were led to believe’ and she suggested there was an urgent need
to research realist work of artists ‘who have long been in the shadows’
(Morris 1980, p. 3). Since then, postmodernity has replaced reductivist
accounts, and ‘monolithic modernism’ has been substituted with a plu-
ralist approach as histories have been revised and challenged (Wheale
1995, p. 27). Publications such as James Hyman’s The Battle for Realism
(2001) and exhibitions such as The Forgotten Fifties at the Graves Art
Gallery, Sheffield (1984) and Transition: the London Artscene in the Fifties
at the Barbican, London (2002) have helped redress the historical imbal-
ance and invited a revaluation of British realist art and its relationship
to social changes in the fifties.
A key political context of course, even in Britain, was the onset
of the Cold War. Berlin provided a focal point for the tensions of a
deeply divided Europe through which the fear of nuclear annihilation
permeated.
Entire generations grew up under the shadow of global nuclear battles

which, it was widely believed, could break out at any moment, and
devastate humanity.
(Hobsbawm 1994, p. 226)
Alongside the international military escalation, psychological and ide-

ological weapons were waged against the ‘communist threat’ (Lindey
1990, p. 8). Although in Britain panic never reached the heights of
American McCarthyism, there were still government purges of Commu-
nists from the Civil Service – employees were vetted and anti-communist
pledges signed. With such economic and political polarization, the
ideology of the Cold War pervaded all aspects of cultural life. The
implications for art and criticism were considerable. The Soviet regime
denounced Western modern art as decadent and glorified Socialist Real-
ism without irony. Any Western artists associated with realism now
risked being linked with the Soviet camp.
Despite all this, and with the ambivalent asset of the critical and
curatorial support of Berger, social realism had its euphoric celebra-
tory ‘moment’.25 Briefly, for a few years in the mid-1950s, it triumphed
amidst a flurry of curatorial activity, culminating in the British pavilion
Figure 5.4 Jack Smith, Mother Bathing Child, 1953, oil on board.
c The Tate
Collection
at the 1956 Venice Biennale showing artists Derrick Greaves, Jack Smith,
John Bratby and Edward Middleditch. However, the Soviet invasion of
Budapest in the same year marked the onset of disarray amongst an
increasingly divided political left. Communism had been failing for
some considerable time but the impact of Hungary was catastrophic for
the British Communist Party and this had wider political, social and
cultural reverberations.26
Viewing this period of British realism as a battle of the critics, with
Berger ranged against David Sylvester, James Hyman (2001) has com-
prehensively outlined the aesthetic terrain in which, ultimately, neither
side won. However, the adversarial emphasis on individuals obscures
complex political contexts and associations. Equally, highlighting the
way in which so-called kitchen-sink realism reflected the austerely
rationed social life of Britain or connecting the ‘A.Y.M. cage’27 to the bur-
geoning power of a newly vocalised and envisioned northern-English
working-class, offers only a superficial analysis of the relationship
between art, society and politics.
Undoubtedly, Berger played a central role in the British art scene as
part of a disparate coterie of left-thinking artists, writers and intellec-
tuals for whom, despite post-war disaffection and dissention amongst
communists and sympathisers, the idea of commitment – in terms of
the socially engaged artist and writer – continued to hold significance.28
Indeed, the role of the artist in post-war society was of widespread
interest. Sartre’s polemical essay ‘What is Literature?’, first published
in 1947,29 had addressed the role of the ‘committed writer’ and gen-
erally re-kindled the controversy about the idea of the politically and
socially engaged artist amongst the intelligentsia. Furthermore, through
the 1950s art critics such as Berger acquired a particular role in com-
menting on the responsibility of artists in society. The historian Asa
Briggs, in an article entitled ‘The Context of Commitment’ published in
the New Statesman in 1958, addressed this very issue. Briggs stressed that
the moral commitment and emotional simplicity of critics in the 1950s
was a key element and one that distinguished the debate from that of
the pre-war period. Briggs pointed to Berger’s ‘obsession’ with the future
as a crucial characteristic, citing Berger’s comments ‘for that future he
must fight – above all within his assessment of his own responsibili-
ties. Therein lies his famous commitment’ (Berger cited in Briggs 1958,
p. 453).
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of social realism in art dis-
courses of the 1950s was the way in which this coterie of committed
artists and writers commandeered the term ‘humanism’ and developed
a rhetoric of hope as part of a redemptive utopian discourse. One of
the most powerful uses of this particular leftist rhetoric was by the
artist Paul Hogarth in his polemical article ‘Humanism and Despair in
British Art Today’ published in 1955 in Marxist Quarterly. Referring to
the ‘anti-humanism’ evident in the work of the eight sculptors who had
been hailed by Herbert Read as Moore’s successors at the 1952 Venice
Biennale, Hogarth wrote that
over-personalised and socially irresponsible art is encouraged as never

before, isolating the artists even more from the general public [ . . . ]
re-armament and Cold War thinking has affected the very nature of
art itself, replacing the qualities of accessibility and humanism with
those of introspection and despair.
(Hogarth 1955, p. 37)
Communists and sympathisers were claiming ‘humanism’ for the social

realists and counter-posing it against those who had effectively aban-
doned the human figure for abstraction and Read’s ‘iconography of
despair’.30 However, Hogarth’s characterization of contemporary art as
a struggle between abstraction and realism was simplistic. Artists such
as Bernard Meadows and Lynn Chadwick may have replaced the human
figure with animal and insect imagery but this by no means meant that
they had abandoned empathy for humankind.
Of course, alongside the leftist rhetoric of humanism, Berger’s critical
positioning of a peculiarly British form of social realism was crucial as
he championed it through exhibitions, and theorized and supported it
through his writings. In a series of exhibitions of realist art entitled Look-
ing Forward, Berger stopped short of overtly declaring his own political
allegiances, but the implications were obvious. Indeed, the Cold War
atmosphere of suspicion and plots was such that Berger felt it necessary
to pre-empt his attackers by commenting that there was
no such thing as a realist style. There is certainly no such thing as

realist subject matter [ . . . ] Nor is there a realist conspiracy.
(Berger 1956)31
The first Looking Forward show at the Whitechapel in 1952, featur-

ing over 150 artworks, was followed up with an Arts Council touring
show in 1953 and a further exhibition at the South London Gallery
in 1956. These included realist works by a diverse range of artists, not
all of whom necessarily shared Berger’s political stance, including Péri,
Hogarth, George Fullard, Frederick Brill, Francis Hoyland, Harry Baines,
Morley Bury, Derrick Greaves, Patrick Carpenter, Leslie Duxbury and
Michael Ayrton.
Some, such as Fullard and Hogarth, drew on specific political contexts.
Fullard had northern-English working-class heritage, an early family
history of Labour militancy, and had been a member of the Young

Communist League. Hogarth, a Communist Party member, had a long
commitment to the radical left through various anti-fascist activities,
including serving in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil
War.32 Known for his documentary-style draughtsmanship – a kind of
pictorial journalism – Hogarth travelled extensively in Europe in the
immediate post-war years and had been described as social realist in an
article in Studio in 1951:
Paul Hogarth is one of a number of British artists whose work is

characterized by a trend that could be described as ‘social realism’.
In brief, its attributes are to see all aspects of the world without
sentimentality and to transcribe them with honesty into direct picto-
rial terms. One finds it in contemporary pictures by Ronald Searle,
James Boswell, Edgar Ainsworth, Ruskin Spear, Patrick Carpenter,
Josef Herman, Carel Weight and James Fitton. It is no accident that
their viewpoint is similar to those European and English artists whose
performance is so admired by Hogarth – Daumier, Grosz, Kathe
Kollwitz, Steinlen, Sickert, Cruikshank and the early Millais.
(Whittet 1951, p. 54)
Clearly, however, if the term social realist could be used to describe such
a diverse set of artists, approaches and influences, it was an ambigu-
ous and contradictory term. Berger was careful to emphasize progressive
vision and humanist qualities but he was often vague about how he
differentiated it from Socialist Realism in terms of form and content.
So what exactly was Berger’s idea of a social realist aesthetic?
In 1955, on the brink of the euphoric celebratory ‘moment’ of Real-
ism, Berger turned one of his fortnightly reviews for the New Statesman
into an impassioned defence of the work of a handful of ‘famously unac-
ceptable’ artists. In the article, prompted by a visit to the exhibition
Artists of Fame and of Promise at the Leicester Galleries in London, he
commented:
dealers complain that their work is unsellable because too large and
too sordid; critics interpret it in terms of contemporary violence, a
love of ugliness or (with a dab at their mouth with a white folded
handkerchief) Social Realism [ . . . ] Their work described objectively
is cumbersomely large, totally lacking in charm, raw, nearly always
proletarian in subject matter and possibly somewhat aggressive.
(Berger 1955, pp. 133–4)
Berger’s young artists included Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves, Edward

Middleditch and Ralph Brown.33 Alluding here, ironically, to the way
in which other critics used the term to disparage their work, he went
on to articulate what he saw as the work’s social realist characteristics.
Certainly, many of the works Berger associated with social realism did
indeed display the characteristics he identified. At the time, Fullard,
Brown, Greaves and Smith shared some broad concerns with the details
of everyday life, domestic surroundings and the grim realities of indus-
trial areas such as Sheffield. It was often large-scale and had a raw energy.
The extent to which their work was underpinned by any conscious polit-
ical ethos, however, is difficult to assess. Smith consistently denied or
underplayed any political message or social interpretation of his work,
famously declaring that he merely painted whatever happened to be his
surroundings at the time.
Berger himself was highly critical of Soviet cultural policy and
was emphatic in distancing himself from Muscovite photographic
naturalism. However, his relationship with the British Communist Party
was closer than it appeared. Although purportedly an independent
Marxist, Berger had considerable involvement with the Communist
Party through its Artists Group. His promotion of social realism was
informed by his involvement with the Group’s short-lived newsletter
Realism, which ran to six issues between 1955 and 1956. The journal, a
re-vamped version of the Artists’ Group Bulletin, demonstrates the inti-
mate nature of the group around Berger.34 The group recognised the
shortcomings of Soviet-style orthodoxy, and criticised it openly in the
first issue of Realism:
We, who have become sick of Socialist Realism in subject matter, a

so-called pictorial art, lacking in formal excitement and organisation,
illustrative and passionless.
(Berger 1955, p. 3)
The second edition of Bulletin, dated October 1954, included an article

by Berger entitled ‘Definitions’ that outlined his analysis of ‘the disin-
tegration of art under late capitalism’ (Berger 1954, p. 2) and featured
a piece urging the pressing need to have shows of realist art, such as
his Looking Forward series, to ward off the ‘present attempts of reac-
tionaries to cash in on the situation’ (anon., 1954).35 The third Bulletin,
from February 1955, presented its programme for the year: the main
aim was to ‘turn outwards’, to welcome non-party members to meet-
ings and activities whilst expounding the continuing need to ‘oppose
degenerating bourgeois standards’ (anon., 1955). Whilst the promotion

of realist art was obviously a central focus of Realism, the journal also
acted as a broad forum for political discussions on art. Papers and cor-
respondence provide evidence of the considerable political motivation
behind the developments and support for realism.36 A policy state-
ment, describing Realism as the ‘first art magazine within the Labour
Movement’, agreed that the journal should, amongst other things, serve
to ‘re-assess the visual arts from a Marxist standpoint’ and ‘provide a
medium for popularizing new developments of Realist art.’37
Not surprisingly perhaps, the editorial in Realism’s final issue, which
featured a drawing by Peter de Francia on the cover, made no reference
to the invasion of Budapest of a few months earlier that had resulted
in widespread disaffection and resignations from the party. Instead,
euphemistically, it informed readers that a ‘better’ magazine with a ‘new
editorial board’ was needed (anon., 1956).38 Evidently, neither funds
nor sufficient will were forthcoming to carry this out. The hopes that
Realism would become a popular cultural magazine were quickly foiled
and it largely circulated amongst party members and sympathisers. But,
briefly, it had been a crucial forum for aesthetic debate.
Social commitment, political conscience, an ability to communicate
universal aspects of human experience, an exploration of the human
condition – these were the specific qualities of social realism for Berger.
However, the debate about the kind of art that could embody these
qualities was part of a wider European discussion about the social
responsibility of the artist in post-war society. Similar debates were
going on in France, for example, where the sides were even more polar-
ized and issues were exacerbated by Louis Aragon’s rigid adherence to
the Zhdanovite edicts. The group of painters L’Homme Témoin, which
included Paul Rebeyrolle, were anxious to promote a socially and polit-
ically meaningful art. Peter de Francia recalls that the work of these
artists, and also that of Francis Gruber, was in turn influential on the
circle around Berger.39 Concerns about artistic engagement and the
appropriateness of abstract and realist styles of art were conveyed by
Alexander Watts in his regular Paris column in Studio magazine amid
vitriolic attacks on the work of the French communist artist André
Fougeron: ‘the squabble goes on more antagonistic than ever between
the exponents of Realism and Abstraction’ (Watts 1950, p. 188).
However, the greatest influence on British realist artists came not from
Russia or France, but from Italy. Italian realism was a liberal amalgam
of modernist styles, figurative and humanist traditions, with a distinct
resistance to the Soviet line. These characteristics were epitomized, for
Berger and others, in the work of the painter Renato Guttuso, a realist,
communist, and a personal friend of Berger and Greaves.40 Guttuso’s

ability to express intense personal feeling and convey this to a popular
audience in a figurative style which was vibrant and plundered both
historical and modern traditions was, for Berger, revolutionary:
Obviously modern forms are needed to express contemporary reality.

But what makes his work significant is his grasp of that reality – not
just his style. It is Guttuso’s understanding of our historical position
which finally enables his anger, his compassion, his sense of human
dignity, to be applied to subjects which can fully justify them.
(Berger 1955, p. 384)41
In attempting to appraise the kind of realism Berger was promoting, it is

particularly important that the model was, essentially, a European one.
It was not at all the kind of sentimental Socialist Realist work being pro-
duced in the Soviet Union. That said, to some degree, Berger’s views were
inconsistent and although he stressed that his focus was not on con-
tent, many of his comments belied this and he frequently praised artists
for their accessible subject matter – more often than not, a euphemism
for the depiction of working-class subjects and environments. However,
he certainly viewed his ‘famously unacceptable’ social realist artists as
representing a progressive aesthetic that offered an alternative not only
to what he perceived as an ethical emptiness of much of modernist
abstraction, but also to the equally vacuous Soviet Socialist Realism.
As already indicated, Berger was not alone in supporting realist artists.
Other curators and critics also played important roles in promoting this
work, often valuing different aspects. Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts
Gallery, for example, played a key part in Greaves, Middleditch, Bratby
and Smith acquiring group status as the Beaux Arts Quartet by exhibit-
ing them individually and as part of mixed shows. Lessore identified a
diverse range of aesthetic characteristics in these artists’ work: Smith’s
work had ‘a sort of Spanish, monkish austerity, combined with a gener-
ous grandeur; Middleditch was ‘gentle and lyrical’; Bratby was ‘violently
and avowedly egotistical and expressionist’, whereas Greaves’ work
has neither the slightly melancholy poetry of Edward Middleditch,

nor the dramatic severity of Jack Smith. The dominant note in his
work is a large-hearted optimism, a positive quality of gay courageous
acceptance – a yea-saying welcome to the whole of life.
(Lessore 1957, p. 112)
However, it was David Sylvester’s article ‘The Kitchen Sink School’,

published in Encounter in December 1954, which as Martin Harrison
indicates ‘stuck with the public, to the dismay of the artists in ques-
tion’, soon becoming conflated in the press with the Angry Young Men
of literature (Harrison 2002, p. 74). There is some debate about whether
Sylvester’s epithet was meant to be disparaging or not, but the label was
catchy and took some shaking off. At the apogee of the realist ‘moment’,
the Venice Biennale in 1956, they were referred to more plainly as ‘Four
Young Painters’. Paradoxically, the Biennale exhibits were selected by
Herbert Read, who chose work that demonstrated the quartet was ‘mov-
ing away from the prosaic English subjects and settings that had first
gained acclaim, towards the sun, light and colour of the Mediterranean’
(Hyman 2001, p. 179).42 Critics and curators had other agendas but, as
Hyman notes, the artists themselves had no ‘shared aesthetic’ and ‘no
common manifesto’:
As their shaky camaraderie crumbled, so the artists of the Quartet

began to use public statements to reject their presentation as social
realists, their appearance as a group and their indebtedness to Berger.
(Ibid., p. 182)
As already emphasized, with knowledge of Stalin’s purges emerging in

1955 and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, polit-
ical allegiances switched and declarations in an art context became
fraught with problems. Berger alienated artists and readers and exac-
erbated the situation with his various statements in the New Statesman
and Nation, culminating in his ‘Exit and Credo’ piece.43 Artists quickly
shied away from associations with a social realist aesthetic. Jack Smith,
for example (the artist whose painting had led to the ‘kitchen sink’
epithet), made a dramatic shift from stylisation to abstraction. Others
remained committed to the idea of communicating with a broad audi-
ence, but acknowledged the problems inherent in attempts to realize
that. As Greaves resignedly commented in 1959:
feeling a desire to lessen the gap that exists between audience and
painting, I made attempts to form a pictorial language from nature
which would be easily accessible to all who cared to look. To do this
in England at the present time [ . . . ] is I realised, aesthetic suicide.
(Greaves 1959, 82)
Although many artists such as Rea and Gisha Koenig continued to

produce work that might be linked to social aspects of realism and
humanism into the 1960s, the quintessential ‘moment’ of British social

realism in visual art had passed.44
‘Art and Social Purpose’ in the 1970s and 80s: the

‘unfinished agenda’ of social realism
This is by far the most urgent and important challenge facing art in
the latter half of the seventies: to restore a sense of social purpose, to
accept that artists cannot afford for a moment longer to operate in
a vacuum of specialised discourse without considering their function
in wider and more utilitarian terms.
(Cork 1976, p. 94)
There is no doubt that, with the complex set of factors already dis-
cussed, the realist approaches of the fifties were driven underground,
sometimes literally, by the sixties. As Jeff Nuttall indicated in his semi-
autobiographical book Bomb Culture, the ‘dark night of the kitchen sink’
(Nuttall [1968] 1970, p. 53), along with the ‘patronising idolization of
the lumpen proletariat’ (ibid., p. 40) and the ‘desolate puritanism’ (ibid.,
p. 49) of places like the New Left’s Partisan Coffee House in London, was
over. Now ‘sick humour’ (ibid., p. 105) anarchic happenings and festi-
vals of protest and liberation were to be welcomed in. Grey interiors
were replaced by radiant colour; the New Generations45 of British visual
artists – sculptors, painters, muralists and graphic artists – manipulated
Pop imagery and geometry, drenching their huge canvases, synthetic
forms and found objects with vivid primary hues.
However, the 1970s in particular also witnessed a re-engagement of
artistic practices with the political. Indeed, sentiments expressed in
the editorial commentary in the 1976 special issue of Studio Interna-
tional dedicated to ‘Art and Social Purpose’ could have been written two
decades earlier. Significantly, the suggestion that there was a need to
restore a sense of social connection implies it had been missing, even if
this also reflected the particular viewpoint and prejudices of the editor
Richard Cork. Notably, the special issue featured a whole series of art
practices that might be considered to have some relevance here along
with developments in a particular genre of British photography in the
1970s and 1980s, which David Mellor recently described as ‘continuing
the unfinished agendas of Social Realism, documentary and the cultural
promises of modernisation’ (Mellor 2007, p. 13).
In a recent anthology of new research about the 1970s, Forster and
Harper argue that it was a period of extraordinary cultural ferment, a
radical decade in which ‘there was a revolution in consciousness, as sub-

cultural groups of the 60s became more vociferously counter-cultural’
(Forster & Harper (eds) 2010, p. 5). For Forster and Harper, the impetus
for social change in the 1970s was an important driver on both a per-
sonal and collective political level. Certainly, there was just as much to
be angry about as in the 1950s: as was evidenced, for example, by the
prolonged industrial confrontations between the government, employ-
ers and dockers, engineers and miners, while political violence on a
national and international scale continued with the troubles in North-
ern Ireland and the IRA and Angry Brigade bombing campaigns across
the UK. Indeed, John Walker has argued that one of the key aspects of
British art in the 1970s was its re-politicization. It certainly reflected,
and contributed to, developments in society more generally. Walker’s
survey documents the ‘often-acrimonious’ struggles caused by various
leftist factional disputes within the art world:
traditionalists and formalists versus left-wingers and feminists,

abstractionists versus figurative artists, blacks versus whites, practi-
tioners versus theorists and critics. These groups argued about the
character, social function and future direction of art and its institu-
tions. Even those who shared a leftist political perspective indulged
in factional disputes: there were anarchists, Labour Party supporters,
Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists and every shade in between.
(Walker 2002, p. 3)
In the early 1970s, various groups of artists banded together to form

revolutionary organizations and radical collectives: the Artists Union,
viewed as reformist by the League of Socialist Artists (LSA), also shunned
by the Artists Liberation Front, was formed by John Dugger and David
Medalla on May Day 1971.46 The LSA aimed to create a ‘Marxist-Leninist
proletarian art’, issued manifestoes and pamphlets such as Class War
in the Arts! and generally, according to Walker, ‘promoted the cause of
socialist realism’ (Walker 2002, pp. 51–2). Clearly, hard-line minority
groups like the LSA did not have a particularly nuanced approach to
revolutionary political theory and their adoption of Socialist Realism
was almost nostalgic in its naivety.
However, if we are to move beyond the narrow focus of a social realist
aesthetic linked to representation and expand the field to give consid-
eration to work which demonstrates in other, perhaps more subtle or
complex senses, ‘art’s critical recovery of the social world’, there were
many activities and groups in the 1970s which could be considered –
indeed too many to fully cite here. The ‘Art & Social Purpose’ issue of
Studio International in 1976 provided a snapshot of some of the socially

