In our ongoing Our Culture Series, we examine how art and media reflect, and too often distort, the realities of working-class life in Britain. In this essay, filmmaker and writer Brett Gregory explores the systemic barriers that have killed off British working-class cinema, from the film schools he has worked in to the funding bodies that decide on what reaches our screens. This isn’t just an obituary, it’s a reminder that working-class storytelling still takes place in everyday life, on phones, in classrooms, and across the internet on places like YouTube, even if the British movie industry has turned its back on the working class.
By Brett Gregory
Every once in a while mainstream British cinema attempts to enact and explore the lives of the nation’s working-class with depth, honesty and integrity.
Given the general nature of the subject matter – impoverished and pessimistic protagonists surviving rather than thriving in a corrupt and callous country – the motivation behind such productions is never the pursuit of profit at the box office, but instead a quest to attain some sort of social, political and/or existential truth.
For example, Housing Problems (Elton, 1935), Love on the Dole (Baxter, 1941), I’m All Right Jack (Boulting, 1959), This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963), Kes (Loach, 1970), Made in Britain (Clarke, 1982), Nil by Mouth (Oldman, 1997), This Is England (Meadows, 2006), I, Daniel Blake (Loach, 2016), and Ali and Ava (Barnard, 2022).
Nil by Mouth
Such quality fictional films are few and far between, however. This is because the British film industry or, should we say, the UK Screen Sector, has always been governed by a white London-based bourgeois coterie characterised by privilege, tradition, contact lists and capitalist logic.
Thus, for filmmakers – particularly those trying to live and work outside of the metropolis – to actually produce, release, distribute, promote and exhibit a working-class feature of note has always been a Herculean act of self-sacrifice and defiance.
Today, however, with our feet firmly in the first quarter of the 21st century, to even attempt to negotiate the multitude of creative, technical and administrative hardships and anxieties involved in the above can only be described as a Sisyphean act of self-harm and humiliation.
Murder by starvation
As an impoverished and pessimistic feature filmmaker myself, raised on a council estate in an abandoned mining town in the East Midlands throughout the 1980s, I should know: British working-class cinema is now well and truly dead, and its murder – by way of starvation – has been in the making for decades.
For seventeen years I funded my film ‘career’ with the salary I earned from lecturing in film studies and media production throughout Greater Manchester, and most of the students I taught were from working-class backgrounds similar to my own.
Working-class families still adore watching movies and television shows, and it is through these types of popular media that they acquire their wider knowledge and cultural capital: the shelves in their living rooms tend to be stacked with Spielberg and Scorsese rather than Shakespeare and Shelley.
Consequently, middle-class teachers at school and college generally treat their working-class students not as potential producers but as callow consumers, not as future owners but as future workers. The underlying assumption being that, since the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, these teenagers will inevitably lack the gumption, the wherewithal and even the good luck required to progress beyond their lot. Undoubtedly, if quizzed, such teachers would argue that they are just being realistic, that they are just trying not to get the students’ hopes up.
On the shop floor of university, however, working-class film/media production undergraduates are treated quite the opposite, in my experience, with lecturers telling them exactly what they want to hear: that if they continue with their attendance and their projects, continue analysing Guardians of the Galaxy or The Hunger Games instead of Raining Stones or Fish Tank and, of course, continue paying £9,500 a year in student fees without question or delay, then they will eventually get their ‘foot in the door’.
Memorably, a course leader once said to me in private: ‘Brett, as soon they’ve got their qualifications they’re not our problem anymore.’
Made in Britain and Love on the Dole
In January 2025 Campbell, Leigh, O’Brien et al published an academic paper which puts forward the first quantitative analysis of class inequality in the UK Screen Sector based on data from the British Film Institute. It is entitled: ‘Where are the working class in the British film industry?’