and politically engaged work going on in Britain at the time.47 Steve
Willats wrote about ‘Art Work as a Social Model’, a theme he pursued
through the 1970s as he explored the realities of living in high-rise
urban housing through text, photography and diagrams. Walker doc-
umented the important Artists Placement Group, the project set up by
John and Barbara Latham, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan a decade ear-
lier, which created artists’ residencies in industrial settings: placements
included John Latham with the National Coal Board as well as in the
Intensive Care Unit of Clare Hall Hospital, Stuart Brisley at Hillie Co
Ltd, Leonard Hessing working with ICI Fibres Ltd, and Lois Price with
the Milton Keynes Development Corporation.48
In the same issue, Victor Burgin, typically crossing the boundaries of
theory and practice, contributed a theoretical critique on ‘Socialist For-
malism’ and a two page photo-essay warning against the illusions of
capital, urging
As we move into this characteristic contemporary world, we can see

the supposed new phenomenon of classlessness as simply a failure of
consciousness.
Class consciousness
Think about it
(Burgin 1976, pp. 146–7)
Later that year, Burgin reprinted his now well-known poster, Possession,
originally produced in connection with an exhibition in Edinburgh,
and flyposted 500 copies of it across Newcastle upon Tyne. Created to
look like an advertisement, it aimed to engage the public in a political
dialogue about consumption under capitalism.
All these activities and practices exemplified art’s purposeful engage-
ment with social and political contexts but, in particular, specific
photographic practices in the 1970s and 80s offer a richer resource
for considering a social realist aesthetic. Historically, the medium of
photography has been hampered by a series of assumptions involv-
ing its perceived objectivity and assumed passive capacity to represent
a kind of visual reality. As Jane Tormey notes in her study of a range
of ‘photographic realisms’ in contemporary practice, ‘photographic
representation is complicated by contrasting attitudes to what is con-
sidered to be truth or realism’.49 In her discussion of ‘political realism’
Tormey highlights John Tagg’s emphasis on the photograph’s ideological
existence both as material object and as a historically specific social prac-
tice. As Tagg indicates, when we deal with photography as ideology,
we are not dealing with something ‘outside’ reality.50 Hence, as Tormey

explores at some length, the conflation of realism with what is thought
to be a true document is problematic. Many contemporary artists, such
as Jeff Wall, have used the medium of photography to expose these
ambiguities. However, in the 1970s, whilst artists such as Burgin were
as interested in the politics of representation as in the representation
of politics, the contemporaneous genre of social-documentary photo-
graphic practice offered a prime site for the production of imagery that
appeared to tell truths about social realities.
Interestingly enough, it is important to return briefly to Berger here as
his contribution to the discourses around social realities continued, if at
a distance, through the 1960s and into the 1970s not only with his influ-
ential Ways of Seeing (1972), which dealt extensively and innovatively
with the uses and abuses of photographic practices and their social and
political functions, but also through his involvement in various pho-
tographic projects and creative writings. As Roberts comments, Berger’s
dialogic account of photography at that time was deeply indebted to
the philosophical debates on realism he first engaged with in the mid
1950s.51 However, for Roberts, Berger works with the notion of ‘photog-
raphy as a form of social exchange’ (Roberts 1998, p. 128). With Berger’s
A Fortunate Man (1967) and A Seventh Man (1975), for example, Jean
Mohr’s photography is used
as a challenge to the loss of historical memory. Narrative recon-

struction of the photograph actively breaks with the de-historical
circulation of images under the effects of capitalist spectacle.
(Ibid., p. 132)
Rather than the fetishization of the production of a single image

that captures social reality, according to Roberts Berger works
sequentially, reconstructing through a ‘process of narrative redemption’
(ibid.).
In the UK there was considerable expansion in the development of
photography as a social art form that told truths, however tendentious,
both through the creation of a single image and through this kind
of ‘process of narrative redemption’. These themes were explored by
the 2008–9 touring exhibition of photographs from the Arts Council
collection, No Such Thing as Society. The exhibition, and accompanying
catalogue, taking its title from an infamous statement by Margaret
Thatcher in 1987, focused on the strong documentary and commu-
nity photographic traditions and explored how the advent of state
support for independent photographers facilitated these practices. The
exhibition included work by Homer Sykes, Tony Ray-Jones, Daniel

Meadows, Brian Griffith, Chris Killip, Vanley Burke, Martin Parr, Tish
Murtha and many others who produced ‘Realist, communal portraits’
(Mellor 2008, p. 31), ‘emancipatory community photography’ and a
series of utopian photographic projects (ibid, p. 51).52 One of the most
extensive early projects was Meadows’ Free Photographic Omnibus.
From 1973 to 1974 Meadows travelled around Britain in a double-
decker bus taking photographic portraits and taping his interviews with
his subjects. As Mellor notes, his Portsmouth: John Payne, Aged 12 with
Two Friends and his Pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974, with its resonances
of Billy in Ken Loach’s social realist classic film Kes (1969), produced an
iconic image. The original photo-book that Meadows produced, follow-
ing his thirteen-month, ten-thousand mile trip, provides a tender and
fascinating narrative of individual working-class lives and the places in
which they lived, worked and played.53
Figure 5.5 David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire. Photograph

by Daniel Meadows from the Free Photographic Omnibus, 1973. ‘David lived
with his father and his step-mother in a council estate at Conanby. When he was
fourteen David was playing with a lemon-squeezer in a bus queue; some of the
contents of the lemon-squeezer sprayed over an eighteen-year-old sixth former
who beat David up. He suffered a fractured skull and a brain haemorrhage and
was confined to hospital for three months. David worked for a coach-builder
in Rotherham and managed quite well in spite of a very pronounced limp.’
(Daniel Meadows in private correspondence with the author July 2010). c Daniel
Meadows
In many ways, Meadows’ project was quite nostalgic: on the cusp of an

avalanche of industrial decline – and, of course, pre-Thatcher – its decla-
ration of protest was more poignant than revolutionary. In contrast, the
work of Killip, with its bleak and intimate studies of disaffected unem-
ployed youth and the ravaged post-industrial wastelands captured in
the seminal photobook In Flagrante (1988) encapsulated, for Mellor, ‘the
darkening social panorama of the late 1970s and 1980s’ (Mellor 2007,
p. 109). Killip’s portrait Jarrow Youth (1976),54 of a skinhead crouched
on a wall, which first appeared in Creative Camera in 1977, coincided,
emblematically, with punk’s outrageous misappropriation of the Silver
Jubilee:
Killip emblematised North Eastern de-industrialisation and its abject

legacy of waste, with visionary iconographies. These are reminiscent
not only of Honoré Daumier’s urban migrants and Pablo Picasso’s
Blue Period vagrants but also J.M.W.Turner’s enlarged and luminous
landscapes with human industrial activity set beneath.
(Ibid.)
Certainly, Killip’s iconic photograph was dependent on the viewer read-

ing the single image as telling or capturing a kind of truth, and, to
some extent despite its intimacy it persists in an attempt to represent
politics. Killip’s images – here married with texts by John Berger and
Sylvia Grant – are powerfully affective but this kind of desolate truth
telling was particularly bound up with an evacuation of political hope
in the late 1980s. Rather than conveying a universal social reality, the
images and text resonated with the multiple realisms of a fragmented
and defeated society, emblemized by the impoverished travellers on
In Flagrante’s cover, collecting coal on the seashore.
An elderly man picks over rubbish.

The sea shuts in and, on its beaches, washes up flotsam and jetsam.
Kids sniff glue and find a way-out.
Here there will be no more silver-wedding presents.
[...]
On these last reaches, people make love, children are born,
grandmothers make pies, families go to the seaside. And they all know
what is happening: the boot is being put into the future.
(Berger and Grant [1988] 2008, p. 90)

Figure 5.6 Chris Killip, Youth, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976.

c Chris Killip
Eventually though, this kind of aesthetic reached something of an

impasse. The critical realist constructed-narrative approach to the polit-
ical, characterized in US-born Allan Sekula’s The Fish Story, and the
dispassionate avoidance of emotional engagement exemplified in the
vernacular realism of the British photographer Richard Billingham, are
just two of the many routes explored thereafter.
Contemporary social realisms: the new forms of sociability

in art
Any consideration of the visual arts in the new millennium has to

start with a number of provisos. Whilst the visual generally dominates
our encounter with contemporary art, it is not necessarily the primary
mode of practice. Post-conceptualist art is no longer ocular-centric,
with shifts into philosophy and text-based work, installation, perfor-
mative and environmental processes and multifarious forms beyond
and outside the gallery into the expanded field of the post-postmodern
digital era. The visual now encompasses a broad spectrum of the arts
including the patently non-visual, such as the haptic and the sonic.
The rules of art have broken down. Contemporary art practice is now
characterized not by its visuality but by its multimedia, interdisciplinary

and interventional natures.55
In 1996, Hal Foster argued that we had witnessed a ‘return to the real’
(Foster, 1996) as art and theory sought grounding in actual bodies and
social sites. But what might constitute such a ‘return to the real’, and if
there has been such a ‘return’, does it resonate at all with anything to
do with the term or aesthetic social realism as discussed so far? Where
might we turn for answers to these questions in such an eclectic and
pluralist art world?
Certainly, Alison Marchant’s artistic practice, for example, has con-
tinuity with earlier forms of social realism. Marchant has unfailingly
addressed questions of political power, using oral testimony in her site-
specific installations to make visible working-class cultural and domestic
life in Britain. Indeed, through the 1990s, there may even be ways in
which the so-called YBAs (Young British Artists) might be associated
with social realism, even if they are not purveyors of it. YBA artists
such as Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin took a vernacular approach and
dealt with social class issues in their work. Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s
punk-inspired trash shadow installations – Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)
(1998), Wasted Youth (2000), The Undesirables (2000) and Real Life Is Rub-
bish (2002) – besides drawing on a growing obsession with urban
detritus, also reflected the realities of social life in Britain at the turn of
the century, resonating with a contemporary wave of social derision for
youth in general and an obsequious obsession with a British underclass
in particular.
That said, merely embracing the social or exploring the realities of
popular culture – a favourite subject for art through the 1990s and
beyond – is insufficient for it to be linked in any meaningful way. For
some critics, the banality of the activities of the Liverpool-based Com-
mon Culture Collective, with the ‘paucity and opportunistic cowardice
of this kind of synthetic philistinism’, merely demonstrated the nadir
in contemporary art’s giving up on ‘imaginative engagement’, and led
many artists to ‘fill the void with the negation of culture per se.’ As JJ
Charlesworth concludes, bleakly:
The problem, not just for art but for all culture, is that when one is
faced with the choice of being outside the box vomiting in, or inside
the box vomiting out, it’s difficult to care much either way.56
However, in counterpoint, the recent shift to socially engaged practices,

‘the new forms of sociability in art’, may have some resonance. I want
to frame my concluding remarks about the relevance of social realism
to current art practice, therefore, by returning to where I started – with

Roberts’ prescient and insightful comments made in 1990 that ‘art’s crit-
ical recovery of the external world needs to be linked to an understanding
of that world as both structured and differentiated and characterised by
emergence and change’. I want to mirror this with Roberts’ more recent
references to the post-autonomous world of art being very much unset-
tled but simultaneously characterized by renewed interests in the social.
Here, Roberts’ analysis reflects an ongoing recognition of recent con-
temporary art’s accommodation and appropriation of the social such
that, with the influential field of relational and post-relational practices,
he articulates a ‘new sociability in art’ (Roberts 2009, p. 353). Add to
this a resurgent interest in a ‘communist imaginary’ and ‘commonism’57
and this, perhaps, is where we might begin to identify a coalition
with some of the former practices and ideas associated with social
realism.
Many of Jeremy Deller’s projects, for example The Battle of Orgreave
(2001), which restaged a momentous confrontation in the Miners’ Strike
of 1984–85, although not purposefully part of any professed political
programme, have created their own political momentum when encoun-
tered and experienced by viewers and participants.58 Another British
artist, Lucy Orta, has extensively used participative artistic practices,
working with communities all around the world, to critique a whole
series of social issues from global ecology and environmental waste to
the plight of the homeless and destitute.59 Other contemporary prac-
tices conduct a more surreptitious form of engagement at the edges of
cultural activism, often operating outside the gallery space in the con-
frontational and agonistic site of the public sphere. The Institute for the
Art and Practice of Dissent at Home utilizes the domestic environment,
and the social life of the family itself, as a discursive and politicized
space for action. The Institute, describing itself as a family activist cell,
is located in a council property in Everton, Liverpool, and provides a
platform to discuss homemade aesthetics, the private/public, the famil-
ial, class and money matters.60 The Institute’s practice draws on diverse
and contradictory traditions in art but in its audacious re-thinking and
re-presentation of the socialized and politicized circumstances in which
we live our lives, it raises powerful philosophical and aesthetic questions
about twenty-first century social realities.
To end, I return to Roberts’ explanation of why such ‘new forms of
sociability in art’ are significant:
They may aestheticise their own conditions of production; they may

fetishize the dialogic as transformative activity; they may devalue and
misconstrue the emancipatory potential of artistic autonomy (and, as

a consequence, as Žižek puts it in his discussion of Hardt and Negri,
mimic the frictionless ‘communism’ of Bill Gates’s virtual capitalism),
but at a material level they strive to unblock the reified and dismal
social relations of contemporary artistic production.
(Roberts 2009 (ed.), p. 367)
Art that declares its engagement with the social and with the political is
problematic. All claims to reflect social reality in a world self-conscious
of the impossibility of representation yet, simultaneously, obsessively
attempting to perform and re-stage lived experience through end-
less ‘reality televison’ formats, are fraught. Contemporary art’s ‘critical
recovery of the external world’ sits uneasily within a global economy
that seeks to commodify all cultural production. Nevertheless, at the
risk of reiterating Berger’s optimism in the fifties, art practice can have
agency. Certainly we can no longer glibly refer to simple viabilities of
social realism, for the quintessential time and place for that aesthetic
and its politics is now historical, but art practice continues to develop
strategies and forms based on ‘transformational conceptions of social
reality’ and we should not be at all surprised if in drawing from these
wellsprings contemporary art and its discourses resurrect the term anew
very soon.
Notes
1. Interestingly, Roberts heads his essay with a quote from Roy Bhaskar: ‘Real-
ists argue for an understanding of the relationship between social structures
and human agency that is based on a transformational conception of social
reality’ (Bhaskar cited in Roberts [1990] 1992, 195). Bhaskar’s original text
gives ‘transformational conception of social activity’ but I retain Roberts’
misquoted version here.
2. Importantly, in this chapter I take ‘British’ to refer to both art practices
produced by British-born artists, along with any art-making done in the
UK, therefore encompassing non-native and exiled/émigré artists living and
working in Britain.
3. For a useful survey of the intersection of cultural and political practices in
the 1970s see for example Forster & Harper (eds) 2010.
4. See Lucy Lippard’s 1968 essay (with John Chandler) of this title in Lippard
1997.
5. For example, the 1970s witnessed the founding of the radical photo maga-
zine Camerawork and the setting up of the Exit Photography Group amid a
range of publications, exhibitions and projects explored ordinary life and
everyday acts of protest and resistance through social documentary and
community photography.
6. I am inferring the much-rehearsed debates on questions of ‘authorship’

raised by Foucault and Barthes. For the classic texts see Barthes’ ‘The Death
of the Author’ (Barthes 1977), and Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (Rabinow
(ed.) 1984).
7. See for example the extensive debates around ‘relational’ and ‘participative’
art practices instigated and reflected in Bourriaud 2002 and Bishop 2006.
8. Blunt, art critic during the 1930s for both the Communist-oriented Spec-
tator magazine and the British Communist Party’s journal Left Review, was
a key figure in the promotion of ‘New Realism’. This new aesthetic was
also supported by A.L. Lloyd, Alick West, and Francis Klingender and other
British Communist Party-oriented artists’ organizations such as the Hogarth
Group, the Euston Road School, and the British Communist Party Artists’
Group. Recruited for the Soviet spy network, Blunt later became a reader in
art history at the Courtauld Institute and went on to serve as art advisor to
the monarchy and surveyor of the Royal art collection. For more on Blunt’s
role see Rickaby 1978 and Antliff 2008.
9. See Milner 1993, p. 26.
10. Given world politics and social upheavals of the period it is hardly a sur-
prise that the AI/AIA underwent significant changes of direction through the
course of its twenty-year history (1933–53). As part of the general expansion
of left politics across all social classes in the thirties, Robert Radford describes
the inauguration of the AI as the ‘product of grass roots experience’ of a small
group of largely London-based artists, critics and designers (Radford 1987,
p. 15). Initially set up as a discussion group, the AI rapidly gained mem-
bers and started to organize exhibitions and fund-raising events for various
causes. Whilst some AI members were in the British Communist Party and
promoted a more didactic approach, others were merely communist sympa-
thisers. In the early years, the overall unifying principle was opposition to
the Fascist movement although, of course, views differed enormously about
how best to use art as a ‘weapon in the struggle’. In 1998, Andy Croft used
this slogan for the title of his book about the cultural history of the British
Communist Party, explaining that it was a term commonly used by Commu-
nists at the height of the Cold War to define their attitude to cultural activity
(Croft, 1998, p.1).
11. In Rea (ed.) 1935 five oppositional positions were proposed by Herbert Read,
A.L. Lloyd, Alick West, Francis Klingender, and Eric Gill. The archives for
the AIA are held in the Tate Archive. For a history of the AIA see Morris &
Radford 1983, and Radford 1987.
12. D.D. Egbert notes that, after the death of Christopher Caudwell in
the Spanish Civil War, Klingender was ‘the best of the remaining
Marxist-Leninist critics in England’ (Egbert 1970, p. 562). For a discussion
of Klingender’s contribution to Marxist criticism, and that of other radicals
including Arnold Hauser and Berger see Egbert 1970, pp. 551–80.
13. For example, the entire collection of the National Gallery, including the
library, was deposited in the Manod Quarry near Blaenau Festiniog until the
end of the war. See Richardson 1994, p. 89.
14. ‘Recording Britain’ was an ambitious scheme set up at the outbreak of the
Second World War by Kenneth Clark as an adjunct to the Official War Artist
scheme. It aimed to boost morale on the Home Front by employing artists
to depict the effects of war on the urban, rural and industrial landscapes
and changes taking place in the social life of the civilian population. See
Richardson 1994, p. 93.
15. Boswell, a frequent satirical illustrator for the Daily Herald and Left Review
in the 1930s, was the President of the Artists International Association at
the time when he wrote the first in this series of slim volumes published by
Bodley Head on single cultural issues.
16. 1948 was the year when Moore was awarded the prestigious International
Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale. Numerous accolades and British
Council exhibitions followed.
17. See review of exhibition Witness: Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum
North, Manchester, 2009 by Rachel Aspden, ‘War through women’s eyes’,
New Statesman, 12 March 2009, available at www.newstatesman.com/art/
2009/03/female-artists-war-women.
18. Mass Observation was established in 1937 and involved the detailed record-
ing and documenting of the everyday social lives of people in Britain. The
Mass Observation Archive is now housed at the University of Sussex Library.
See the present volume’s introduction.
19. See LCC file ‘Works of Art for Housing Estates, 1957–1959’ and LCC Housing
Committee minutes: London Metropolitan Archive ref. CL/HSG/1/99. See
also Sandilands 1960, and Lapp et al. 1999.
20. Author’s correspondence with John Lloyd, Ray Watkinson and Péri’s family,
1990s. An extensive Péri archive is held at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
21. In a 1996 exhibition Robert Burstow surveyed the sculpture commissioned
for the South Bank and listed 28 different sculptors. See Burstow 1996, and
Banham & Hillier (eds) 1976.
22. Fleischmann was born in Bratislava. He settled in London in 1948.
The mermaid fountain was commissioned by Lockheed Hydraulic Brake
Company.
23. The gigantic pavilions of Nazi Germany and that of the Soviet Union con-
fronted each other on the banks of the Seine at the 1937 International
Exhibition in Paris. The professed aim of the exhibition was to encourage
peaceful co-existence and co-operation among nations. Yet it was staged in a
Europe dominated by competing totalitarian ideologies and at the height of
the Spanish Civil War. See Ades et al. 1995.
24. The central character, artist Janos Lavin, declares this in John Berger’s novel
A Painter of Our Time, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London,
[first published 1958] 1976. Berger’s novel was partly based on the life of
the émigré realist sculptor Peter Péri whom he knew well and wrote about
in various publications and exhibition catalogues. See, for example, Berger’s
‘Impressions of Peter Péri’ in the catalogue for Péri’s memorial exhibition
at Swiss Cottage Library, London, 1968. On Péri’s work more generally, see
Kay 1991.
25. Building on Lynda Morris’s previous work (e.g. ‘Realism: the Thirties Argu-
ment, Blunt and The Spectator 1936 to1938’ in Art Monthly, 1980, No. 35,
pp. 3–10), Deborah Cherry and Juliet Steyn’s essay ‘The Moment of Real-
ism 1952–56’, published in 1982, was an important acknowledgment of
the ‘silences, elisions, absences’ which hegemonic modernist art-historical
accounts had effected up until the 1980s, marginalising and suppressing
considerations of realist art, and particularly its ‘moment’ in the nineteen-

fifties (Cherry & Steyn 1982, p. 44).
26. By the late 1940s, the political divisions on the left in the Spanish Civil War,
the ‘show-trials’ in Russia, the Nazi–Soviet pact and Stalin’s subsequent rever-
sals of policy had all contributed significantly to the waning of the British
intelligentsia’s flirtation with Communism. See Croft 1995, Croft (ed.) 1998,
and Morgan et al. 2007.
27. Tom Maschler blamed poor journalism and a ‘chain reaction’ for the
widespread adoption of the catchy phrase ‘Angry Young Men’, arguing that
the writers who had set themselves the task of ‘waking us up’ had been
rendered harmless in the ‘A.Y.M. cage’ (Maschler 1958, p. 7).
28. For more on commitment in this context see Whiteley 2003.
29. Sartre’s influential polemical text condemned social indifference on the part
of writers and proposed an aesthetics based on the notion of commitment.
A wide-ranging debate ensued with subsequent responses from Theodor
Adorno and Bertolt Brecht.
30. Read’s comment about the ‘iconography of despair’ is taken from his intro-
duction to the ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’ at the Venice Biennale
in 1952. ‘Here are images of flight, of ragged claws “scuttling across the
floors of silent seas”, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.
[ . . . ] These new images belong to the iconography of despair’ (Read cited in
Burstow 1993, p. 119).
31. Berger made these comments in the foreword to the 1956 exhibition of real-
ist art, Looking Forward, which showed at South London Art Gallery from
18 April–5 May 1956 and then toured the provinces. The show was entirely
selected by Berger. Its leftist credentials were underlined by its being officially
opened by the General Secretary of the TUC, Sir Vincent Tewson.
32. Author’s correspondence with Hogarth, 1990s. See also Hogarth 1986 and
Ingrams 1997.
33. On Berger and Brown see Whiteley 2009a and 2009b respectively.
34. In Realism, June 1955, No. 1, p. 10, in an article entitled ‘Three Men in
Search of Realism’, Ray Watkinson describes Berger as ‘with us but not of us’,
implying that, indeed, Berger had a very close relationship with the party
but remained outside it. Geoff Dyer maintains a similar view in his study
of Berger’s work. See Dyer 1986. Another related initiative was the Geneva
Club, set up by Berger in 1955 as an informal discussion forum for writ-
ers, artists, scientists and poets. The club, inspired by the temporary thaw
in East-West relations at the Geneva summit conference and also by Ilya
Ehrenberg’s influential novel The Thaw, initially met in Bertorelli’s restau-
rant but then move to the Argyll public house, near Oxford Circus. Regulars
included Fullard, Middleditch, Smith, Greaves, Duxbury, Peter de Francia,
John Warren Davis, John Willett, Randall Swingler, Ayrton, Hogarth, Evelyn
Antal, Margot Heinemann, E. P. Thompson and Péri.
35. Many of the articles in Realism did not name a specific author.
36. Papers and correspondence relating to the Communist Party’s Artists’ Group
and to the journal, Realism, are part of the Artists’ Group file, ref. 5/2–5/7,
Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester. Realism included
reviews of exhibitions, interviews and feature articles. For example, reviews
of Berger’s Looking Forward shows (1952 and 1956) and an interview with
Renato Guttuso at the Leicester Galleries were published. It also included

articles on British art education, art in Eastern Germany, vernacular sculpture
and architecture in England. Contributors included Berger, Hogarth, Clifford
Rowe, de Francia, Ray Watkinson and Patrick Carpenter.
37. Undated typed statement of the Realism Editorial Committee (Labour His-
tory Archive and Study Centre, Manchester).
38. In the fifth issue of the journal (August–September 1956) Patrick Carpenter
argued that the Communist Party Artists’ Group had been working towards
a new approach to social realism but, he noted optimistically, they fully
acknowledged that whilst the Soviet Union had ‘achieved socialism in an
economic sense’, it had been ‘less successful in a spiritual and moral sense’,
and he called for a new need to reappraise social realism (Carpenter in Real-
ism, Nos 5, 6). However, Realism’s Editorial Board minutes indicate deep
divisions over the aims, content and projected readership of the journal.
The ‘new’ journal never emerged, suggesting that perhaps no consensus (or
sufficient funds) could be found.
39. Rebeyrolle’s work was shown, alongside the work of André Minaux, Ginette
Rapp, Roger Montane and Jean Vinay, as part of the show Five French Real-
ists at the Tate Gallery, London in the summer of 1955. For a discussion
of developments in France, see the catalogue accompanying the exhibition
Aftermath: France 1945–54, New Images of Man at the Barbican Art Gallery
London from 3 March to 15 June 1982, and also Wilson 1991.
40. When Guttuso had his London show in 1955, a special celebration party was
thrown by Greaves. See Hyman 1996, p. 47.
41. Berger also wrote on Guttuso for Realism in 1956 and published a monograph
in German. See Berger 1957.
42. See Hyman 2001 for an extensive discussion of ‘the Quartet’.
43. Berger, ‘Exit and Credo?’ in New Statesman and Nation, 29 September 1956,
Vol. 52, No. 1333, p. 372.
44. For example, Rea organised the hugely popular Looking At People exhibi-
tion (Manchester 1955 and Moscow 1957) of largely realist art and was also
part of the exhibition Three Humanist Sculptors at Zwemmers, London 1960.
See Whiteley 2003 and ‘Betty Rea’, New Dictionary of National Biography.
On Gisha Koenig, see Spencer 1960.
45. This refers to a series of exhibitions of contemporary work by young British
artists entitled ‘New Generation’ held during the 1960s at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery, London.
46. David Medalla, born in Manila but mainly based in London since, has
frequently brought together an ethos of Marxist agitation with Buddhist sen-
sibilities. Guy Brett, writing about Medalla and Dugger in their Mao jackets,
noted that they gave ‘a dated air to an incontestable conviction: that the
legacy of colonialism in the Third World could only be effectively challenged
by the national liberation movements’ (Brett 1995, p. 85). Significantly,
given the comments on the 1970s as the ‘lost decade’, Brett recognised that
the mid-1990s were not the best moment to ‘look again dispassionately at
a movement in the 1970s in which many people were caught up (myself
included)’ (Brett 1995, p. 85). Walker’s survey, published since, has made an
invaluable contribution to that process but there is clearly much more to
be done on social and political groupings and art practices from the period,
some of which might be considered in the kind of context we are concerned

with here.
47. There were many contemporaneous publications, events and exhibitions
worth mentioning here that dealt with art’s social and political engage-
ment, but one show with particular associations with the Studio issue was
Art in Society: Contemporary British Art with a Social or Political Purpose at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London May–June 1978. It had a public programme
of events, talks and films and attracted over 14,000 visitors. See Walker 2002,
pp. 223–4.
48. See Studio International: Art and Social Purpose, March/April 1976, Vol. 191,
No. 980 and also on APG see Tate Archive and information at http://www.
tate.org.uk/learning/artistsinfocus/apg/default.htm
49. I am indebted here to Jane Tormey for her thoughtful comments on this
topic and for sight of the draft manuscripts for her forthcoming book
Photographic Realism (Manchester University Press, 2012).
50. Tormey cites Tagg 1988, p. 188.
51. See Roberts 1998, p. 128.
52. Mellor’s 2007 No Such Thing as Society was published in relation to an Arts
Council Collection exhibition in London, Aberystwyth, Carlisle and Warsaw,
2008–9. In much limited form, an earlier exhibition covered similar ground -
In Search of the English, The work of Independent Photographers in Britian dur-
ing the Late 1960s and 1970s, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield. At the time,
the Arts Council Collection of photographs was housed at Sheffield Hallam
University.
53. See Meadows 1975.
54. The title given in Mellor’s book is slightly different from the caption
provided to the author of this essay by the photographer himself, Chris
Killip.
55. See ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity: an Interview with Marie-Aude
Baronian and Mireille Rosello’, Art & Research, A Journal Of Ideas, Contexts
and Methods, Vol. 2, No.1, Summer 2008, pp. 2–3, and Bourdieu 1996.
56. See Charlesworth’s review of the exhibition of Common Culture at Gasworks
10th November-10th December 2000, originally published in Art Monthly
242, December 2000–January 2001 http://www.jjcharlesworth.com/reviews/
commonculture.htm.
57. For references to some of this literature see Roberts 2009 (ed.). Key writers
and theorists include Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Slavoj Žižek and
Alain Badiou. Also see, for example, Grant Watson, Gerrie van Noord and
Gavin Everall (eds) Make Everything New: A Project on Communism, Bookworks,
London/Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2006, which, on the back cover, puts
itself forward as ‘a collection of partial and subjective accounts’ of various
creative practices and an ‘experimental platform for ideas and an attempt to
see in what ways the communist imagination can be materialised as art’.
58. Deller’s The Battle for Orgreave (Directed by Mike Figgis, 2001) was originally
shown on television but its subsequent life, through other screenings and
accompanied by archive material associated with its making and the original
dispute, has added layers of social and political meaning to the project.
59. See Bourriaud, Pinto and Damianovic 2003.
60. See http://www.twoaddthree.org.
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6
Small Screens and Big Voices:
Televisual Social Realism and the
Popular
Dave Rolinson
Introduction: transformations and the popular
Although social realism on television has drawn some practices and

debates from theatre, cinema and literature, it also exists within specifi-
cally televisual frames of reference. Indeed, developments in television’s
social realist practices and theoretical elaboration have existed in a par-
allel and sometimes symbiotic relationship with television’s attempts to
define its own specifically televisual discourses. In attending to these
interweaving relationships, this chapter examines several programme
types across a broad chronology, within their institutional and critical
contexts. If realist innovations involve, according to Raymond Williams,
a ‘movement towards social extension’ (Williams 1977, p. 63), and social
realism in Stephen Lacey’s phrase ‘reveals the situation of the working-
class at the level of its culture and everyday practices’ (Lacey 2007,
p. 5), it is understandable that television has been a key social realist
arena, given its ability to address mass audiences in the domestic sphere.
As Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh argued, ‘social television drama’
became ‘a most urgent social tool’ because ‘it had the means to saturate
the nation’s consciousness in a way that, with their relatively limited
audiences and inhibiting conditions of public reception, theatre and
cinema could never achieve’ (MacMurraugh-Kavanagh 2002, pp. 151–2).
The point is not only one of numbers, although Harold Pinter ‘estimated
it would take a thirty-year run of The Caretaker’ to get the audience he
got for A Night Out (1960) (Shubik 2000, p. 77). Rather it is that televi-
sion, according to Irene Shubik, could ‘broaden the audience’s viewing
experience’ in distinctive ways (ibid.).
172
Televisual Social Realism and the Popular 173
This chapter traces social realism’s impact on television, and

television’s impact on social realism, through reference to single drama –
often a distinctive form of authored, politically-motivated drama –
and more popular forms such as soap opera and situation comedy,
whose constraints in terms of production conditions, house style and
genre requirements have made them less critically valued. However, in
the popular medium of television, differentiating popular texts from
serious texts presents particular challenges. Programme makers, in par-
ticular those from working-class backgrounds, have frequently sought
to engage a mainstream audience. Attending to a range of programmes
and approaches across different periods helps to focus BF Taylor’s point
that social realism ‘is difficult to define owing to its being so politically
and historically contingent’ (Taylor 2006, p. 3). One of television’s most
popular programmes, the soap opera Coronation Street (1960-present),
prompted an influential definition of television social realism from
Marion Jordan:
Briefly the genre of Social Realism demands that life should be pre-
sented in the form of a narrative of personal events, each with a
beginning, a middle and an end, important to the central characters
concerned but affecting others in only minor ways; that though these
events are ostensibly about social problems they should have as one
of their central concerns the settling of people in life; that the resolu-
tion of these events should always be in terms of the effect of personal
interventions; that characters should be either working-class or of the
classes immediately visible to the working classes (shopkeepers, say,
or the two-man business) and should be credibly accounted for in
terms of the ‘ordinariness’ of their homes, families, friends; that the
locale should be urban and provincial (preferably in the industrial
north); that the settings should be commonplace and recognisable
(the pub, the street, the factory, the home and more particularly the
kitchen); that the time should be ‘the present’; that the style should
be such as to suggest an unmediated, unprejudiced and complete
view of reality; to give, in summary, the impression that the reader, or
viewer, has spent some time at the expense of the characters depicted.
(Jordan 1981, p. 28)
This chapter’s case studies variously subscribe to and deviate from

Jordan’s definition, the longevity of which is illustrated by Lez Cooke’s
observation that it ‘very comfortably’ fitted Clocking Off (2000–2003)
(Cooke 2005, p. 187). It is important to note however that Jordan places
these broad social realist conventions alongside ‘the existing conven-

tions of soap opera proper’, and finds that these ‘two sets of conventions
fit neatly together’, resulting in a type recognisable as ‘Soap-Opera Real-
ism’ (Jordan 1981, p. 29). I argue that we should look much more
broadly than this at social realism on television, and accordingly the fol-
lowing case studies look at programmes that develop new genre-hybrids
or suggest alternative, politically radical, modes of realism. More gen-
erally, I argue, television demonstrates John Caughie’s contention that
realism has been a ‘broad church [ . . . ] happy to transform the new cur-
rents it encounters [. . . and . . .] to be transformed by them’ (Caughie
2000a, p. 68).
Realism and the ‘televisual’ to 1960
In television’s early decades its aesthetics and practices were being devel-
oped and contested in ways that necessarily shaped televisual social
realism. The first regular television service began on 2 November 1936,
with a public service imperative instilled by John Reith whose belief that
‘commerce is the enemy of any serious social or moral purpose’ made
him television’s equivalent of John Grierson (Caughie 2000a, p. 28).
‘Social purpose’ in this context was unifying. According to Andrew
Crisell, the BBC’s ‘cheerful and conciliatory’ coverage of the 1926 Gen-
eral Strike enhanced its reputation and facilitated its ‘transition from
private enterprise to public institution’ (Crisell 2002, p. 25). This meant
fulfilling the recommendations of the Crawford Committee, the first
of several Royal Commissions that became ‘the standard procedure for
regulating [. . .] public service broadcasting’ and ‘the positions it was
asked to occupy in the national culture’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 79). Televi-
sion’s capacity for social realist discourse seems ingrained even in what
Anthony Smith calls the ‘pre-natal experience of the BBC’, an experience
informed by the ‘drive towards working-class self-education which was
part of the trade-union movement’ in the early twentieth century, and
before that in ‘Self-Help, in William Forster’s Education Act (1870)’ and
in a ‘public revulsion against the crude propaganda and commercialism
of the early printed mass media’ (Smith 1979, pp. 84–5).
Moreover, early dramatic style on television invoked particular kinds
of immediacy relevant to social realist discourse. Tracing a full develop-
ment of on-screen style is hindered, however, by the fact that early tele-
vision was mostly live, and little survives from before the mid-1950s.1
What we can say is that technological and aesthetic developments that
marked social realism in the cinema, such as semi-documentary exterior
filming in real locations, seem distant from early television’s reliance on

theatre, on live relays of plays from theatres (such as J. B. Priestley’s
When We Are Married in 1938) and studio-based adaptations (such
as Gogol’s The Government Inspector, watched by 9.5 million in 1959)
(Caughie 2000a, p. 34). Early dependence on theatre led to concerns
among some practitioners about a residual theatricality that inhibited
television drama’s specific capabilities by tending ‘towards the literate
rather than the visual’ (ibid., p. 43).
Jason Jacobs has contested a description of drama as developing from
an early ‘static, theatrical, visual style to a mobile, cinematic one’, as if
television initially ‘did not develop its own aesthetic’ and merely grad-
uated from imitating one medium to imitating another (Jacobs 2000,
p. 1). It is important to observe that the television play was not simply
a phase ‘through which television had, inevitably, to pass before arriv-
ing at its true destiny (film), but represented possibilities’ in its own
right (Bignell et al. 2000, p. 38). Although it is important to debate the
practices, modes and even academic methodologies that constitute the
specificity of the televisual, my task here is to apply selected ideas specif-
ically to the development of social realist discourse.2 For instance, from
writer Nigel Kneale and director Rudolph Cartier’s debates on televisual
form in the 1950s, we can isolate Cartier’s speculation that ‘it is only
live programmes that comprise real television’ (Cartier 1958, p. 31).
Although Cartier’s use of pre-filmed inserts extended television’s scope,
the perception of such inserts as anti-televisual reveals a vital argument
about early drama, namely that it, and the early relaying of live theatre,
involved ‘the assertion of immediacy, liveness and the direct transmis-
sion of live action as both an essential characteristic and an aesthetic
virtue of the medium’ (Caughie 1991, p. 23). Liveness remains a val-
ued asset today, with reality TV, sport, entertainment and one-off live
episodes from series such as E.R. and Coronation Street. Early television’s
liveness created the ‘effect of immediacy, of a directness and spontane-
ity [which came] to signify authenticity’, and which became ‘one of
the characteristics of the specific forms of realism in television drama’
(Caughie 2000a, p. 32).
In terms of content, social realism can be traced across various genres,
as in the science-fiction/horror serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59)
which discussed race riots as openly as more celebrated realist forms; its
writer, Nigel Kneale, joined the British New Wave with the screenplays
of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. However, in terms of practice,
variations on drama-documentary provide instructive examples of the
development of television social realism. Just as cinema documentary
developed through reconstructing reality in a studio, as in Night Mail

(1936), so early television, restricted by technological and logistical
limitations upon location-recording bar all but major events, drew inspi-
ration from pre-war radio journalism to dramatize in the studio. Early
results included I Want To Be A Doctor (1947), a ‘how to’ guide which
recreated observation of doctors at work and the difficulties of medi-
cal training, in part to dissuade unrealistic applicants (Caughie 2000a,
p. 104), which demonstrated ‘the placing of educational or informa-
tional content into entertaining form’ (Kerr 1990, p. 79). Locating such
relatively primitive programmes in Britain’s drama-documentary tradi-
tion, Derek Paget notes elements that were also vital to evolving realist
discourses. That is, in order to delineate the documentary credentials
of a dramatic presentation, ‘a realist mise-en-scène was now required’.
The ‘ “look” of reality became an issue’ and viewers experienced the
‘novelty of a new kind of seeing – taking place in their living rooms’
(Paget 1998a, p. 143). The ‘enabling conventions of the dramatised story
documentary’ were, therefore, not only ‘dramatic’ but also social realist
(ibid., p. 145). Indeed, such a melding of different genres ‘was a given of
post-war practice’ (ibid.).
To take an example – A Man from the Sun (1956), a John Elliott play
about West Indian immigrants’ experiences in London, which echoes
mainstream social problem films such as Sapphire (1959) and Flame in
the Streets (1961, adapted from Ted Willis’s stage and TV play Hot Sum-
mer Night (1959)), but has a different style: it is, in Elliott’s words, a
semi-documentary piece ‘in the tradition of the pre-war GPO movies’
(Bourne 1998, p. 112). Dramatizing research as conducted like ‘a fly-on-
the-wall [. . .] sinking into the background’ across Brixton and elsewhere,
Elliott explored race relations and ‘the clash between this mythical
Britain and the actual grotty real Britain, which West Indians would
face when they got here’ (ibid.). The play’s reconstructions of observed
experience display social realist emphases in prioritizing politicized
everyday details and attitudes over plot, and yet these are combined
with the use of telecine (the live playing-in of pre-recorded footage)
that locates studio-based scenes within the real world (filmed mate-
rial provides, for example, establishing shots of exteriors and wide
shots of interiors, of which only small, metonymic sections are recon-
structed in the studio). The film also overtly uses its narrative structure
to critique bigoted attitudes via the edited transitions between scenes.
Negative comments about immigrant workers in a job centre, for
example, are followed by scenes of racial prejudice in a workplace,
thereby devaluing those initial comments by juxtaposing them with
practical obstructions to employment. Another mix attributes a union

representative’s broad racial prejudices to his specific anxiety about a
black man seeing his daughter, undermining his economic and politi-
cal claims about productivity and community via reference to personal
prejudice.
For John Stokes, however, in realist dramas such as this and Hot
Summer Night, ‘the risk is always that black people will become the
honourable victims of white complexity’, and so ‘the plays are really
about whites’. For Stokes, these plays are inferior to those of Pinter
because they obey ‘the realist rule that an unquestioning focus on a
previously identified – and prejudged – situation is the only starting
point’ (Stokes 2001, p. 36). Therefore, although the actors welcomed
then-unprecedented opportunities to insert their own attitudes into a
television representation, feeling they would be ‘portrayed as real peo-
ple, not as stereotypes’, the manner of their portrayal can be queried
(Bourne 1998, p. 112). It is a specific instance of where Stokes’s criticism
bears comparison with a broader ‘case against naturalism’ such as that of
John McGrath. According to McGrath characters in naturalistic drama
are not ‘allowed to be articulate’ but are only permitted ‘to emote, inco-
herently’, with ‘meaning’ made ‘implicit’ and the world presented as
‘static, implied and ambivalent’ (McGrath 1977, p. 102).
Such criticism, however, should not detract from the progress made
in social realist dramas of the mid-1950s. ITV’s commencement in 1955,
which ‘brought with it a change of class address’, fed into concerns
about the commercialization of culture that emerged in social realist
texts of the period (Caughie 2000a, p. 50). The founding of ITV was
hotly debated, from the Beveridge commission that began in 1951 to
the 1954 Television Bill, but widespread concerns about the dilution
of public service broadcasting were assuaged as the BBC and ITV ini-
tially shared core ‘Reithian values’ such as the drive to ‘inform, educate
and entertain’ (Crisell 2002, p. 90). These values were particularly evi-
dent in ITV’s social realist dramas. Scheduled after the popular Sunday
Night at the London Palladium, ITV’s Armchair Theatre (1956–74) featured
a variety of types of drama but is often associated with the ‘school of
“naturalistic realism” – that is to say, a realism based on experience and
environment’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 75). Television improved the reach of
New Wave works – Look Back in Anger’s theatre run ‘benefited consid-
erably from exposure on television’ as the performance was relayed by
the BBC in part on 16 October 1956 and by ITV in full on 28 Novem-
ber (Lacey 1995, p. 17). Television developed spin-off series from New
Wave texts, including Man at the Top (1970–72) and the sitcom Billy
Liar (1973–74). However, as Caughie observes, this drive for ‘agitational