As mentioned above, their research confirms that the sector is dominated by those from middle-class social origins. In 2020, for instance, only one in four of the British film workforce came from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
Precarious work conditions and outright hostility
One reason for this is that cultural and creative sectors are sites of precarious working conditions – young adults need a familial financial safety net in order to survive, for example – and so those already in positions of relative privilege have a favourable advantage. Another reason is that social class, unlike gender, ethnicity and disability, is not a protected characteristic under UK equality legislation and, therefore, organisations like the BFI, Arts Council England and Creative UK face lower levels of scrutiny.
With regards to commissioning new film productions the authors observe also that a ‘closed middle-class space’ exists which lacks experience in greenlighting working-class stories. It is assumed, from a middle-class perspective informed by middle-class tastes and values, that such narratives and their characters will not find an audience, and therefore they never see the light of day. There’s an echo here of Jenny Farrell’s article in this Our Culture series, on how the working class is misrepresented in literature. The same point can be made about the film industry.
Moreover, when the odd feature film is, incredibly, completed by a working-class production team, or a movie advances working-class themes, ‘[it] may receive less support (or even outright hostility)’ from film distributors and marketers.
The main funders of film
Campbell et al also focus on the BFI’s Film Fund and its application process. This is a programme designed ‘to support formal development of original live action, emerging media and animation fiction feature filmmaking’ and, allegedly, applications are submitted by producers and writers from up and down the country.
However, only 4% of applications from working-class producers are successful compared to the 75% success rate which is achieved by those who are middle-class. Yes, you read that right: 4%. In turn, while 43% of middle-class writers who apply for development funds will prevail, only 25% of working-class writers are granted their request: ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’
It should be noted here that the BFI Film Fund is financed by the National Lottery which, ironically, is bankrolled by the UK’s lowest socio-economic groups, i.e. those earning less than £20,000 a year and those who are claiming state benefits. In other words, the working-class and the poor.
Ultimately, its British cinema audiences, both working-class and middle-class, who suffer from such systematic bias, prejudice and inequality, as well as the country at large. This is because we are being denied a full representation of the state our nation is in, and this disreputable lack of class diversity disables our cultural debates and political decision-making with regards to which direction we should all be going in, i.e. the democratic process.
As film fans, cinephiles and citizens we should expect to see screen stories which portray how the farce and fraud of the Brexit referendum, for example, affected the working practices of lorry drivers in the North East. Or how governmental incompetence and criminality during COVID decimated the livelihoods of hairdressers, waiters and shop assistants across the East Midlands.
We should insist on dramatisations which delineate the disenfranchised families dwelling in crumbling council estates across the North West that are being incinerated by the relentless rise in energy prices as they drown in higher and higher water bills. Furthermore, we should demand feature films which explore how nationwide mass redundancies and mass immiseration, in concert with the orchestrated rise of the far right, are malforming the values, attitudes and mental health of the 7.5 million Britons who are currently claiming Universal Credit.
Kes
Sadly, however, with stalwart socialist storytellers like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh now in the final reel of their careers, we are going to need an army of necromancers to realise any of this working-class wishful thinking.
Then again, a possible alternative to help balance the books could be the relentless lobbying of and legislation from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, so a root and branch rebuild of organisations like the BFI, Arts Council England and Creative UK is carried out. Radical reform would include a recalibration of funding policies alongside the rehabilitation of staff so that their remits are more evenly attuned to the diverse socioeconomic make-up of the nation’s population, including the working class, the precariat, the outright poor and the homeless. To have key decision-makers in quangoes forever favouring an unremarkable minority who happen to remind them of they grew up with, who they work with and who they socialise with, is simply not cricket.
As history laments, however, the marginalised have been persistently and perennially pilloried, punished and pissed upon ever since hereditary peerages were interwoven into this country’s ideological infrastructure following the Norman Conquest in 1066. In turn, so we, the people, never forget the indisputable depth of this decree, as it is literally etched in stone after stone in Westminster Abbey.