contemporaneity’ that Sydney Newman brought to Armchair Theatre
when he began producing it in 1958, and to BBC drama when he joined
them in 1961, was inspired not only by attending Look Back in Anger at
the Royal Court, but also by American television dramas such as Marty
(1953) by Paddy Chayefsky (Caughie, 2000, pp. 73–4). Chayefsky and
other American writers including Tad Mosel and Rod Serling wrote about
subjects ‘that the kitchen-sink dramatists were about to tackle, though
perhaps in a more sentimental way – strikes, working-class underpriv-
ileged misfits, boxers, etc., all speaking the language of the “working
class”’ (Shubik 2000, p. 9).
There were earlier landmark plays, such as Ted Willis’s Woman in a
Dressing Gown (1956), but Armchair Theatre ‘introduced a new social
space to television drama – the social space of class and region which
it drew thematically from the New Wave in theatre and literature’ and,
after the series had started, cinema (Caughie 2000a, p. 77). Examples
include Pinter’s A Night Out, a ‘powerful drama, demonstrating how
effective live studio drama could be’ while it also gained a large audi-
ence, and the inter-racial relationship drama Hot Summer Night, directed
by Ted Kotcheff (Cooke 2003, p. 42). Other plays such as Alun Owen’s
No Trams to Lime Street (1959) and Lena, O My Lena (1960), ‘created
a new televisual space in which the dramas of social relationship and
social situations could be acted out’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 77). Set around
a Salford warehouse, Lena, O My Lena depicts the relationship between
student Tom (Peter McEnery) and factory worker Lena (Billie Whitelaw),
through which it ‘explores class difference, with Tom having a romanti-
cised notion of the working class, from which he is removed as a result
of his upbringing and education’ (Cooke 2003, p. 43). Ted Kotcheff’s
direction aims to ‘use the camera as a way of breaking free from the
stasis of theatrical space to the mobility of cinematic space’, making the
studio ‘fluid and expressive’, but in a way that is ‘specific to the develop-
ment of television drama’ and television’s ‘notions of realism’ (Caughie
2000a, p. 77). Caughie analyses sequences to argue that plays like Lena
create ‘a performative space – a space for acting – rather than a narra-
tive space – a space for action’, as the actors ‘invest’ the studio ‘with
meaning’, creating ‘a reality which is watched rather than inhabited,
a performed reality rather than the absorption into a narrative space’
(Caughie 2000a, p. 77).
Such naturalistic plays operate within the ‘secular’, ‘contemporary’
and ‘socially extended’ emphases which are ‘often consciously described
as realism’ in nineteenth-century texts (Williams 1977, pp. 64–5). These
emphases include individual action, the location of actions in the

present day, colloquial speech that ‘approximates the everyday conver-
sation of its audience’, social extension through which ‘drama begins
to represent an increasing range of social experience’ and ‘class expe-
rience’ (Lacey 1995, pp. 64–5). For many critics, televisual drama was
limited by such naturalistic roots. With statements ‘mediated [. . .] to the
point of triviality’ through ‘the situation of the character speaking’, nat-
uralist drama according to writer-director John McGrath could be ‘a way
of not saying anything’, revealing only ‘a small cluster of subjective con-
sciousnesses’, and imposing ‘a certain neutrality about life on the writer,
the actor and the audience’ (McGrath 1977, p. 101). McGrath felt that
many of the acclaimed American and British television dramas were ‘still
theatre’ rather than television: for McGrath, television has specific quali-
ties that are emphatically not ‘conducive to naturalist drama’, but rather
can be harnessed to oppose naturalism (McGrath 1977, p. 101). Resul-
tant tensions began to emerge in the early 1960s, and this is the focus
of the next section.
The 1960s – angry young men and dirty old men: Hoggart
on television
This section explores television’s engagement with social realist dis-

course in the years immediately following the literary, theatrical and
cinematic ‘New Waves’ and the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The
Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart is a key reference: his book influenced
programme makers, and they operated within broadcasting policy that
Hoggart helped to shape. The results are manifested in a range of tech-
niques and genres, including situation comedy, documentary, and – the
section’s main focal points – authored single drama and soap opera. The
varying attitudes of these programmes to social realist strategies, from
allegiance to opposition, facilitate a consideration of television’s part
in wider debates such as inhere in distinctions between naturalism and
alternative modes.
The Pilkington Committee illustrates broadcasting committees’ ability
to shape television’s scope. Pilkington was established in 1960 to con-
sider who should be allocated the new third channel, which ultimately
became BBC2. However, the Pilkington report of 1962 also provided a
forceful ‘language of values’ (Caughie 2000a, pp. 78–9). Resemblances
between the report and The Uses of Literacy are unsurprising, given that
Richard Hoggart was a key member of the Pilkington Committee. In par-
ticular, The Uses of Literacy’s anxieties about the effect of commercialism
upon traditional culture were articulated through forceful criticism of

ITV for not fulfilling its public service obligations as required by the
1954 Television Act, and in a belief that ‘television is and will be a main
factor in influencing the values and moral standards of our society’
(Crisell 2002, pp. 116–17). Between the book and the report’s publi-
cation, Hoggart asked, ‘What has happened to the old BBC ideal that
the invention of television would make it possible to reunite our splin-
tered modern society by giving it a common cultural background?’
(Sydney-Smith 2002, p. 155) This occurred in the speech ‘The Uses
of Television’, whose title was ‘indicative of Hoggart’s belief that a
culture of literacy would save television’ (ibid.). The Pilkington report
described as ‘patronising and arrogant’ commercial TV’s claim to ‘give
the public what it wants’ when its sense of a ‘mass audience’ under-
estimated audience complexity (McDonnell 1991, p. 42). The report
claimed television had a ‘burden of responsibility’ in the dissemina-
tion of ‘information, education and entertainment’: it was essential
to cover ‘the widest possible range of subject matter’, spanning ‘the
whole scope and variety of human awareness and experience’ (Caughie
2000a, pp. 80–1). As a result, Hoggart’s ‘concern with working-class
culture’ found ‘a new home and a mass audience’, but Pilkington’s
influence went deeper (Lacey 1995, p. 76). The report ‘gave a licence
to controversy’, an ‘invitation to test values’: if broadcasting was to be
serious, it ‘must be challenging, controversial, and even transgressive’
(Caughie 2000a, p. 85). The 1960s in particular saw ITV and the expand-
ing BBC both produce challenging work in a cultural climate that was
very much ‘sympathetic to realist, socially critical drama’ (Lovell 1984,
p. 27).
That drama would be made by key realist practitioners such as pro-
ducer Tony Garnett, director Alan Clarke and writer Trevor Griffiths,
who had all been born into working-class backgrounds in the mid-
1930s and experienced educational mobility as a result of the 1944
Butler Act. Although it produced ‘the first working-class generation
to attend university in any numbers’, for Garnett the class separation
inherent in the Eleven Plus constituted ‘class villainy’ which ‘put the
silver spoon in my mouth’ (Garnett 2000, p. 12). Hoggart documented
how the ‘working-class boy who goes through the process of further
education by scholarships finds himself chafing against his environ-
ment during adolescence. He is at the friction point of two cultures’
(Hoggart 1957, p. 242). Unsurprisingly, Garnett recalled that ‘Hoggart
had influenced us all with The Uses of Literacy’ (Garnett 2000, p. 11),
while Dennis Potter felt that ‘Hoggart’s name had become “something
of an incantation” in undergraduate left-wing circles’ and described

Hoggart and Raymond Williams as his ‘intellectual mentors’, according
to Roger Smith (Carpenter 1998, pp. 58–9).
Potter’s early career certainly shows Hoggart’s influence. Potter’s
media appearances, which promoted his authorial vision, traded on
autobiography (which his work problematized), from his psoriatic
arthropathy to class mobility. Potter left his working-class background
in the Forest of Dean to study at New College, Oxford in the late
1950s, and his early work explored his transit in Hoggartian terms.
In the New Statesman in May 1958, Potter wrote about how working
class undergraduates ‘cannot stomach the two languages that divide up
the year, the torn loyalties and perpetual adjustments, the huge chasm
between the classes’ (Potter 1958, p. 562). Potter developed this in a
1958 interview on the BBC programme Does Class Matter? in which
he mentioned his father communicating with ‘contempt’, prompting
the real-life headline ‘Miner’s Son at Oxford Ashamed of Home’ (Cook
1998, p. 12). Hoggart’s description of how ‘the older, more narrow
but also more genuine class culture is being eroded in favour of the
mass opinion, the mass recreational product and the generalised emo-
tional response’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 203), encapsulated in phrases like
‘shiny barbarism’ (ibid., p. 285), was manifest in New Wave ‘anxiety
about traditional forms of working-class culture’ and ‘the destabilising
effects of newer forms of mass leisure’ (Lacey 1995, pp. 186–7). In Pot-
ter’s case, these divisions and animosities were thematized in his book
The Glittering Coffin (1960) and documentary Between Two Rivers (BBC,
3 June 1960).
In Between Two Rivers, whose title refers doubly to the location of the
Forest of Dean between the rivers Severn and Wye, and the social worlds
Potter must bridge, Potter discussed ‘the decline of working-class cul-
ture in the Forest, in the face of post-war social change and the rise
of a consumer society’ (Cook 1998, p. 14). Such changes included the
‘juke-box boys’, who were ‘listening in harshly lighted milk-bars to the
nickelodeons’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 203). The ‘impressionistic rendering of
the Forest and its people’ achieved by Denis Mitchell’s use of ‘editing
to counterpoint the thoughts of local people on the soundtrack with
carefully selected images of Forest coal-mines, working men’s clubs and
pubs’, is interrupted by Potter, whose voice-over critiques one intervie-
wee in terms of a ‘status-ridden society’ (Cook 1998, p. 14). The resultant
description of escaping the ‘drab and untidy’ area for a ‘more fertile
and richer world’ was controversial. Potter felt that the ‘reality’ of ‘doc-
umentaries and current affairs could paradoxically conceal the truth’,
and he turned to non-naturalistic forms that would ‘draw the audience’s

attention to the artifice of television’ (ibid., pp. 15–16).
These multiple concerns are sharply focused in Potter’s drama Stand
Up Nigel Barton (1965), about a miner’s son studying at Oxford. Like Pot-
ter, Barton too appears in a television interview in which he describes
being caught ‘between two utterly different worlds’, and how he could
feel his father ‘watching me like a hawk’: ‘It’s a tightrope between
two worlds and I’m walking it.’ This upsets the father, who is wor-
ried about his workmates’ reactions. The father’s frustrated literalizing
of metaphors (‘Here comes the bloody hawk, they’ll say! With his son
on a tightrope!’) emphasizes that education makes Barton an outsider.
Barton’s situation echoes the depiction of characters ‘dislocated from
their origins’ by education which means they are rarely representa-
tive of class experience in the period (Lacey 1995, p. 79). However,
Potter’s exploration of these issues foregrounds performance and author-
ship. Barton explains his interview’s betrayal of his family as his ‘acting
it up a bit, over-dramatizing’ because he ‘wouldn’t mind a job on the
old telly’. Given that the BBC offered Potter work because of his Does
Class Matter? appearance, it seems that ‘the quality of Potter’s perfor-
mance’ did indeed gain him ‘a job on the old telly’ (Cook 1998, p. 12).
The play’s structure invites consideration of how the impulses discussed
by Hoggart may have motivated what came to be seen as class betrayal –
Barton’s present-tense at home and Oxford is intercut with scenes from
his childhood. However, this too is rooted in performance and subjec-
tive creation rather than objective report. Barton’s performances at the
Oxford Union and on television are related to his childhood storytelling,
when he blames Georgie Pringle for an act of vandalism Barton com-
mitted and watches as others corroborate his untrue story. Barton was
unpopular at school because of his intelligence. In the present, Pringle’s
stand-up comedy attack on students is related to Barton’s Oxford Union
speech about his background. Potter, therefore, ‘seeks to implicate this
“working-class hero” as a self-publicising fraud who is a traitor to his
class’, a ‘class comic’ with puns operating on ‘class’ (school, social
class, breeding) and ‘standing up’ (childhood orders to obey, acting on
principle, stand-up comedy) (ibid., p. 35).
The play’s style signposts the subjectivity of the flashbacks: for
instance, at Oxford, Barton sticks his tongue out at the camera via his
shaving mirror; a mix replaces him in the frame with his childhood
teacher telling us (repeating an earlier sequence) that ‘clever children
from common homes like his have to be, shall I say, separated from their
backgrounds. I say nothing controversial’. In profile, Barton begins to
repeat his earlier statement (‘I remember, I remember the school where
I was born’) but breaks off, turns to the camera and says, with excessive
emphasis, ‘torn’. In a wide-shot, Barton sits alone at his desk but (due to
a cut) is then seen with the rest of his class. All the children are played
by adult actors, underlining that childhood formed him but also that
these flashbacks are the adult Barton’s subjective memories: the ‘highly
fluid structure’ is ‘governed less by narrative chronology than associative
psychological connections’ (ibid., p. 40).
This structure results in a characteristic Potter memory play, but in the
context of the New Wave/Hoggart era adds an extra layer. As Caughie
argues, the British New Wave films were ‘made from outside the class
which they represented’, lending the working class ‘the romance of the
Other’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 85). This, however, is in contrast to television
drama, which more firmly ‘rooted itself in a particular experience of
class from the inside’. This partly explains why so many dramas ‘took
as their theme the dislocations of class mobility’ (ibid). Such divisions
are of course not always so clear-cut. Alan Lovell noted the Hoggartian
‘structure of feeling’ of A Taste of Honey, an example of how New Wave
films took as their ‘point of enunciation’ a view of ‘someone deeply
implicated in and familiar with what is being observed: someone who
has left that life behind, yet with a considerable sense of loss in moving
through the educational system’, using ‘the knowledge of the insider
combined with the distance achieved by the move outside and beyond’
(Lovell 1990, p. 370).
As Cook observed, although practitioners’ attempts to ‘question
received notions of the real, particularly those of habituated TV
naturalism’ are often associated with the ‘documentary realism’
of Ken Loach, Potter’s particular ‘non-naturalism’ or ‘psychological
expressionism’ is also very much part of this process. Potter’s ‘non-
naturalistic’ techniques are less ‘an evasion of the real’ than ‘an alter-
native means of “expressing” reality’ (Cook 1998, p. 30). Cook relates
this to Williams’s discussion of how certain literary texts between 1890
and 1920 that tried to ‘show the physical world as a dynamic rather
than a merely passive and determining environment’, were ‘described
as moves beyond realism and naturalism’, but were arguably attempting
rather ‘to realise more deeply’ the ‘original impulses of the realist and
naturalist movements’ (Williams 1977/78, p. 2).
The ‘desire to experiment’, which Laura Mulvey sees as ‘a thread
running through the history of British television’, is keenly debated
in this period, from the Langham Group to Studio 4 (Mulvey 2007,
p. 1). Potter joined the debate on ‘non-naturalism’ generated by writer
Troy Kennedy Martin’s ‘Nats Go Home’ article of 1964. Kennedy Martin

attacked naturalism and called for a new televisual grammar, describing
television naturalism as a ‘makeshift bastard born of the theatre and
photographed with film techniques’, which because it ‘evolved from
a theatre of dialogue’ restricted directors who were ‘forced into pho-
tographing faces talking and faces reacting’ and would ‘retreat into the
neutrality of the two- and three-shot’ (Kennedy Martin 1964, pp. 24–5).
A new form of drama should ‘free the structure from natural time’ and
‘exploit the total and absolute objectivity of the television camera’ (ibid.
1964, p. 25). One manifestation of this project was Diary of a Young
Man (1964), written by Kennedy Martin (with John McGrath, whose
own later Brechtian work sought new forms) and directed by Ken Loach
and Peter Duguid. Diary of a Young Man featured narration, ‘montage
sequences of still images’, and a ‘degree of experiment and innova-
tion’ amid a ‘collage of different forms’ that engaged with critiques of
naturalism (Cooke 2003, pp. 65–6).
However, such ‘encounters and transformations’ of realism are also
marked in mainstream forms such as soap opera. Early episodes of Coro-
nation Street, for example, addressed ‘class dislocations’ (Caughie 2000a,
p. 85) and ‘tapped into the new mode of social realism’ through ‘iconog-
raphy, character types and storylines’ (Cooke 2003, p. 33). Critics who
felt that Stand Up Nigel Barton’s depiction of a working-class character
‘uprooted from his class through education’ had ‘become a media com-
monplace by 1965’ (Cook 1998, p. 32) had a point: Coronation Street’s
Ken Barlow had been engaging with such issues since 1960. Set in an
industrial working-class area, Coronation Street focused on ‘everyday life
as realised in common-sense speech and philosophy’ and ‘common-
sense [. . .] events’ (Dyer 1981, p. 4). But this common sense was also
historically specific and private, being ‘of a particular description in a
particular moment’ which was marked by Hoggart, who was ‘concerned
to “discover” and legitimate a tradition of culture that could authen-
tically be termed “working-class”’ (ibid., pp. 2–4). The ‘truth’ of the
representation was ‘guaranteed by being based on personal testimony’
(ibid., p. 4). That testimony came from the programme’s creator, Tony
Warren:
A fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten rules. These are the

driving forces behind life in a working-class street in the North of
England. The purpose of [working title] Florizel Street is to examine a
community of this nature, and to entertain.
(Warren 1969, p. 58)
Soap opera echoed Hoggart’s concern with ‘a view of class that is essen-
tially anthropological, in which it is primarily the sum of its cultural
practices, its shared routines, values and habits, focused at the level of
“everyday life”’ (Lacey 1995, p. 75). Various studies have compared the
programme’s view of class with Hoggartian structures of feeling. Richard
Dyer traced how ‘four aspects of The Uses of Literacy – the empha-
sis on common sense, the absence of work and politics, the stress on
women and the strength of women, and the perspective of nostalgia –
inform Coronation Street and indeed come close to defining its fictional
world’ (Dyer 1981, p 4). Jordan related the programme to Hoggart’s
‘already wistfully nostalgic view of the industrial working classes of his
childhood’, which results in a ‘group-centred, warm-hearted, matriar-
chal, faintly comical’ view of the social, with a ‘belief in the essential
good-heartedness of “ordinary people”’ so marked as to epitomise Joan
Rockwell’s argument that ‘the fidelity of Realism is a fidelity to the
norms of a society rather than to its actuality’ (Jordan 1981, p. 29).
Coronation Street’s earliest episodes, packed with Ena Sharples’ observa-
tional but poetically acerbic dialogue, establish this nostalgic domestic
focus. If the programme’s strengths included its focus on ‘the role
of women’, its weaknesses involved a rose-tinted nostalgia for ‘a self-
contained community that was in reality in the process of disappear-
ing even as it was being established as a fictional TV community’
(Cooke 2003, p. 35). Reinforcing myths of non-metropolitan society
‘where blunt common sense and unsentimental affection raises peo-
ple above the concerns of industrialisation, or unions, or politics, or
consumerism’, Soap-Opera Realism’s conventions included explaining
situations by ‘psychological make-up’ or luck, omitting entirely social
or political explanations and contexts (Jordan 1981, p. 29). The pro-
gramme depicted work environments predominantly only when ‘they
affect people’s domestic lives’, because the ‘representation of personal
relationships is its bedrock and the plot is character-driven’ (Vice 2009,
p. 19). These criticisms echo responses to Hoggart’s own text, which
described it as ‘more a reflection of rather than a reflection on class and
its culture’ that marginalised working-class politics to focus sociolog-
ically on class identity at ‘the level of everyday practices and rituals’
(Lacey 1995, pp. 75–7).
What is interesting, however, given Jordan’s definition of ‘Soap-Opera
Realism’ as a specifically televisual form, is how the features of the
continuing serial impact upon, and interact with, social realist dis-
course. The ‘interweaving of narratives, and of the personal lives of
the characters’ in Coronation Street became ‘a distinctive feature of soap
opera’ (Cooke 2003, p. 35). Such techniques would later shape other
social realist forms. For Lacey, such serials ‘offered the possibility of
solving some of the problems associated with the dominant forms of
realism/naturalism’ given the serial’s potential for ‘more fluid narra-
tive structures’ and a lack of ‘closure’ (Lacey 1995, p. 118).3 Hoggart’s
sense of ritual finds an echo in soap’s temporal structure and ritualistic
transmission patterns. Soap has been described as inherently natural-
istic, presenting an ‘unmediated, unprejudiced and complete view of
reality’ (Jordan 1981, p. 28).4 The legacy of early practices was strongly
felt: Coronation Street’s as-for-live techniques persisted even when live
broadcasts were phased out after its first decade.
A number of Coronation Street’s early narrative concerns had corre-
lations with the New Wave. University student Ken Barlow clashes
with his traditional working-class father as early as the first episode
(9 December 1960, written by Tony Warren), displaying embarrassment
at domestic details such as the sauce bottle on the table. Like Potter’s
Stand Up Nigel Barton, this displays Hoggart’s point that ‘the test of
[the scholarship boy’s] real education lies in his ability, by about the
age of twenty-five, to smile at his father with his whole face’ (Hoggart
1957, p. 239). In another episode (12 February 1962), neighbour Martha
Longhurst says of Ken, ‘I don’t think he likes us. Have you ever noticed
the way he smiles and narrows his eyes?’ Other episodes revisiting New
Wave themes include a Blackpool trip (16 October 1961, written by Jack
Rosenthal) in which Ken displays an anger with the trivial that echoes
Hoggart, along with Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland and other texts
from the period:
Masstopia here we come [. . .] they work hard for fifty weeks of the
year to save up for this – a fortnight in Blackpool. Chipshops, stink of
onions, lights, some imbecile sideshow, the dirty great concrete fair-
ground, and they’re happy – or so they think [. . .] They don’t know
any better, they live in dumps like Coronation Street [. . .] People
deserve better than this.
Sue Vice notes from Valerie’s reply that ‘Ken’s outlook is that of an
educated white-collar worker’ who ‘does not value’ his father’s work
as postman nor other street residents’ jobs as builder, publican, bus
inspector or the ‘service industry jobs’ of the women (Vice 2009, p. 18).
Ken considers the New Wave trope of escaping from the ‘limited ambi-
tions and philistine cultural outlook’ of the North to the ‘new freedom’
of London and the South (Lacey 1995, pp. 79–80). In one episode
(22 November 1961, written by H. V. Kershaw), Ken’s refusal to be

a ‘little cog in a big machine’ in white-collar work, and subsequent
family arguments, result in Ken contemplating leaving, though only
getting as far as a smoke-filled train station before neighbour Christine
persuasively argues that ‘it’s not home you leave, it’s people’. Soap’s
open-ended narrative form lends these decisions retrospective pathos:
the programme’s fiftieth anniversary year found Ken still resident.
In an episode that foreshadowed Potter’s work (12 February 1962,
written by Robert Holles), the local newspaper quotes Ken’s article for
left wing political review Survival. To his neighbours’ fury, Ken describes
them as ‘lazy minded, politically ignorant, starved of a real culture
and stubbornly prejudiced against any advance in human insight and
scientific insight’. Ken’s writing echoes Hoggart:
while the British Empire bursts open at the seams the young people
collect in shadowy coffee bars to discuss the latest discs. The mid-
dle aged are hunched complacently over their television sets and the
elderly sit half-starved and shivering in damp terraced boxes [ . . . ] the
regulars would still gather in the local pub, swill beer, throw darts,
and discuss the usual topics – the quality of the bitter, the prospect
of the 3.15 and the latest scandal from their own little corner of our
smouldering national compost heap.
The episode focuses on Ken’s neighbours’ responses to this. Explaining

this situation with recourse to psychological rather than social factors
reflects the New Wave’s ‘tendency to reduce social relations to individ-
ual characteristics’ (Hill 1986, p. 139), as Ken is either ‘a very nice class
of boy’ (Annie Walker), a damn sight ‘too clever’ (Len Fairclough), or
someone who ‘hasn’t had the experience of life that we’ve had’ (Albert
Tatlock). Elsie Tanner suggests the others are ‘jealous’, while Annie
thinks the article is ‘miles above their heads’. Ken’s criticism of those
distracted by ‘pretty toys’ like ‘dishwashers and tellies’ clashes with his
father’s view that ‘there’s nowt wrong [. . .] with being loyal to your own
class’. Intriguingly, we first see Ken and his father together when shar-
ing their bathroom, both in string vests about to shave, similar in their
class-evoking habits (unlike Ken’s first-episode discomfort about a sauce
bottle). The eventual showdown, in which Len Fairclough punches Ken
unconscious in the local pub is an insider-outsider clash redolent of New
Wave discourses: Len describes this ‘walking flaming dictionary’ as ‘the
angry young man’. The idea of New Wave discourse as cultural tourism
is raised in subsequent episodes, when Ken’s article attracts sightseers to

the street.
This chapter’s focus on drama is necessary, but it is important to also
note that other genres made a vital contribution to social realist dis-
course and the spirit of challenge in 1960s television. For instance, many
episodes of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe and Son (1962–74)
invoked, and occasionally critiqued, New Wave tropes. The contempo-
rary rhetoric of social mobility, generational tensions, the interrelation-
ship of domestic and work spaces (symbolized in the Steptoes’ junkyard
home/premises) and the stressing of practical limitations on narratives
of escape are explored through the experiences of autodidactic rag-and-
bone man Harold and his traditionalist father, ‘dirty old man’ Albert.
Its one-off pilot was as tough as much single drama, but by the early
1970s Raymond Williams, then a television reviewer, worried that the
series form ‘prevents any full working-through’ (Williams 1989, p. 124).
Self-contained episodes require a weekly return to the status quo, a
narrative structure that has been described as ‘circular’, allowing ‘little
room for progression’ in comparison with single drama or soap, prompt-
ing accusations that it is ‘a conservative form’ (Bowes 1990, p. 129).
Coronation Street and Steptoe and Son demonstrate that series should
not be neglected as an outlet for serious social realist engagement.
However, it would be practitioners working in drama-documentary and
single drama who were to emphasize the importance of finding a more
progressive form.
Days of Hope: defining radical realism in the 1970s
Play strands like Armchair Theatre, The Wednesday Play and Play for Today
provided a space for original contemporary dramas, encouraging per-
sonal expression, aesthetic experimentation or political radicalism. Play
for Today is a particularly useful case study because its ‘dominant aes-
thetic’ is often ‘perceived to be that of social realism’ (Cooke 2003,
p. 95). However, its plays included many genres, styles and techniques,
many of which were dominated by studio recording (the number of
slots for all-filmed plays were limited), and naturalism. Its dramas tack-
led various social concerns and experiences, from Glasgow sectarianism
in Peter McDougall’s Just Another Saturday (1975) to British-Jewish expe-
rience in Jack Rosenthal’s comic-realist Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) and Black
British experience in Horace Ové’s A Hole in Babylon (1979). The follow-
ing discussion restricts itself to two forms of realist filmed plays deriving
from Play For Today: those in a cinematic lineage (British New Wave,
Czech social cinema, Italian neo-realism) combining observation and

aestheticism, and radical drama-documentaries such as Ken Loach and
Jim Allen’s The Big Flame (1969) which became ‘embroiled in a debate
among left-wing critics about transparency, objectivity and realism,
and the latter’s efficacy in promoting political activism’ (Leigh 2002,
pp. 96–7).5
The extension of location filming was as valued in television as it was
elsewhere. The movement was ‘out of the drawing-rooms’ and it made
the ‘particular aesthetic and cultural mix’ associated with ‘Northern
working-class realism’ seem like ‘a revolution in postwar British cul-
ture’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 95), paralleling realist cinema’s efforts to leave
behind what VF Perkins called ‘the “phoney” conventions of charac-
ter and place characteristic of British studio procedure’ (Taylor 2006,
p. 17). In television, ‘the electronic studio with its historical depen-
dence on the spoken word and a more theatrical form of naturalism’
was joined by ‘a new realism that was closer to cinema than the theatre’
(Cooke 2003, p. 77). This does not mean that television must lose its
specificity and become like cinema to be social realist, however. Televi-
sion was to generate its own distinctive practices. When Loach sought
a form for Up the Junction (1965), writer Nell Dunn’s collage of observed
experiences among working-class women in Clapham, the precedent
set as it ‘breached the walls of the television studio’ would ‘change the
nature of TV drama’ (ibid., p. 70). Its developments were hard-earned:
the BBC resisted Loach’s use of 16mm stock in drama because it was
seen as a stock for ‘news, current affairs and documentaries’, that is as
inferior to 35mm stock (Hayward 2004, p. 60). Loach in consequence
circumvented BBC rules about shooting at least 10 per cent of dramas
in the studio on video, by shooting studio scenes in quasi-documentary
style and editing on the 16mm back-up print, to match the look to the
location footage.
Social realism’s concern with observing everyday detail, creating as
Jordan called it ‘a narrative of personal events’ and spending ‘time at
the expense of the characters’ often results in narratives that resist con-
ventional structure. Many filmed dramas between the 1960s and 1980s
share the neo-realist belief, as explained by André Bazin, that cinema
should capture the ‘dailiness’ of life through narrative that ‘unfolds
on the level of pure accident’ (Bazin 1967, pp. 58–9), respecting the
‘phenomenological integrity’ of events rather than using characters as
functionaries of narrative causality (ibid., p. 52). Given that, as Loach
said of Up the Junction, ‘when you put together incidents and anecdotes
from people’s lives, they do add up to a set of experiences that indicate
the way they live and why they live that way’ (Fuller 1998, p. 13), writers
like Alan Plater resisted ‘conventional narrative’ by prioritising ‘people
being’ themselves over ‘people doing’ or ‘inventing stuff to happen to
people’ (Rolinson 2007, p. 31).6
In an example of dailiness manifested in repetition and ritual, Mike
Leigh’s television debut Hard Labour (1973) depicted Mrs Thornley’s
unceasing domestic duties as a char, mother and wife (in effect unpaid
char). Garry Watson noted that ‘nothing much occurs in the way of
external action’, but if this is undramatic (the style shares the ‘undemon-
strative’ quality that Watson notes of Mrs Thornley) there are dramatic
elements beneath the surface, including a ‘spiritual crisis’ (Watson 2004,
p. 46). Raymond Carney and Leonard Quart argue that Hard Labour’s
‘sensory experiences’, which include Mr. Thornley’s hairy back which
his wife rubs to alleviate rheumatism, ‘half-eaten food’, scraping sil-
verware and ‘burps, belches, groans, and grunts’ (Carney and Quart
2000, p. 54), are a reaction against the ‘cinematic idealization’ by which
‘Hollywood film systematically dephysicalizes experience’ (ibid., p. 52).
As I have noted elsewhere, Watson related Leigh’s early work to Andrew
Klevan’s readings of Robert Bresson, Milos Forman, Yasujiro Ozu and
Eric Rohmer as filmmakers who ‘disclose’ rather than ‘transform’ the
‘everyday’, depicting ‘a range of life experiences’ neglected by conven-
tional cinema, ‘based around the routine or repetitive, the apparently
banal or mundane, and the uneventful’ (Watson 2004, p. 19, cited in
Rolinson 2010, p. 173).
The style of rigorous art directors like Bresson and Ozu informs some
of these films. In the repetition of static frames, for example, in which
the movement comes from characters within the frame, in elliptical
narratives downplaying causality, and the use of confining frames that
isolate hands and feet working at repetitive tasks, and in unadorned
performances indicative of submerged articulacy. In the 1970s, director
Alan Clarke applied such techniques to themes of alienation, repe-
tition and institutionalisation in topics including Sandhurst military
training, prison life, incest and borstal brutality. Similarly, Czech social
cinema influenced the (in its turn influential) placid style of Ken Loach,
which he described as a ‘reflective, observed, sympathetically lit style of
photography’ (Fuller 1998, pp. 38–41).
Some of these plays use space in a way that engages with the rhetoric
of realist cinema such as the British New Wave, for instance when the
aforementioned elements of style are applied to industrial locations. For
example, Stephen Frears’ direction of Sunset Across the Bay (1975) (from
Alan Bennett’s script about a retired couple’s relocation from Leeds to
Morecambe) includes highly formal extreme long shots. When these

depict Dad walking home from his last day of work, the juxtaposition
of visual style with Dad’s voice-over, recalling events from his working
life, results in a much more melancholic journey than those of New
Wave protagonists such as Arthur Seaton, whose assertions of masculin-
ity are often depicted via more subjective and mobile techniques. Small
in the frame, Dad enters and leaves shots that are composed in hor-
izontal quarters or thirds. This establishes a contrast with the ‘open,
sparse frames’ of sky-dominated landscapes he walks in Morecambe, just
as retirement ‘destabilises [. . .] comfortable routine’ (McKechnie 2007,
p. 60) and leaves the characters struggling to adapt to a life without
work. If there is a play of nostalgia here, it is a variation on the nos-
talgia for a changing way of life that characterizes Hoggartian social
realism. The bulldozing of slum housing in the Leeds of Sunset Across
the Bay and the Hull of Land of Green Ginger (1974) reflects real alter-
ations. Agreeing with Jane Jacobs’ writing on urban planning, the writer
of the latter play, Alan Plater, argued that the enforced relocation of
communities had negative effects and that there was a need for ‘walk-
able streets’ (Rolinson 2007, p. 296). Both plays juxtapose traditional
community with comfortable but unattractive alternatives, where bull-
dozed properties serve as metaphors for fragmented communities, but
also as breaches in the topography of social realism, a trope followed
through in more radical terms in Alan Clarke’s Road (1987).
If Coronation Street demonstrated the ‘absence of work and politics’,
social realist plays often foregrounded their presence (Dyer 1981, p. 4).
In Leeds – United! (1974) for example, workplace politics are central
to the play’s female protagonists (some of whom are played by future
Street actresses). Such plays were not alone in presenting a ‘sympathetic
portrayal of unionised factory life’ (Wagg 1998, p. 9): a mainstream sit-
com such as Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney’s The Rag Trade (BBC
1963–65, ITV 1977) could too. That series’ female sweatshop workers
are represented by Paddy, whose ‘Everybody out!’ catchphrase endeared
affection as she voiced her identity as ‘a militant on behalf of her class,
rather than herself’ (ibid.). The Rag Trade’s sitcom format provided (play-
ful) restoration of the status quo, whereas Leeds – United!, despite writer
Colin Welland’s wit and depiction of hope, provided damning closure in
its depiction of the alleged betrayal by unions of the 1970 Leeds clothing
workers’ strike for gender-equal pay.
In a post-transmission discussion programme In Vision – a regular
point of so-called balance for controversial material and a critically
neglected forum for the popular interrogation of concepts such as social
realism, Leeds – United!’s ambitious large-scale reconstructions were

compared with Look North news footage of the real incidents the play
reconstructed. In Vision’s findings were positive, but posed questions to
those who experienced the real events here dramatized – ‘How near to
the facts was it? [. . .] Did you recognize yourself?’ – which suggested a
view of social realism that frustrated some critics. Potter found it ‘down-
right insulting’ that In Vision was ‘discussing not the relevance, not the
discoveries, not the insights of the play but its mere documentary “accu-
racy”’ (Potter 1974, p. 671). Indeed, although Leeds – United! intercuts
footage of sweatshop conditions with workers’ testimony about these
conditions, director Roy Battersby’s use of black-and-white film was a
choice made less for documentary veracity than for aesthetic reasons.
Producer Kenith Trodd noted cinematic influences such as Eisenstein,
Pontecorvo and Pabst ‘which in aspiration [ . . . ] we wanted to relate
more closely than many current models’ (In Vision). The play’s visual
scope is established in its opening scene, a developing crane shot which
follows a woman worker along noirishly-lit early-morning streets while
a voice-over details her limited new contract.
The texts discussed so far invite comparisons with the criticisms of the
aestheticization of experience that were made of realist cinema, from the
British New Wave to Humphrey Jennings’s poetic documentaries. For
instance, while on the one hand the Hull filming of Land of Green Gin-
ger demonstrated the creative vitality of BBC English Regions Drama’s
reflection of the regions in national slots, The Times worried that ‘this
was not so much a play as a montage of Hull [ . . . ] The setting was evi-
dently more important than the plot’, while the Evening News wondered
even more pointedly whether ‘getting the TV cameras out on full-scale
location’ was ‘in danger of becoming a substitute for a good play’ (cited
in Rolinson 2007, p. 293). Elsewhere, I have related these concerns to
debates amongst VF Perkins and the Movie tradition, Andrew Higson
and John Hill, regarding the functions served by locations in British New
Wave films (ibid., p. 293). These debates disputed the ability of locations
to ‘connect their characters effectively with their environments’, and
considered the tensions arising between the needs to ‘authenticate the
fiction by being easily read as real historical places’ and form a space for
interesting narrative action (Taylor 2006, pp. 14–17). The Movie criticism
of the ‘obtrusiveness’ of the display of place, which Higson later defined
as ‘surface realism’ concerned with ‘iconography’, related that inability
to penetrate the surface to ‘a correspondence between the form of a film
and its actual content’ (ibid., p. 18). Such criticisms of neo-realist and
New Wave filmmakers therefore posit the idea of a type of realism that
could delve beneath the surface, equally radical in content and form,
and several drama-documentaries would focalize this theoretical debate.
Like television plays, drama-documentary has engaged with ways
of suggesting ‘an unmediated, unprejudiced and complete view of
reality’ (Jordan 1981, p. 28). Accordingly, its narrative and technical
artistry has also been underestimated as art, and critiqued as deceptive.
Drama-documentary is often accused of duping viewers by blurring the
boundaries between fact and fiction – based on the problematic assump-
tion that documentary is an objective form lacking the dramatic features
of narrative, performance and subjectivity that would corrupt it. But
Paget notes critics who consider drama-documentary to fail as drama
because its ‘journalistic values’ and adherence to legal issues in depicting
real situations override ‘dramatic values’ and creative invention (Paget
1998a, p. 198). For reasons of space, while we must not entirely elide
the distinctions made by Caughie between drama-documentary types –
‘documentary drama’ (a dramatic fiction whose factual value resides in
detailed research and quasi-documentary visuals), and ‘dramatised doc-
umentary’ (in which documentary processes are uppermost, but which
also feature dramatization) – the following discussion will focus on the
‘documentary drama’ type (Caughie, 1980). Drama-documentary nev-
ertheless contains hugely varied practices, from the dialectical force of
Peter Watkins’ Culloden (1964) and banned nuclear piece The War Game
(1965) to the Leslie Woodhead/Granada/World in Action tradition of
journalism given a wider social reach in drama such as Who Bombed
Birmingham? (1990) (a continuation of World in Action’s investigation
into the Birmingham Six’s conviction). Despite being called a ‘bastard
form’, drama-documentary has a ‘distinctive aesthetic’ and ‘particu-
lar dynamics of narrative’ that bear on discussions of televisual social
realism (Corner 1996, p. 31).
I will focus on the techniques associated with director Ken Loach,
producer Tony Garnett and writer Jim Allen. Their productions, as a
team and separately, are landmarks of drama-documentary and televi-
sion social realism. These drama-documentaries are characterized by ‘a
pronounced social critique [ . . . ] usually focused through “underdog”
protagonists; filming techniques that place a premium on immediacy
(from which authenticity can be inferred); and acting styles that stressed
the underplayed and improvisational’ (Paget 1998a, p. 158). Cathy Come
Home (1966) presented writer Jeremy Sandford’s detailed research as
scripted drama, with actors playing fictional characters whose slide
into homelessness delivered an emotional impact with stylistic imme-
diacy. Cathy and Reg’s micro-story is located within the macro-story of
the social problem by voice-overs of real-life testimony and statistics

(features only of Loach’s earlier work). Fiction is integrated with docu-
mentary references and factual content via real audio testimony playing
over images of actors in the social environment, or shots of bystanders
unconnected to the narrative, as in the devastating scene in which
social workers take Cathy’s children from her in a train station. This
scene begins with long-distance cameras of which real bystanders are
unaware. The children’s removal is filmed with markers of reactive doc-
umentary style (the alteration of shot size, reframing, zooming and
refocusing, panning, and apparently accidental camera movements and
compositions, including shots in which our view is restricted). Drama-
documentary techniques can therefore be said to have ‘caught a real
incident and filmed it within the limitations which such filming entails’,
replacing the ‘composure of mise-en-scène’ (Corner 1996, p. 99) with the
‘rhetoric of the “unplanned” or “unpremeditated” shot – the camera
surprised by the action’ as part of an ‘aesthetic of immediacy’ (Caughie
1980, p. 28). Other devices aiding Loachian immediacy include shooting
in continuity order, withholding completed scripts, and valuing ‘actors
who could pretend not to be actors, who could sound unrehearsed’:
indeed, Cathy’s experiences with officials demonstrate a ‘reversal’ of
norms in performance whereby ‘traditional skills of impersonation came
to mean insincerity, and not quite knowing your lines meant you were
speaking the truth’ (Caughie 2000b, pp. 165–6).
Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home inaugurated what Cooke calls a
‘progressive, social realist tradition’ which can be traced through numer-
ous works such as Jeremy Sandford and Ted Kotcheff’s Edna, the Inebriate
Woman (1971), Roy Minton and Alan Clarke’s Scum (1977) and Jim Allen
and Roland Joffé’s The Spongers (1978) (Cooke 2003, p. 95). The Spongers
is an acclaimed example. Allen and Joffé researched care provisions and
local government, observed the withdrawal of mentally-handicapped
children from a home, and produced a drama on the effects of wel-
fare cuts on the poor and disabled which was both compelling human
tragedy and urgent social report. Its refusal of stereotypes of the poor as
cheats or parasites is underlined by the play’s opening scenes: Pauline’s
family being interrupted by a bailiff is juxtaposed with preparations for
Jubilee celebrations outside, where hoardings of the Queen and Prince
Philip appear. Over those Royal images, ‘The Spongers’ title frame is
superimposed, a subversive touch added after BBC1’s controller had
approved the play. Its social realist value lies in its presentation of the
human impact of politics, both on those enforcing the system and on
families such as Pauline’s, whose suffering as a result of welfare cuts and
convoluted bureaucracy culminates in a resolution that is as tragic as the

‘because we were too many’ scene in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
Deborah Knight related this period’s ‘telenaturalism’ to Émile Zola’s
literary naturalism:
Like the experimental scientist, the naturalist does not set out merely
to record or to document some aspect of the observed world; instead,
in an attempt to explain what she has observed, the naturalist records
in controlled conditions [ . . . ] something she has previously observed
in an actual environment.
(Knight 1997, p. 61)
Directors positioned themselves as observers and presented characters

in debilitating environments, creating a ‘naturalistic perspective’ and
asking us ‘to recognize that, given the social and cultural contexts in
which these characters act, things could scarcely have been otherwise’
(ibid., pp. 76–7). The following will consider complaints lodged against
these methods by film critics, television executives and theorists.
Sight and Sound criticised Riff-Raff (1990) on the basis that it demon-
strated Loach’s ‘confusion’ of realism (a ‘literary/dramatic convention’)
with real life (‘what you see is how it is’) (Wilson 1991, p. 61).
The reviewer doubted that ‘television audiences, accustomed to seeing
through the “realist” masks of Coronation Street or EastEnders’ would be
‘seduced’ by the film’s ‘unfocused naturalism’ (ibid.). Rather than trying
to dupe viewers into accepting that dramatic events were real, however,
Loach claimed he simply could not make his films in a wholly documen-
tary style, and they were made as fiction films. Therefore, Loach said
that ‘I shoot a scene from two or three angles’, and ‘repeat the action
for each set-up’, so that he ‘can cut it together’, but uses ‘little tricks of
the trade’ so that it might ‘look as though it is happening for the first
time’ (Hill 1997, p. 169). As Bazin stated of neo-realism, ‘realism in art
can only be achieved in one way – through artifice’ (Bazin 1971, p. 26).
Rather than an absence of style, these techniques of realism were part of
the highly personal style and shared values of Loach, Clarke and their
contemporaries.
The polarized political climate which gave much television social real-
ism its urgency in the 1970s also narrowed institutional support, with
bans and interventions that were blamed, not always convincingly, on
drama-documentary’s discourses of immediacy. In 1969 the BBC warned
that ‘well-acted dramas’ on ‘real-life material’ like Cathy Come Home and
Tony Parker’s Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It (1969) troubled viewers’
ability to rely on ‘conventions’ to ‘distinguish’ fact from fiction (Anon.