So it is highly unlikely that public bodies like the BFI, approved by the establishment, will voluntarily relinquish their singular authority, their bequeathed birthright, and evolve into a truly fair-minded, culturally democratic entity. It really would be much easier for us to raise the dead.
Grassroots filmmaking of, by and for the working class
But all is not lost.
For while the corpse of British working-class cinema continues to rot away in a basement at 21 Stephen Street, the BFI’s head office in London, British working-class filmmaking is very much alive and kicking at 901 Cherry Avenue, YouTube’s head office in San Bruno, California.
Here in the Golden State, the home of Hollywood no less, vibrant scenes of British working-class life, filmed by working-class owners of working-class smartphones, are being moderated and monetised minute by minute to be watched instantaneously by millions of people around the world.
For instance, we have the lumpenproletariat drinking their afternoon away in a pub in Doncaster; young working-class women in aspirational attire negotiating Manchester’s nightlife; and, of course, the obligatory plebeian punch-up outside of a McDonald’s in Leeds.
While not exactly the nascent work of the next Lindsay Anderson or Terence Davies, it could be argued that such audio/visual recordings do unintentionally echo the caricatures of commoners painted by Beryl Cook, as well as the pained portraits of poverty captured by the camera of Tish Murtha.
No doubt many will disagree with this interpretation though, and simply decry that depictions like these are the lowest common denominator – selfish, shoddy, stereotypical and sensationalist – and should be deleted.
Fair enough, but we should bear in mind that similar criticisms were also levelled at Thomas Edison’s Kinetescope in the late 19th century for its portrayals of amateur boxing matches, illegal cockfighting and teenage girls engaging in pillow fights.
Of course, such DIY online videos do indeed lack ingenuity, insight and integrity, and are more than likely uploaded ‘just for a laugh’. This said, however, they do also indicate that the working class still, despite all of the odds outlined by Campbell et al, possesses a deep desire to express themselves through the medium of the moving image.
Moreover, the rapid and unregulated release of such films further reveals that the excessively priced certifications and permissions traditionally required from formal bodies like the British Board of Film Classification in order to exhibit a film in public are now of little importance. For impoverished and isolated filmmakers eager to reach an actual audience during their actual lifetime, this is a truly liberating development, especially since, firstly, there are 2.7 billion active YouTube users across the world and, secondly, 60% of the platform’s output is, at present, being watched in living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens via Smart TVs.
Naturally, such opportunities are not enough, however. This is because as consumers of fictional film and media we are greedy: greedy for quality, greedy for depth and greedy for truth. We want our working-class filmmakers to be serious about their craft, for instance, and to have the visual, literary and technical skills necessary for bringing their onscreen creations memorably to life with grace and honour.
Radical educational reform
A nuts and bolts approach to achieving this over time would be some radical educational reforms, to embed media proficiency skills into the national curriculum alongside traditional literacy and numeracy programmes. The way the world communicates has now completely changed – the expensive vibrating box in our pockets keeps telling us this every hour of the day and night – and so the UK’s education system needs to change with it.
By introducing working-class children to the theory and practice of scriptwriting, direction, performance, mise-en-scene, sound, music, camera angles and editing etc. from an early age would, initially, like reading and arithmetic, help them to normalise film and video production, pierce the suspension of disbelief, and actively participate in a digitised world. Furthermore, they would also then begin to realise that the mimetic movies which send them to sleep in bed at night are not all what they are cracked up to be, that, in many cases, the makers of these movies are really only after their pocket money and their principles.
Optimistically, I like to imagine that a better understanding of such filmmaking techniques and their purposes, like learning a new language, would then empower and inspire those who need culture the most. It would help them to think critically and act creatively so that one day they may actually decide to produce and release stories of their own which are not simplistic, spiteful or sensationalist, but are actually worth watching, worth keeping and worth remembering.
Brett Gregory is a freelance filmmaker and writer based in Greater Manchester. His latest working-class production, ‘Autism and the Arts: Poetry with Peter Street’ (2025), is available to watch on YouTube here.