1969, p. 4). In a joint reply, Garnett, Trodd, Loach and others argued
that because accusations of duping were not made against the fictional
Alf Garnett regarding his attending real football matches, ‘this is an
argument about content, not about form’. They argued that broadcast-
ers, while enjoying the occasional easily manageable controversy for
preserving their post-Pilkington ‘liberal and independent image’, were
all too ready to ‘censor or ban’ programmes on ‘social and political
attitudes not acceptable to us’ (Garnett et al. 1969, p. 2). The BBC sub-
sequently banned Scum, a violent account of abuses in borstals, and the
BBC’s stated reasons suggest a resistance to techniques also vital to social
realist discourses: naturalistic narratives compressing real events, a style
that they found too convincing in its immediacy, and tough social com-
mentary taking positions that lacked the balance which they saw as
inherent in factual programmes (although factual programme makers
disagreed).7
The single play’s presentation of radical work to mass audiences ener-
gized consideration of its impact. Trodd summed up the ‘heady fantasy’
of programme makers through reference to Loach and Allen’s The Big
Flame as a ‘powerful “what if” parable about workers’ occupation’ which,
because it was ‘seen by a vast unfragmented audience on Wednes-
day night’, might produce ‘a walkout around the country by Thursday
morning’ (Trodd 1999, p. 16). The ‘Loach/Garnett innovation of tak-
ing television drama out onto the streets and making it look like news
footage’ had been seen as a new development, and allied to theories
about forms of realism that could effect political or economic change,
their work moved to ‘the forefront of debates’ on political form (Cooke
2003, p. 76).
Loach and Allen’s The Big Flame, The Rank and File (1971) and Days
of Hope (1975) depicted working people in industrial disputes who were
betrayed by their own union leaders or Labour Party, revealing ongoing
political struggles and how, in Loach’s words, ‘England is founded on
a violent past’ and ‘the forceful suppression of dissent’ (Lyndon 1975,
p. 66). Days of Hope comprised four feature-length films, each of which
involved a major historical event: wartime conscription in 1916, the
miners’ strike of 1921, the short-lived first Labour government of 1924
and the General Strike of 1926. In these films Loach attempted to show
how ‘the lives of individual characters [ . . . ] fitted into the larger can-
vas of events’ (ibid.). Those events shape the political consciousness
its characters develop, from mainstream Labour to Communism, as the
series explored, according to producer Garnett, the Labour movement’s
debates about ‘the proper and most effective way of changing society –
whether through Parliament or by revolution’ (ibid., p. 69).
However, in theoretical debates on progressive form in the film jour-
nal Screen Loach and Garnett’s approach was itself queried as the proper
and most effective way of producing change, and Days of Hope was par-
ticularly critiqued for adopting the bourgeois form of costume drama
and the ‘closed’ form of the Classic Realist Text (Cooke 2003, p. 102).
Colin MacCabe’s ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian
theses’ (1974) delineated a position on progressive form which, accord-
ing to Colin McArthur in ‘Days of Hope’ (1975/6), stopped Screen from
‘contributing to public debates about television programmes like Days
of Hope which have acquired political importance as events’ (Caughie
2000a, p. 107). McArthur’s claims for Days of Hope’s progressiveness were
critiqued in MacCabe’s ‘Days of Hope: a response to Colin McArthur’
(1976). Raymond Williams’s ‘A Lecture on Realism’ (1977) provided the
debate with context, relating The Big Flame to a literary history of real-
ism and naturalism. Away from Screen, McArthur contributed the useful
monograph Television and History (1978). In related pieces, Caughie
explored ‘Progressive Television and Drama Documentary’ (1980) in
Screen while Sight and Sound published practitioner John McGrath’s
lecture ‘TV Drama: The Case Against Naturalism’ (1977), lamenting tele-
vision’s failure to answer former colleague Kennedy Martin’s call for
non-naturalistic form.
The ideological distinction between form and content dominated the
debate. Authored drama – from Days of Hope and Scum to Law and
Order (1978), GF Newman and Les Blair’s mini-series attacking police
and judicial corruption – was more politically radical than the British
New Wave. Defining an ‘aesthetics of immediacy’, Caughie noted that
drama-documentary discourses involve ‘systems of mediation (hand-
held camera, loss of focus, awkward framing) so visible as to become
immediate, apparently unrehearsed, and therefore authentic’, in con-
trast to the ‘classic paradox’ of the ‘dramatic look’ of conventional
screen grammar, which ‘creates its “reality effect” by a process of medi-
ation so conventionalized as to become invisible’ (Caughie 1980, p. 28).
However, when Loach’s work entered the debate, MacCabe argued
that it too was less progressive in its form than in its subject mat-
ter. Within realism’s conventions it is easier to show poverty than to
show ‘how such poverty is the effect of a particular economic system
or socially structured pattern of inequality’ (Hill 1986, p. 60). Days of
Hope was contentious because its techniques “‘naturalized” the events
depicted’ (Cooke 2003, p. 100); Loach’s work was related to naturalism
‘as a description of character formed by environment’ which could be

‘perceived as a passive form’ in which people were trapped ‘with no
possibility of changing their social lot’ (Cook 1998, p. 27). Lacking
Brechtian self-consciousness, Loach’s style was avowedly political, but
was just ‘not political in the right sort of way’ (Knight 1997, p. 70).
In MacCabe’s formulation, ‘radical political intentions’ were under-
mined when presented in a ‘Classic Realist Text’ (which Cathy Come
Home was as much as was The Sound of Music or Middlemarch). This
undermining occurs by virtue of ‘the illusion of transparency, narrative
closure, a concentration on individual drama and, therefore, an inabil-
ity to deal with the complexities and contradictions of a world in which
ideological forces determine lives’ (Leigh 2002, pp. 13–14). In film, the
camera, like ‘author-less’ third-person prose, ‘shows us what happens –
it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses’: therefore,
classic realism’s ‘epistemology’ is ‘empirical’, as ‘it is basically through
observation that the world is to be “revealed” and understood’ because
‘the unquestioned nature of the narrative discourses entails that the
only problem that reality poses is to go and look and see what Things
there are’ (MacCabe cited in Hill 1986, pp. 59–60). For Caughie, there is a
‘self-confirming discourse of truth’ at work in cinema’s own hierarchised
discourses (Caughie 2000a, pp. 111–12). These hierarchised discourses
include a ‘dramatic look’ in which spectators see the world through a
character’s point of view (this is an active look ‘cut into the narrative
space’ and with which characters both ‘look and are looked at’, gaining
‘reversibility’); by contrast, the ‘documentary gaze’ renders the object
‘passive’, a document gazed at (ibid). In Days of Hope, this gaze and its
denial of point of view and reversibility produce a ‘self-authenticating
discourse of truth’ whereby the integration of drama and documen-
tary discourses ‘can only be achieved by failing to dramatize the class
which is supposed to be becoming the subject of its own history’ (ibid.,
pp. 112–13).
Instead, for MacCabe, radical filmmaking must engage with ‘contra-
diction’, the ‘motor which drives history’. The ‘revolutionary subject’
must ‘experience itself as being in contradiction, incomplete, out of bal-
ance, in order that the next step must be taken to progress towards a
new position’ (ibid., p. 105). The classic realist text can show ‘the contra-
diction between the dominant discourse of the text and the dominant
ideological discourse of the time’ (MacCabe 1974, p. 16) – MacCabe
cites Days of Hope’s sympathetic presentation of the General Strike – but
it cannot progressively probe contradiction because its ‘secure equilib-
rium’ places us in a position of superior knowledge’ (Caughie 2000a,
pp. 105–6). McArthur cited a sequence from Days of Hope, in which

a mine-owner talks about ‘non-violent social democracy’ while in the
background ‘the soldiers who have been brought in to quell any distur-
bance are engaged in violent bayonet practice’ (ibid., p. 107), and was
‘not sure how such a scene fails to handle contradiction in MacCabe’s
terms’ (McArthur 1975/76, p. 143). MacCabe responded that there was ‘a
contradiction between what the mine-owner says and what the picture
shows’ but that ‘is exactly the classic realist form which privileges the
image against the word to reveal that what the mine-owner says is false’,
presenting ‘a contradiction which it has already resolved’ rather than ‘a
contradiction which remains unresolved and is thus left for the reader
to resolve (MacCabe 1976, p. 100). According to this critique, ‘McArthur
looks simply for contradiction in the text’ whereas for progressive
form ‘we must look at how contradiction is produced in the audience’
(ibid).
MacCabe’s formulation has been criticised as ‘brutal formalism’ (Lacey
2007, p. 101), which saw little difference between Days of Hope and The
Sound of Music and failed to allow for the importance of circumstances
specific to television such as matters of production and reception, and
for the fact that viewers were surely both ‘textual subjects’ and ‘social
subjects’ with their ‘own experience of contradiction’ and their own
awareness of media texts and contemporary events, as a result of which
the ‘conditions of progressiveness are highly contingent’ and difficult to
identify (Caughie 2000a, p. 108). Arguing that classic realism could not
produce political knowledge because observation alone cannot interro-
gate social and political relations (and so Loach’s techniques ‘effectively
militated against an explication of the social and economic forces lead-
ing to the collapse of the General Strike’), denies viewers’ sense of
contemporary developments (Hill 1986, p. 60). The ‘formal logic’ of
Days of Hope was said to limit the argument to individual betrayal by
trade union leaders (ibid., p. 61). Of course, that was partly its point –
Allen described the General Strike as an ‘opportunity for the creation
of a workers’ state’ which was ‘lost by the sell-out of the TUC, the
Labour Party and the Communist Party’ (Lyndon 1975, p. 69). Con-
trary to those criticisms of its use of the historical genre, Loach stressed
that ‘our motive for going into the past is not to escape the present:
we go into the past to learn lessons from it’ and show how the 1970s’
‘major crises of capital, trade union militancy, a threatened middle-class
[ . . . ], inflation and wage restraint [ . . . ] has happened before’; for Allen
the ‘message’ about the workers’ betrayal is ‘don’t let this happen again’
(ibid., pp. 66–9).
The debates’ preference for ‘avant-garde practice’ over ‘popular forms’

(as if, in McArthur’s complaint, work that challenged the Classic Real-
ist Text ‘must of necessity attract a smaller audience than works such
as Days of Hope’) has been described as ‘reactionary’ and not in keeping
with Brecht (Lacey 2007, p. 101). Williams criticised the idea that real-
ism was inherently bourgeois because although the bourgeoisie formed
it, it was developed by opponents such as ‘working-class and social-
ist movements’ (Williams 1977/78, p. 3). McArthur cited McGrath’s
Brechtian The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974) as evidence
that analytical work could pleasure a mainstream audience (McArthur
1978, p. 51). In television work such as Bill Brand (1976), Trevor
Griffiths valued working with ‘the popular imagination which has been
shaped by naturalism’, and felt ‘realistic modes’ facilitate ‘demystifying,
undistorted, more accurate, counter descriptions of political processes
and social reality than people get through other uses of naturalism’
(Millington and Nelson 1986, p. 17).
Accusing these realist drama-documentaries of a ‘transparency effect’
and ‘constructing a unity in the viewing subject’, furthermore underes-
timated their formal radicalism (Tulloch 1990, p. 9). Williams discussed
‘the character of the realism in The Big Flame’, whose shift from strike
to occupation to present a ‘politically imagined possibility’ displayed
a ‘fracture, between the familiar methods of establishing recognition
and the alternative method of a hypothesis within that recognition’
(Williams 1977, p. 69). There was a play between naturalistic dia-
logue and alternative views in voice-over; The Ballad of Joe Hill located
events within working-class history, and a statement that students can
have radical ideas ‘but if working men get them it’s dangerous’ (ibid.,
pp. 70–1) is made by a Judge so far ‘beyond the conventions of the
naturalist method’ that the effect is Brechtian (Tulloch 1990, p. 118).
Therefore, realist drama-documentaries of the 1960s can be said to
have displayed a willingness to ‘explore issues of form’ (Bignell et al.
2000, p. 88) and to have moved between modes in such a way as to
create ‘a degree of viewer disorientation’ (Corner 1996, p. 105). It was
precisely the willingness of Up the Junction to stretch ‘the boundaries
of representation and form’ that made it, according to Caughie, ‘much
more inventive’ than Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, despite broach-
ing similar subject matter (such as abortion) (Caughie 2000a, p. 123).
When Dennis Potter praised non-naturalistic television drama as a form
which ‘disorientates the viewer smack in the middle of the orientation
process which television habitually uses’, he observed that the best real-
ist drama, including ‘the Garnett-Loach-Allen school’, resists offering
viewers a cosy ‘means of orientating themselves towards the generally

received notions of “reality” [ . . . ] by the vigour, clarity, originality and
depth of its perceptions of a more comprehensive reality’ (Cook 1998,
p. 145). Williams’s call for a ‘counter-sense of realism’ could ‘complicate
definitions of style [ . . . ] for if “realism” can be opposed to “naturalism”,
realism could be seen as “non-naturalism”’ (Cook 1998, p. 27).
The ‘aesthetics of immediacy’ that Caughie described in television
‘has an affinity with naturalism as Lukács describes it’, whilst ‘cin-
ema has a similar affinity’ for ‘classic realist narrative’ (Caughie 2000a,
p. 122). Even if we accept that the ‘Classic Realist Text’ label applies to
television texts, it neglects ‘the different viewing conditions of television
drama’ and ‘its place in the flow of an evening’s entertainment’ (Lacey
2007, p. 101). Realist practitioners were aware of meanings generated
by their place in the schedules. Loach noted that ‘we were following
the news so we tried to work in the style of World in Action [ . . . ] so
that people didn’t think “we’ve had the facts and now we will have the
fiction” but rather “we’ve had the facts – now here’s some more facts
with a different point of view”’ (Hill 1997, p. 160). If ‘texts do their
work in contexts’, drama-documentary ‘occupied a progressive role’ not
only because it ‘introduced into the discourses of television a repressed
political, social discourse’, but because it might in turn shape the audi-
ence’s ‘scepticism of the other representations which television offers’
(Caughie 1980, pp. 33–4). For McArthur, once forms ‘cease to be unam-
biguously “fictional” and begin to look like the “factual” production of
the media’, filmmakers are ‘seen to pose a political threat’ (McArthur
1978, p. 294). To return briefly to the matter of the use of 16mm film
stock, which profoundly shaped the realist aesthetic in television – allied
to an ‘understanding of television’s flow and its characteristic hetero-
geneity’ – such stock imbued plays such as Cathy Come Home with ‘a
specifically televisual textuality’ (Mulvey 2007, p. 12). If ‘the specificity
of the televisual lies in the possibility of the immediate’, then exploring
‘an aesthetics of immediacy’ places the definition of realism in an inter-
weaving relationship with televisual specificity (Caughie 2000a, p. 122).
Such discourses have remained interlinked, but in recent years have
become subject to profound transformations.
End of the road or ‘the new social realism’?
This chapter has demonstrated how the provision, content and styles
of television social realism are ‘politically and historically contingent’
(Taylor 2006, p. 3), shaped by the ‘enabling discourse’ of broadcasting
policy and television’s specific techniques, genres and forms (Caughie

2000a, p. 87). This is underlined by the profound changes that have
occurred in the television landscape since the Screen debates of the
1970s. Thatcherite ideology shifted the ideological climate which made
those debates central to television practice and theory, and the ‘reac-
tionary 1980s’ saw a decline in single drama as a form ‘licensed’
for social comment (Bignell et al. 2000, p. 1). Legislation challenged
the Pilkington consensus which had safeguarded radical social drama.
Channel Four’s emergence in 1982 as a platform for diversity as a
result of the 1977 Annan Committee and subsequent 1980 Broadcast-
ing Act partly restated that consensus, but the 1990 Broadcasting Act
sparked a wave of deregulation and cultural concerns. The BBC/ITV
duopoly declined and both organizations were obliged to follow Chan-
nel Four’s lead and commission from independent companies. The
proliferation of digital television channels fragmented audiences and
restricted revenues, causing greater pressure on ratings and budgets,
with deregulation reducing the public service requirements for ITV and
other commercial channels. However, social realism persists in various
forms, including a ‘new social realism’ which negotiates these changing
institutions, forms and techniques in vibrant ways (Cooke 2005).
Shifts in ideology and form can be measured across 1980s social
realism. A serial of five linked plays, Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)
condemned the impact of unemployment caused by Conservative mon-
etarism. Aiming to ‘write about the Dole as seen from the point of view
of those who are on it’, writer Alan Bleasdale opposed the stereotyp-
ing of those unemployed as ‘malingerers and rogues’ (Millington and
Nelson 1986, p. 179). The final episode, ‘George’s Last Ride’, represents
‘Britain’s industrial decline and the “death of socialism”’ in the death of
trade unionist George Malone, who has retained a ‘fighting spirit’ miss-
ing in younger protagonists who have been ‘ground down’ (Cooke 2003,
pp. 132–3). George’s dying words, ‘I can’t believe there’s no hope . . .
I can’t’, trigger a shot of Liverpool’s now-derelict Albert Dock. If 16mm
determined the aesthetic of earlier drama, the fact that four out of the
serial’s five episodes were shot on video (within cheaper Outside Broad-
cast recording practices) underlines the programme’s different sense of
immediacy: these images served as ‘actuality footage of Liverpool’s dev-
astation’ and ‘specific records of the concrete destruction of people’s
working lives’. But this was ‘not a “documentary” drama in the tradi-
tion of Loach/Garnett/Allen’ (Pawling and Perkins cited in Cooke 2003,
p. 133). Indeed, Alan Lovell noted its origins in Bleasdale’s ‘critique
of the over-politicisation of working-class life’ in Loach/Garnett/Allen’s
work (Lovell 1984, p. 28). Malone’s death mirrors the decline of that
tradition, as he is played by Peter Kerrigan, who appeared in The Big
Flame, The Rank and File, Days of Hope and The Spongers. Lovell contex-
tualised Bleasdale’s drama in television’s social realist tradition but saw
new developments. Its success was attributed to a ‘balancing of black
comedy and sheer emotion’ according to producer Michael Wearing
(Millington 1984, p. 17) and to its ‘eclectic style’ which drew from ‘var-
ious film and TV genres’ (Millington and Nelson 1986, p. 13). The play
of forms is evident in episode ‘Yosser’s Story’, where a dream sequence
of Yosser leading his children into a pond featured ‘none of the markers
which separate dream from reality in film and television’, and according
to Caughie conflated surrealist and realist perspectives wherein ‘dream-
ing has as much logic as reality’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 177). The serial
therefore ‘seems realist in its apparent form’ but in its ‘lurches of sub-
jectivity, of not knowing how to read it, whether to laugh or cry’,
also somewhat paralleled, according to Caughie, ‘the modernist absurd’
(ibid., p. 178).
Road (1987) provides another distinctive approach to social real-
ist tropes in the depiction of a community devoid of work. The
Stage’s unease that director Alan Clarke applied ‘technical flair’ to Jim
Cartwright’s play and ‘social document’ (Smurthwaite 1987, p. 21)
continues critics’ ongoing concern with social realism ‘simultaneously
observing and aestheticising’ its subject matter, which Paget relates to
Mass Observation, the documentary film movement and the Royal
Court (Paget 1998b, p. 116). Indeed, Clarke’s style problematizes social
realism even as it evokes it. Traditional signifiers of realism include
a semi-hand-held camera following characters around actual locations
(in this case streets near Easington Colliery) in what Hill calls a ‘know-
able community’ (Hill 1999, p. 258); however, the camera’s smooth
movement is attached subjectively to characters and the play is highly
stylised (Hill 2000, p. 175). One character’s scream at the camera
demonstrates a refusal to be gazed at as the object of ethnography or
passive naturalism, and reverses the gaze in a form of active realism.
The dynamic, subjective Steadicam walking shot was Clarke’s signa-
ture device in the 1980s, making him, according to David Thomson,
a ‘poet for all those beasts who pace and measure the limits of their
cages’ (Thomson 1995, p. 133). A monologue by Valerie combines exple-
tives with rich poetic cadences, using animalistic language to describe
her unemployed husband as ‘a poor beast’ or a ‘wounded animal’. She
describes his enforced inactivity with numerous verbs (‘telling [ . . . ]
eating [ . . . ] squeezing [ . . . ] pissing [ . . . ] missing [ . . . ] shouting [ . . . ]
sulking’), and this juxtaposition of stasis and movement is captured in

Clarke’s style – in an unbroken walking shot which follows Valerie’s
frantic circular walk around a block, ultimately going nowhere, for
example. If, as Paget noted, the ‘sustained figurative language’ and
‘rhythmic resonances’ of the dialogue ‘run beyond’ what we expect
from social realism, this is matched by the camera-style (Paget 1998b,
pp. 114–15).
Interiors, shot in bare houses due for demolition, are made strange
through stark design and Clarke’s experimentation with lenses, as if
embodying Brecht’s pronouncement that a town set ‘must look like a
town that has been built to last precisely two hours’ as sets ‘need only
have the credibility of a place glimpsed in a dream’ (Brecht 1978, p. 233).
The desolation is physical, expressionistic and discursive: its interro-
gation of visual language meets Cartwright’s interrogation of spoken
language to foreground articulacy and state discourses. Taking place in a
structure of feeling concerned with ‘the dialogism expressed when lan-
guage and experience are recognised and articulated as a site of class
antagonism and struggle’ (Kirk 1999, p. 45), Road takes place in a dis-
cursive void in which the ‘new, militant conservatism’ has defeated the
‘organised working-class’ (Paget 1998b, p. 108). This results in a search
for articulacy in the climactic statement, ‘I never spoke such a speech in
my life [ . . . ] If I keep shouting somehow [ . . . ] I might escape’ (ibid.).
More broadly, however, New Wave tropes were updated or rendered
anachronistic in the 1980s: Hill noted how Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986)
inverted New Wave gender politics to re-gender public space (Hill 2000,
p. 75), while Clarke felt that ‘you couldn’t make a film like [Room
at the Top] now because unemployment had changed the landscape’
(Hutchinson 1987, p. 20). Coronation Street’s Rovers Return finds its dark
echo in Road’s Millstone pub, a carnivalesque scene of fire-eating and
stark design that ‘blows away the tidy referential codes of social realism,
re-siting the scene beyond humour and beyond reality’ (Paget 1998b,
p. 124). Not without reason has Clarke’s radical late 1980s style in tele-
vision films such as Elephant (1989) been described as ‘a terminus for
British social realism’ (Walsh 2000, p. 297).
Yet while radical drama sought new forms, popular social realism
remained robust. ‘Soap-Opera Realism’ particularly thrived as ratings
and economic pressures drove a proliferation of soaps. Channel Four’s
Brookside (1982–2003) began with writers like Jimmy McGovern tackling
social issues such as union politics with a realist style nearer sin-
gle drama than soap. Following Brookside’s social emphasis, EastEnders
(1985-present) aimed, according to its originating producer Julia Smith,
for ‘a realistic, fairly outspoken type of drama which could encompass

stories about homosexuals, rape, unemployment, racial prejudice etc. in
a believable context. Above all we wanted realism [ . . . ] we didn’t want to
fudge any issue except politics and swearing’ (Henderson 2007, p. 39).
Comedy continues to cover relevant content, from Dick Clement and
Iain La Frenais’ Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’s first season (1983), a ‘requiem for
the traditional working class community’ as declining heavy industry
causes British building workers to become ‘migrant workers’ in Europe,
to John Sullivan’s Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003), which played with
Thatcherite values in the black economy (Wagg 1998, p. 29). Some
comedies have gone further, however, and have approached a distinctive
social realist form. Glasgow-set Rab C. Nesbitt (1988 – present) combines
the settings and issues of the harshest single drama – from unemploy-
ment to drug addiction – with Rab’s non-naturalistic, poetic addresses
to camera which range from caustic social commentary to satirising
Scotland’s media depictions, including those of social realism. If social
realism ‘reveals the situation of the working-class at the level of its cul-
ture and everyday practices’, The Royle Family (1998-present) develops
a new sitcom-realist hybrid in its downplaying of narrative in favour
of the observation of detail (as the titular family watch television in
their living room) and the single-camera drama techniques used in its
observation of detail.
Police series have also served as a mechanism for social realism.
As chairman of independent World Productions, Tony Garnett main-
tains his ‘desire to address the popular audience’, which in today’s
climate seems more attainable in series (Lacey 2007, p. 7). In develop-
ing The Cops (1998–2000), Garnett felt that ‘a show about cops’ would
sell whilst ‘a series about social workers’ would not. But in practice the
format served as a ‘Trojan Horse’, in that ‘the uniforms will take us into
parts of society that we usually don’t enter’ and take audiences into
social drama (Lacey 2007, p. 145). Much landmark drama has used the
same principle, from Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker (1993–1996, 2006) to Z
Cars (1962–78), created by Kennedy Martin. Z Cars was as much a prod-
uct of the Pilkington report, drama-documentary discourse and debates
on naturalism as the case studies used in this chapter.
For Cooke, modern drama could be simultaneously popular and
serious, and the ‘blending’ of the Loach/Garnett/Allen tradition with
that of soaps was ‘indicative of a postmodern shift in the representa-
tion of social realism in twenty-first-century television drama’ (Cooke
2005, p. 188). This does not mean the Loach/Garnett/Allen tradition
should be viewed as a non-popular form, however – we have seen
radical practitioners’ desire to engage a popular audience – but Cooke’s

point underlines modern television’s distinctions. Similarly, Cooke’s
claim that Clocking Off ‘revitalised a genre that had seemed obso-
lete’ and put ‘the northern industrial working class back on to British
television screens’, may neglect other achievements. William Ivory’s
Common As Muck (1994–1997) combined harsh social realism, lively
humour and episodes that displayed the narrative and stylistic vari-
ety of single drama. Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (2007), on British Muslims’
experiences of post-9/11 anti-terror legislation, is just one example of
how drama-documentary remains a vital source of television social
realism.
However, Cooke has identified a vital development through which
social realist programming maintains a regular place in the modern
broadcasting landscape (Cooke 2003, p. 196). Hybridised narrative fea-
tures have not simply provided Trojan horses, but contain their own
strengths. Clocking Off ’s focus on ‘morality tales’ made it reject the
‘overt politics’ of television’s ‘classic social realism’ (Cooke 2005, p. 189),
while its ‘emphasis on the collective experience of the workplace’
brought ‘a social dimension’ (ibid., p. 187). Glen Creeber sees the var-
ious narrative perspectives at work in Shameless (2004–present) in the
context of an ‘insider’ view and a reflexive problematization of its own
sense of authenticity, which brings into focus the ‘outsider’ position-
ing by which, Creeber argues, the working class had been seen in much
previous British social realism (Creeber 2009, pp. 421–39).
Social realism in Shameless and Clocking Off operates within the
‘flexi-narrative’ form identified by Robin Nelson: a ‘fast-cut, segmented,
multi-narrative structure’ that ‘derives in part from soaps’ (Nelson 1997,
p. 24); according to Cooke, this ‘new form for a post-modern audience’
has both ‘a faster narrative pace’ and stylistic features such as ‘hand-
held camerawork, elliptical editing, unusual shot transitions, montages,
fantasy sequences and surreal inserts’ (Cooke 2003, p. 178). Clocking
Off developed ‘stylistic innovations’ such as ‘faster cutting, mobile
camerawork, a creative use of colour in the mise-en-scène [ . . . ] a lively
music track and energetic acting’. Its techniques have been described as
‘the new social realism’, a solution to the perception that British televi-
sion cannot ‘continue to tell stories using the old naturalist/realist forms
prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s’ (ibid., p. 178).
Social realism and television’s attempts at self-definition then exist in
an interweaving relationship. Television’s mirror on the ‘encounters and
transformations’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 68) experienced by social realism
illustrates that, as Taylor argues
it is the ‘conventionality’ of realism which makes its usage so vul-

nerable to change. As the conventions change (either in reaction to
previously established conventions or in accordance with new per-
ceptions of what constitutes reality) so too does our sense of what
then constitutes reality.
(Taylor 2006, p. 16).
Notes
1. Broadcasting was delayed by a wartime break between September 1939 and
June 1946. On the difficulties of attending to pre-1960s television, owing to
so many programmes either not being recorded or being subsequently wiped,
see Jacobs 2000.
2. This chapter necessarily simplifies issues of specificity. For discussion of the
possibility of a specific academic methodology for the study of television
(as opposed to importing English or Film Studies approaches) and the prob-
lematic definition of the television ‘play’, see Caughie 2000. For a discussion
of methodology for the study of television films as opposed to cinema films,
see Rolinson 2005 and 2010.
3. John Hill has written compellingly on the ideological impact of narrative
‘closure’ in mainstream cinema. See Hill 1986.
4. The description of soap as inherently naturalistic is problematized by some
1960s episodes of Coronation Street which feature flashbacks, non-diegetic
music referencing other genres, and psychological devices: for instance, a
Jack Rosenthal episode from 9 September 1964 includes a piano-scored film
sequence featuring angles and cuts reminiscent of the French New Wave, and
Florrie’s impending breakdown is signposted by the subjective distortion of
dialogue on the soundtrack.
5. For a discussion of the thematic and aesthetic continuities across television
films of the 1970s as suggestive of a cinema movement see Rolinson 2010.
6. For further discussion of neo-realism’s influence, including how these dramas
resisted causality in episodic narratives with repetitive scenes of characters
wandering real locations, how directors favoured understated acting styles
over studied performance, and how the neo-realist rejection of the star con-
cept extended to the casting of non-professional actors, club performers and
locals, see Rolinson 2005 and 2007.
7. See Rolinson 2005, pp. 74–93 for coverage of this ban.
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Index
7:84 Scotland, 61 The Ballad of Joe Hill, 200

Ballmer, Karl, 2
Ackland, Rodney Balzac, Honoré de, 1–2
The Pink Room, 60 Banham, Mary, 164
Absolute Hell, 60 Barbican, London, 144, 166
Aberystwyth, 167 Barstow, Stan
Ades, Dawn, 164 A Kind of Loving, 14, 83, 100–1
Adorno, Theodor, 14, 112–13, 118, Barthes, Roland, 14, 108–10, 119, 163
127, 129, 165 Battersby, Roy, 192
Ainsworth, Edgar, 148 Battersea, 98, 140
Alderson, David, 29 Baudelaire, Charles, 126
Alexander, Lloyd, 83 ‘Les Yeux des Pauvres’, 110
Allen, Jim, 193, 194, 199–200, 202, 205 Baumeister, Willi, 2
The Big Flame, 189, 196–7, 200, 203 Bazin, André, 189, 195
Almereyda, Michael, 110 BBC, 174, 177–82, 189, 191–2, 194–6
Anderson, Lindsay, 4, 69 Beaumont, Matthew, 11–12, 15, 53–4
O Dreamland, 186 Beaux Arts Gallery, 151
Antal, Evelyn, 165 Beckett, Samuel, 1–2, 4
Antliff, Allan, 163 Behan, Brenda
Aragon, Louis, 150 The Hostage, 60
Arden, John, 66 The Quare Fellow, 60
Live Like Pigs, 60, 78 Belsky, Franta, 140
The Workhouse Donkey, 60 Benjamin, Walter, 22–5, 30, 44–6, 54,
Aristotle, 29 118
Armchair Theatre, 177–8, 188 Bennett, Alan
Armitage, Simon, 109, 115 Enjoy, 8–9
Arnold, Andrea, 13, 27, 54 Sunset Across the Bay, 190–1
Fish Tank, 54 Bensaïd, Daniel, 20
Red Road, 47–52 Berger, John, 14, 133, 135, 143–4,
Artists’ Group Bulletin, 149–50 146–52, 156, 158, 162, 164–6
Artists International Association, 14, Bergman, Ingmar, 3
135–7, 163–4 Berlin, 91, 141, 144
Artists Union, 154 Bhaskar, Roy, 132, 162
Arts Council of Great Britain, 140, Bignell, Jonathan, 175, 200, 202
147, 156, 167 Billingham, Richard, 133, 159
Aspden, Rachel, 164 Billington, Michael, 67
Ayrton, Michael, 147, 165 Billy Elliot, 17
Billy Liar (television), 177–8
Badiou, Alain, 29, 54, 167 Biressi, Anita, 19
Baines, Harry, 147 Birmingham Six, 193
Balchin, Nigel, 81–2, Bishop, Claire, 163
Sundry Creditors, 82, 86 Bisztray, George, 126
212
Index 213
Blackburn, 41 Bunnage, Avis, 69

Blackpool, 6, 186 Burke, Andrew, 47
Blaenau Festiniog, 163 Burke, Vanley, 157
Blair, Les, 197 Burgin, Victor, 134, 155–6
Blake, William Possession, 155
Jerusalem, 78 Burrows, Rachel, 1
Bleasedale, Alan, 202–3 Burstow, Robert, 164–5
Blunt, Anthony, 135–6, 163–4 Bury, Morley, 147
Bolton, 5–8, 15 Butler, Reg, 140
Bond, Edward Butterworth, Jez
Saved, 60, 67–8, 74–5, 77 Jerusalem, 78
The Pope’s Wedding, 67
Bonney, Sean, 111 Cambridge (University of), 8
Borgerhoff, E.B.O., 126 Camerawork, 162
Boswell, James, 138–9, 148, 164 Carlisle, 167
Bourdieu, Pierre, 167 Carney, Raymond, 190
Bourne, Stephen, 176–7 Carpenter, Humphrey, 181
Bourriard, Nicolas, 163, 167 Carpenter, Patrick, 147–8, 166
Bowes, Mick, 190 Cartier, Rudolph, 175
Bowlby, Rachel, 11 Cartwright, Jim
Boyce, Sonia, 134 Road, 73–5, 203–4
Boys from the Blackstuff, 202 Caudwell, Christopher, 163
Bradley, David, 47 Caughie, John, 62, 174–80, 183–4,
Braine, John 189, 193–4, 197–203, 206–7
Room at the Top, 13, 82–3, 86–7, 91, Chadwick, Lynn, 147
93, 98, 101 Chandler, John, 162
Brassed Off, 17 Charlesworth, JJ, 160, 167
Bratby, John, 145, 151 Charoux, Siegfried, 140, 143
Brecht, Bertolt, 14, 69–70, 106–8, 113, The Islanders, 142–3
116, 126, 165, 184, 197–8, 200, The Neighbours, 140–1
204 Chayefsky, Paddy
Bresson, Robert, 190 Marty, 178
Brett, Guy, 166 Cheeseman, Peter, 64
Brien, Alan, 62 Chekhov, Anton, 60
Briggs, Asa, 146 Cherry, Deborah, 164–5
Brill, Frederick, 147 Chesney, Ronald, 191
Brisley, Stuart, 155 Chittenden, Maurice, 121, 128
Bristow, Joseph, 128 Churchill, Caryl, 70
British Council, 164 Top Girls, 70–1
British Film Institute, 42 Churchill, Winston, 91
Brixton, 176 Clapham, 189
Brooks, Peter, 15 Clark, Kenneth, 163
Brookside, 204 Clark, T.J., 126
Broomfield, Nick, 13 Clarke, Alan, 180, 190–1, 195
Ghosts, 30–1 Elephant, 204
Brown, Marshall, 106 Road (film), 191, 203–4
Brown, Ralph, 149, 165 Scum, 194, 196–7
Buck-Morss, Susan, 54 Clarke, Gillian, 115, 127
Budapest, 145, 150 Clatworthy, Robert, 140
214 Index
Claussen, Detlev, 127 Devine, George, 63

Clement, Dick, 205 Dexter, John, 68
Clocking Off, 173, 206 Dickie, Kate, 47
Cold War, 89, 133, 144, 147, 163 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 45–7
Coldstream, William, 137 D’Monté, Rebecca, 75
Coltrane, John, 105, 120 Does Class Matter?, 181
Common Culture Collective, 160 Douglas, Bill, 24
Compston, Martin, 47–8 Dublin (Trinity College), 1
Cook, John, 181–4, 198, 200–1 Duffy, Carol Ann, 109
Cooke, Lez, 173, 178, 184–6, 188–9, Dufton, 86
194, 196–7, 202, 205–6 Dugger, John, 154, 166
Conanby, 157 Duguid, Peter, 184
Considine, Paddy, 38 Duncan, Andrew, 128
The Cops, 205 Dunn, Nell
Cork, Richard, 153 Up the Junction, 14, 83, 94–6, 98–9,
Corner, John, 193–4, 200 101, 189, 194, 200
Coronation Street, 73, 173, 175, 184–6, Durkheim, Émile, 10
191, 195, 204, 207 Duxbury, Leslie, 147, 165
Council for the Encouragement of Dyer, Geoff, 165
Music and the Arts, 138, 140 Dyer, Richard, 184–5, 191
Courbet, Gustave, 126, 136
Courtauld Institute of Art, 141, 163 Eagleton, Terry, 11, 13, 19, 24–32,
Crabbe, George, 104–5 39–40, 44, 46–7, 49–54
The Village, 104 Easington Colliery, 203
Creative Camera, 158 Eastenders, 195, 204–5
Creeber, Glen, 206 Edna, the Inebriate Woman, 194
Crimp, Martin, 75 Egbert, Donald, 138, 163
Crisell, Andrew, 174, 177, 180 Edgar, David, 61
Croft, Andy, 163, 165 Edinburgh, 155
Cruikshank, William, 148 Edward VIII, 5
Curran, Tony, 48 Ehrenberg, Ilya
The Thaw, 165
Dada, 72 Eisenstein, Sergei, 192
Daily Herald, 164 Eliot, George
Daily Mirror, 95 Adam Bede, 12
Dalou, Aimé-Jules, 135 Eliot, T.S., 4
Damianovic, Maia, 167 Elliott, John
Dante Alighieri, 108 A Man from the Sun, 176
Daumier, Honoré, 135, 148, 158 Middlemarch, 198
Dave, Paul, 13, 19, 21, 53–4 Elsom, John, 68
David-Sauvageot, A., 104–5 Emin, Tracy, 160
Davies, Terence, 24 Empson, William, 126
Davis, John Warren, 165 Encounter, 151
Delaney, Shelagh Engels, Friedrich, 29, 126
A Taste of Honey, 60, 62–5, 68–9, English Stage Company, 59–60, 63,
183 68–9
Deller, Jeremy, 15, 134, 161 E.R., 175
The Battle of Orgreave, 161, 167 Everall, Gary, 167
Derrida, Jacques, 29 Everton, 161
Index 215
Exit Photography Group, 162 Graham, Stephen, 33

Exodus, 30 Grant, Robert, 104–5
Eyre, Richard, 71 Grant, Sylvia, 158
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 144, 167
Faber & Faber, 4, 113 Gray, Thomas, 104, 126
Falklands War, 31, 33, 37 Greaves, Derrick, 145, 146, 149,
Farocki, Harun, 48 151–2, 165–6
Fellini, Federico, 3 Grierson, John, 33, 174
Festival of Britain, 142–3 Griffith, Brian, 157
Figgis, Mike, 167 Griffiths, Trevor, 71, 180
Fisher, Mark, 20, 25–6 Bill Brand, 200
Fitton, James, 148 Comedians, 71–2, 75
Flame in the Streets, 176 Occupations, 71, 75
Flanagan, Barry, 155 The Party, 71–2
Flaubert, Gustave, 109–10, 112, 119 Grosz, George, 148
Fleishmann, Arthur, 164 Gruber, Francis, 150, 165
Miranda, 143, 164 Gunning, Tom, 41–7
Flintham, Matthew, 53 Guttuso, Renato, 150–1, 166
Forest of Dean, 181 GYPO, 30
Forman, Milos, 190
Forster, Laurel, 153–4, 162 Hackney, 77
Forster, William, 174 Hall, Sheldon, 33
Foster, Hal, 160 Hall, Stuart, 65
Foucault, Michel, 38, 54, 163 Hall, Willis, 63
Fougeron, André, 150 Hallam, Julia, 17, 53
Francia, Peter de, 150, 165–6 Hallberg, Robert von, 127–8
Frears, Stephen, 190–1 Hardt, Michael, 53–4, 162, 167
Freud, Sigmund, 42 Hardy, Thomas
Fry, Roger, 137 Jude the Obscure, 195
The Full Monty, 17 Hare, David
Fullard, George, 147–9, 165 The Permanent Way, 76
Fuller, Graham, 190 Harkness, Margaret (Joan Law), 126
Harper, Sue, 153–4, 162
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 109 Harrison, Charles, 136
Galton, Ray, 188 Harrison, Martin, 151–2
Gamble, Andrew, 74 Harrisson, Tom, 4–8, 15
Garlake, Margaret, 138 Hastings, 53
Garnett, Tony, 180, 193, 196–7, 200, Hatfield, 76
202, 205 Hauser, Arnold, 163
Gates, Bill, 162 Hay, Malcolm, 68
Gems, Pam Hayward, Anthony, 189
Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, 71 Hazlitt, William, 105, 110
Gilbert, Jeremy, 21 Hegel, G.W.F., 124, 128
Gilgun, Joe, 33 Heinemann, Margot, 165
Gill, Eric, 163 Helms, Hans G., 112
Glasgow, 12, 61, 119, 188, 205 Henderson, Lesley, 205
Gogol, Nikolai Henry V (film), 91
The Government Inspector, 175 Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 164
Graham, Billy, 89 Hepworth, Barbara, 137
216 Index
Herbert, George, 108 Jennings, Humphrey, 4–7, 33, 53–4,

‘Jordan (II)’, 108 192
‘The Collar’, 108 A Diary for Timothy, 22
Herbert, Jocelyn, 68 Pandaemonium, 22
Herman, Josef, 148 Jennings, Mary-Lou, 4, 53
Herd, David, 127 Joffé, Roland, 194
Hessing, Leonard, 155 Jones, Tom
Highbury, 140 ‘The K Numbers’, 115
Higson, Andrew, 33–4, 192 Jones, Robert Alun, 10
Hill, John, 17–18, 187, 192, 195, Jonzen, Karin, 140
197–9, 201, 203–4, 207 Jordan, Marion, 173–4, 185–6, 189,
Hillier, Bevis, 164 193
Hines, Barry, 4 Joyce, James, 126
Hobbes, Thomas, 49
Hobsbawn, Eric, 53, 144 Kafka, Franz, 126
Hogarth, Paul, 146–8, 165–6 Kane, Sarah
Hoggart, Richard, 62, 66, 179–87, 191 Blasted, 68, 75
Holles, Robert, 187 Kant, Immanuel, 29, 112
Hoyland, Francis, 147 Kaun, Axel, 2
Howe, P.D., 105 Kautsky, Minna, 126
Hubble, Nick, 5 Kay, J., 164
Hull, 191–2 Kebbell, Toby, 38
Hutchinson, Mike, 204 Keeffe, Barrie
Hyman, James, 144, 146, 152, 166 Gimmie Shelter (trilogy): Gem, 72;
Getaway, 72–3; Gotcha, 72–3
I Want To Be A Doctor, 176 Keiller, Patrick, 13, 20–2, 24, 53–4
Ibsen, Henrik London, 20, 22
A Doll’s House, 64 Robinson in Ruins, 21
Imperial War Museum, 139 Robinson in Space, 21–2, 24
Imperial War Museum North, Kennedy Martin, Troy, 184, 197
Manchester 164 Diary of a Young Man, 184
Ingrams, Richard, 165 Z Cars, 205
The Institute for the Art and Practice Kerr, Paul, 176
of Dissent at Home, 161 Kerrigan, Peter, 203
In Vision, 191–2 Kershaw, H.V., 187
It’s a Free World, 30 Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 3–4, 8
ITV, 177, 180, 191 Killip, Chris, 133, 157–9, 167
Itzen, Catherine, 70 In Flagrante, 158
Ivory, William Jarrow Youth, Tyneside, 158–9
Common As Muck, 206 Kirk, John, 204
Klevan, Andrew, 190
Jacobs, Jane, 191 Klingender, Francis, 137–8, 163
Jacobs, Jason, 174, 207 Kneale, Nigel, 175
Jameson, Fredric, 11–12, 20, 25, Knight, Deborah, 195, 198
106, 126 Knight, Laura
Jarmen, Derek Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring,
The Last of England, 35 139–40
Jarvis, Katie, 47 Koenig, Gisha, 152, 166
Jenkins, Clive, 73 Kollwitz, Käthe, 148
Index 217
Kops, Bernard, 60 Lippard, Lucy, 162

Kosminsky, Peter Lissitzky, El, 2
Britz, 206 Littlewood, Joan, 60, 65, 69
Kotcheff, Ted, 178 Liverpool, 160–1, 202
Kun, Béla, 141 Loach, Ken, 183–4, 189–90,
Kwei-Armah, Kwame 193–202, 205
Elmina’s Kitchen, 77–8 Cathy Come Home, 193–5, 198, 201
Days of Hope, 188, 196–200, 203
La Frenais, Iain Kes, 3–4, 157
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, 205 The Rank and File, 196, 203
Lacan, Jacques, 29, 50 London, 4, 23, 48, 61, 63, 65–7, 72,
Lacey, Stephen, 9, 13, 59, 68, 172, 76–7, 140–1, 143–4, 153, 164,
177, 179–82, 185–6, 199–201, 205 166–7, 176, 186
Ladkin, Sam, 119 London Review of Books, 113
Land of Green Ginger, 191–2 London Transport Museum, 142
Lapp, Axel, 164 Look North, 192
Larkin, Philip, 14, 104–6, 113–22, Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 58–9,
125–8 65, 68
‘The Whitsun Weddings’, 125–6 Lovell, Alan, 180, 183, 202–3
‘Wires’, 115–19 Löwy, Michael, 22, 45–6, 54
Latham, Barbara, 155 Lukáks, Georg, 14, 42, 106, 110, 112,
Latham, John, 155 114, 126, 201
Lavin, Janos, 164 Lucas, Sarah, 160
Law and Order, 197 Lynd, Helen, 5
Lay, Samantha, 12, 17, 24, 53–4 Lyndon, Neil, 196, 199
Lawrence, Stephen, 76
League of Socialist Artists, 154 MacCabe, Colin, 197–9
Leeds, 8, 190–1 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 107–8
Leeds – United!, 191–2 ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, 107–8,
Léger, Fernand, 2 123
Leicester Galleries, London, 148, 166 MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, Madeleine,
Leigh, Jacob, 189, 198 172
Leigh, Mike, 54 Malekula, 5
Hard Labour, 190 Malevitsch, Kasimir, 2
Le Juez, Brigitte, 1 Madge, Charles, 4–6
Left Review, 135, 137, 163–4 Mahler, Anna, 143
Lenin, Vladimir, 107–8, 110–13, Man at the Top, 177
119–26, 128 Manchester, 166
Leonard, Tom, 12 Mann, Thomas, 127
nora’s place, 14, 119–26 Manod Quarry, 163
Lessore, Helen, 151 Mansfield, Katherine, 128
Lever, William, 6 Marchant, Alison, 15, 160
Levinas, Emmanuel, 29 Marris, Paul, 17, 20
Lewis, C. Day, 135 Marshment, Margaret, 17, 53
Lloyd, A.L., 163 Martz, Louis L., 108
Lloyd, John, 164 Marvin, Garry, 54
Lin, Ai Qin, 30 Marx, Karl, 28–9, 110, 112,
Lindey, Christine, 144 126–7
Linebaugh, Peter, 22–3, 43 Marxist Quarterly, 146
218 Index
Maschler, Tom, 165 Mitchell & Kenyon, 13, 41–7

Massey, Doreen, 53 Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe
Mass-Observation, 4–9, 15, 81, 140, Mills, Hollinwood, 42
164, 203 Mitchell, Denis, 181
Maton, Karl, 10, 15 Moholy-Nagy, László, 2, 141
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 14, 110–11, Mohr, Jean, 156
113, 120, 127–8 Modernism, 2, 4, 11, 105, 120, 126,
McArthur, Colin, 197, 199–201 133, 137, 144, 151, 203
McDonnell, James, 180 Mondrian, Piet, 2
McDougall, Peter Montane, Roger, 166
Moore, Henry, 137, 139, 147, 164
Just Another Saturday, 188
Moore, Rob, 10, 15
McEnery, Peter, 178
Morecambe, 30, 191
McGough, Roger, 128
Morgan, Kevin, 165
McGovern, Jimmy, 204
Morgan, Stacy I., 16
Cracker, 205 Morris, Lynda, 144, 163–4
McGrath, John, 63, 177, 179, 184, 197 Morris, Pam, 15
The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Mosel, Tad, 178
Black Oil, 200 Moscow, 89, 166
McKechnie, Kara, 191 Mukhina, Vera
McLeish, Robert Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, 143
The Gorbals Story, 60–1 Mullan, Bob, 54
Meadows, Bernard, 147 Mulvey, Laura, 183, 201
Meadows, Daniel, 157–8, 167 Murtha, Tish, 157
David Stephenson, Conanby near
Conisborough, Yorkshire, 157 National Gallery, 163
Portsmouth: John Payne, Aged 12 with National Theatre, 71, 77
Two Friends and his Pigeon, Naughton, Bill, 64
Chequer, 26 April 1974, 157 Negri, Antonio, 53–4, 162, 167
Meadows, Shane, 13, 19, 27 Nelson, Robin, 200, 202–3, 206
Dead Man’s Shoes, 19, 37–41 New Wave (British), 17, 34–5, 59–64,
This is England, 31, 33–7 78, 175, 177–9, 181, 183, 186–8,
Medalla, David, 154, 166 190–2, 197, 204
Melanesia, 6, 8 New Wave (French), 207
Mellor, David, 153, 157–9, 167 New Statesman, 133, 146, 148, 164,
181
Mengham, Rod, 13–14, 81
New Statesman and Nation, 152
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 109
Newcastle upon Tyne, 155
Meschonnic, Henri, 128
Newman, GF, 197
Meunier, Constantin, 135
Newman, Sydney, 178
Michelet, Jules, 109 Newport, 140
Middleditch, Edward, 145, 149, 151, Nicholson, Ben, 137
165 Nimpsch, Uli, 140
Millais, John Everett, 148 Night Mail, 176
Millington, Bob, 200, 202–3 Noble, Tim, 160
Milne, Drew, 128 Nolan, Kevin, 127
Milner, John, 136, 140, 163 Noord, Gerrie van, 167
Minaux, André, 166 Norman, Frank, 60
Minton, Roy, 194 Nottingham Playhouse, 71
Index 219
Nunn, Heather, 19 Pinto, Roberto, 167

Nuttall, Jeff, 153 Pinto-Duschinsky, Michael, 61
Penhall, Joe, 77
Octagon Theatre, Bolton, 64 Some Voices, 76–7
Oldman, Gary, 13 Picasso, Pablo, 158
Nil by Mouth, 23 The Place Theatre, 71
Oliver, Douglas, 121, 128 Plater, Alan, 190–1
Olivier, Laurence, 71–2, 91 Play for Today, 188
Orozco, Gabriel, 135 Poetry Book Society, 113
Orta, Lucy, 15, 134, 161 Poetry Review, 113, 115
Orton, Joe Polanyi, Karl, 24, 54
Entertaining Mr Sloane, 60, 67 Pollard, Arthur, 105
Osborne, John, 61 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 192
Look Back in Anger, 13, 59–61, 175, Postmodernism, 11, 76, 134, 144, 159,
177–8 205
The Entertainer, 59, 175 Potter, Dennis, 180–1, 187, 192, 200–1
Ové, Horace Between Two Rivers, 181–2
A Hole in Babylon, 188 Stand Up Nigel Barton, 182–4, 186
Owen, Alun The Glittering Coffin, 181
Lena, O My Lena, 178 Potts, Robert, 127
No Trams to Lime Street, 178 Pound, Ezra, 105
Progress to the Park, 63 Press, Natalie, 48
Oxford (University of), 8, 181–2 Price, Lois, 155
Ozu, Yasujiro, 190 Priestly, J.B.
An Inspector Calls, 60
Pabst, Georg, 192 The Linden Tree, 60
Paget, Derek, 176, 193, 203–4 When We Are Married, 175
Paolozzi, Eduardo, 140 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 194
Paterson, Don, 114, 118 Prynne, J.H., 121, 127–8
Paris, 141, 143, 150, 164 Purves, Robin, 119
Parker, Tony
Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It, 195 Quart, Leonard, 190
Parr, Martin, 133, 157 Quatermass and the Pit, 175
Penguin New Writing, 81 Queen Elizabeth II, 194
Péri, Peter Laszlo, 135, 137, 141–2,
147, 164–5 Rab C. Nesbitt, 205
South Lambeth Council Estate, 141 Rabey, David Ian, 75–6
Perkins, VF, 189, 192 Rabinow, Paul, 163
Perry, Grayson, 134 Radford, Robert, 136–7, 163
Petit, Chris, 52 The Rag Trade, 191
Philips, Nanette, 127 Rapp, Ginette, 166
Pilkington Committee/Report, Rattigan, Terence
179–80, 196, 202, 205 The Deep Blue Sea, 60
Pinter, Harold, 66–8, 177 Variation on a Theme, 60
A Night Out, 172, 178 Ravenhill, Mark, 75
The Birthday Party, 60, 66 Raworth, Tom, 121
The Caretaker, 66, 172 Ray-Jones, Tony, 157
The Dumb Waiter, 66 Rea, Betty, 137, 152, 163, 166
The Room, 60, 66 Read, Herbert, 137, 147, 152, 163, 165
220 Index
Realism (journal), 14, 149–50, Scott, Michael, 66

165–6 Searle, Ronald, 148
Rebellato, Dan, 59 Sekula, Allan
Rebeyrolle, Paul, 150, 166 The Fish Story, 159
Rediker, Marcus, 22 Serling, Rod, 178
Reith, John, 174, 177 Shameless, 206
Richardson, Robert, 163–4 Sharples, Ena, 185
Rickaby, Tony, 163 Shaw, George, 134
Ricks, Christopher, 125–6 Shaw, Jeffrey, 155
Ricoeur, Paul, 28 Sheffield, 149
Riffaterre, Michael, 109–10 Sheffield Hallam University, 167
Riff-Raff, 195 Shellard, Dominic, 59
Riley, Denise, 121 Shubik, Irene, 172, 178
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 126 Sickert, Walter, 148
Rita, Sue and Bob Too, 204 Sierz, Aleks, 68, 75–6
Ritchie, Guy, 37 Sillitoe, Alan
Rivera, Diego, 135 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
Roberts, Dean, 36, 38 14, 83–4, 89–94, 96–9, 101,
Roberts, John, 132, 135, 156, 161–2, 191, 200
167 Simpson, Alan, 188
Roberts, Phillip, 68
Sinclair, Iain, 52
Rockwell, Joan, 185
Smith, Anthony, 174
Rogers, Claude, 137
Smith, Jack, 145, 149, 151–2, 165
Rohmer, Eric, 190
Mother Bathing Child, 145
Rolinson, Dave, 15, 190–2, 207
Smith, James, 25
Rosenthal, Jack, 186, 207
Smith, Julia, 204–5
Bar Mitzvah Boy, 188
Smith, Murray, 34
Romanticism, 11, 105, 109–10
Smith, Roger, 181
Room at the Top (film), 204
Smurthwaite, Nick, 203
Rowe, Clifford, 166
Royal Academy, 140 Spear, Ruskin, 148
Royal Court Theatre, 59–60, 63, 68, Socialist Realism, 14, 135–8, 140,
73, 77–8, 178, 203 143–4, 148, 151, 154
Royal Shakespeare Company, 71 Soho, 71
The Royle Family, 205 Soukop, Willi, 140
Rylance, Mark, 78 The Sound of Music, 198–9
South Bank, London, 164
St. Petersburg, 110 South London Art Gallery, 147, 165
Salford, 64, 178 South West 9, 22
Sandford, Jeremy, 194 Spectator, 163
Sandilands, G.S., 141, 164 Spencer, Charles, 166
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 146, 165 Spender, Humphrey, 6–8
La Nausée, 83 Spender, Stephen, 111
Saunders, Graham, 75 The Spongers, 194, 203
Savage, Jon, 33, 36, 54 Stalin, Joseph, 138, 152, 165
Sampson, Fiona, 127 Steele, Tom, 54
Sapphire, 176 Steinlen, Théophile, 148
Sawyer, Miranda, 77 Stephenson, Randall, 60–1
Schlegel, Friedrich, 106 Steptoe and Son, 188
Index 221
Stewart, Ena Lamont Tricycle Theatre

Men Should Weep, 61 The Colour of Justice, 76
Steyn, Juliet, 164–5 Triolet, Elsa, 120, 128
Stokes, John, 177 Trodd, Kenith, 192, 196
Storey, David Tucker, David, 20
This Sporting Life, 14, 83, 85, 87–9, Tulloch, John, 200
91–3, 97–101 Turgoose, Thomas, 33, 36, 47
Studio (periodical), 140, 148, 150, 153 Turner, J.M.W., 158
Studio International, 153–5 Tyler, Imogen, 19
Sullivan, John Tynan, Kenneth, 66
Only Fools and Horses, 205
Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Underwood, Leon, 140
177 Unity Theatre, Glasgow, 60
The Sunday Times, 121 Unity Theatre, London, 60
Surrealism, 4, 7 University College, London, 121
Sussex (University of), 15, 164 Upward, Edward, 111
Sutherland, John, 121
Sutherland, Keston, 12, 14, 128 Valkenier, Elizabeth, 136
Swingler, Randall, 165 Venice (Binnale), 144–5, 147, 152,
Sydney-Smith, Susan, 180 164–5
Sykes, Homer, 157 Vice, Sue, 185-6
Sylvester, David, 146, 151–2 Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, 64
Vienna, 141, 143
Vinay, Jean, 166
Tagg, John, 155–6, 167
Vogel, Karel, 143
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 3
Tate, 145, 163, 166 Wacquant, Loïc, 38–9, 50
Taylor, BF, 173, 189, 192, 201, 206–7 Wagg, Stephen, 191, 205
Taylor, John Russell, 60 Walker, John, 133, 154, 166–7
Tewson, Vincent, 165 Wall, Jeff, 156
Thatcher, Margaret, 31, 33, 35, 37, 71, Wallinger, Mark, 134
74–5, 156, 158, 202, 205 Walsh, Michael, 204
Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 60, Wandor, Michelene, 70
63, 69 War Artists Advisory Committee, 139
Theatre Workshop, 60, 63, 69 Warren, Tony, 184, 186
Thomas, Dylan Warsaw, 167
Under Milk Wood, 73 Waterhouse, Keith
Thomson, David, 203 Billy Liar (play), 63
Thompson, E.P., 165 Watkins, Peter
Thorpe, Vanessa, 17 Culloden, 193
Thwaite, Anthony, 127 War Game, The, 193
Tiedemann, Rolf, 127 Watkinson, Ray, 164–6
Times Literary Supplement, 113, 127–8 Watson, Gary, 54, 190
Timms, David, 116, 127 Watson, Grant, 167
Tisdall, Hans, 143 Watts, Alexander, 150
Todorov, Tzvetan, 110 Wearing, Michael, 203
Tonning, Erik, 2 Webster, Sue, 160
Tormey, Jane, 155–6, 167 The Wednesday Play, 188
Trainspotting, 19, 34 Weight, Carel, 148
222 Index
Welland, Colin, 191 Sing Yer Heart Out, 77

Welles, Orson, 3 Sucker Punch, 77
Wesker, Arnold, 61 Williams, Tennessee
Chicken Soup with Barley, 59 A Streetcar Named Desire, 61
Chips with Everything, 60 Willis, Ted
I’m Talking about Jerusalem, 59 Hot Summer Night, 176–8
Roots, 59, 65–6, 68, 75 Woman in a Dressing Gown, 178
West, Alick, 163 Wilson, David, 195
Wheale, Nigel, 144 Wilson, Sarah, 166
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 147, Winston, Ray, 23
166–7 Wolfe, Ronald, 191
Whitelaw, Billie, 178 Wood, Paul, 136
Whiteley, Gillian, 12, 14, Woodhead, Leslie, 193
165–6 Woolf, Virginia, 3–4
Whittet, J.S., 148 Wordsworth, William, 110
Who Bombed Birmingham?, 193 World in Action, 193, 201
Wilkinson, John, 109, 121 World War Two, 14, 60, 81, 86, 89–92,
Willats Steve, 155 98–9, 135, 138–143, 163–4
Willett, John, 165 Worsley, T.C., 64
Williams, Nigel Wright, Patrick, 53
Class Enemy, 72
Williams, Raymond, 13, 17–9, 22, Young, Michael, 15
25–7, 29–33, 35–7, 42, 52–3, 58–9,
172, 178, 181, 183, 188, 197, Žižek, Slavoj, 29, 162, 167
200–1 Zola, Émile, 105, 195
Williams, Roy, 77 Zhdanov, Andrei, 136, 150

David Tucker - British Social Realism in The Arts Since 1940

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British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940

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List of Figures viii

Introduction – ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ Vs ‘the

1 Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social

2 Staging the Contemporary: Politics and Practice in Post-War

3 Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction 81

4 ‘this/is not a metaphor’: The Possibility of Social Realism

5 Re-presenting Reality, Recovering the Social: The Poetics

6 Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and

I.1 Humphrey Spender. Street Scene, Bolton (1937). Spender

sixth former who beat David up. He suffered a fractured

Paul Dave is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social

Stephen Lacey is Professor of Drama, Film and Television, at the Uni-

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University

Dave Rolinson is Lecturer in the Department of Film, Media and Jour-

Keston Sutherland is Reader in Poetics at the University of Sussex. His

David Tucker is Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex. He has pub-

Gillian Whiteley is a curator and Lecturer in Critical and Historical

In 1930, at the age of twenty-four and unsure where his literary

formalized conceptual abstraction – came in for particularly sharp criti-

Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as

Let us take a further refracted approach to an aspect of realism, namely

For me, a bottle of milk is simply a bottle of milk; when it spills, it

Loach is the only director in Kieślowski’s list who is given with a

‘anthropology of ourselves’ intended to reveal was nothing less grand

What was there of Western civilisation which impacted into the

cannibal people on their Melenesian mountain? Only one thing,

Having noted that ‘[e]ven the cannibals in the mountains of Melanesia

strictly planned methodology, as a kind of cultural metonymic, the oth-

There are, nevertheless, certain things that should be noted here of

signals a shift from viewing knowledge in terms of construction –

shown, realism itself is well overdue important reappraisals. Notable

It might be more productive, as Fredric Jameson has argued, “if we

In Signatures of the Visible Jameson describes the ‘excitement’ of Mod-

realist pleasure, for example, in reading the opening lines of George

The subject of class, hinted at above, is also central to social realist

productively be brought to bear on certain contemporary visual artists

For some, social realism in British cinema is a problematic tradition, one

p. 253). However, rather than viewing this as a process whereby the

People still assemble or are assembled, meet or collide. A given col-

After noting this distressing attenuation of the ‘means of sociality’ in

realist film under the rubric of a contemporary ‘urban pastoral’ (Dave

History and ‘capitalist realism’

Looking forwards and backwards will be an important part of what fol-

Robinson in Space (1997) – it is the history of the ‘peculiarly capitalist’

neglected, which are more deeply buried. To refer to Keiller’s work

It is also interesting to note that running through Linebaugh’s writings

resource in helping to strengthen our sense of the finite bounds of

of the ‘present conjuncture’ or ‘presentism’ (ibid.) in which ‘the needs

The relationship between history and social realism can be viewed in

working class, is bound up with the suffering, frustration, waste and

Ethics and social realism

This is a turn that is reflected in Eagleton’s work too. The metaphysical,

review the terms of this ethical enrichment of left politics attempted by

be an insufficient response. This world’s ‘most vulnerable’ victims,

based human nature – ‘sociality bears in upon us at a level even deeper

Social realism and the agonies of the working class: Ghosts

A common culture: This is England

Shane Meadows’ This is England (2006) explores the obstacles to a com-

Crucially then, a common culture is committed to ‘equality of being’

what is understood positively from such a perspective (the individual

collective flourishing. One frequently repeated example of this is the