Class Sketch

Mssrs. Cleese, Barker, and Corbett in the Class Sketch 

Written by Marty Feldman and John Law

The Frost Report (7 April 1966)

I.

If I remember my political theory correctly, then class consciousness refers to an individual's knowledge of their socio-economic status which allows them to judge where their own best interests lie. For Marxists, the hope is that by raising awareness of inequality and injustice, etc., one increases the chances of collective action and, ultimately, revolution.      

However, whilst I've always been aware of myself as working class and fully conscious of what that entails - and whilst I've always had a certain level of mistrust for the middle classes - I've never been motivated to join the Labour Party or align myself with those on the far left who long for power and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.  

In the end, I just don't care enough about even my own interests; certainly not when these are conceived in material terms of ownership. According to my Armenian friend, Vahe, that's because I'm too other-worldly, suffer from a form of false consciousness, don't fully understand the historical process, blah, blah, blah ...


II.    

In a short essay written in 1927, D. H. Lawrence argues that the gulf between social classes is very real and very deep, though there are now, he says, only two great classes: middle and working; the aristocratic upper class having entirely been absorbed into the bourgeoisie.

Indeed, notes Lawrence, even the working class share in the aspirations of the middle class; to be successful and to have a lot of money in the bank. However, there remains a very real difference and division which is rooted in feeling and in the politics of touch:

"What is the peculiar repugnance one feels, towards entering the middle class world? [...]
      What is the obstacle? I have looked for it in myself, as a clue to this dangerous cleavage between the classes. And I find it is a very deep obstacle. It is in the manner of contact. The contact, among the lower classes [...] is much more immediate, more physical, between man and man, than it ever is among the middle classes. The middle class can be far more intimate, yet never so near to one another. It is the difference between the animal, physical affinity that can govern the lives of men, and the other, the affinity of culture and purpose, which actually does govern the mass today.
      But the affinity of culture and purpose that holds the vast middle class world together seems to me to be an intensification today, of the acquisitive and possessive instinct." [39]

       
III.

Like Lawrence, I was  born among the working class. My father too went down the mines when he left school - though unlike Lawrence's father, he hated it and didn't last long as a collier. After the War, he and my mother - at her instigation - moved south, to London, leaving their old life in the north east of England behind. Eventually, they ended up in Essex in a newly built two-up, two-down council house, where I was born.

My father was employed in a non-managerial position at the Bank of England printing works in Debden. My mother was a traditional housewife, who occasionally did part-time jobs outside the home if money was particularly tight. She had hopes for me and my sister, but nothing too grand or ambitious: some kind of clean office job that paid well. Like the Lawrence household, ours was absolutely working class: tabloid-reading, football-loving, and ITV-watching. 

Of course, one is never entirely shaped by or a prisoner to the past, to one's background, to one's class. But one can never quite escape it either. Or - in my case as in Lawrence's - one never really wants to escape and move up in the world, or get on in life. Why? Well, according to Lawrence, it's because this involves too great a cost; one has to sacrifice something vital and vibrate at a different pitch of being, as it were.

For between the classes exists "a peculiar, indefinable difference" that determines the way the heart beats. This might sound like nonsense, but I know exactly what Lawrence means. And I understand entirely why it is he never quite managed (or wanted) to climb up the social ladder, even when offered a helping hand to do so:

"No one was unfriendly. [...] But it was no good. Unless one were by nature a climber, one could not respond in kind. The middle class seemed quite open, quite willing for one to climb into it. And one turned away, ungratefully. [...]
      And that I have not got a thousand friends, and a place [...] among the esteemed, is entirely my own fault. The door to 'success' had been held open to me. The social ladder had been put ready for me to climb. I have known all kinds of people, and been treated quite kindly by everyone [...] whom I have known personally.
      Yet here I am, nowhere, as it were, and infinitely an outsider. And of my own choice." [37-38]

Precisely: here I am nowhere, with nowhere left to go.

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Which Class I Belong To', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 33-40. 

See also 'Myself Revealed' in the above text, pp. 175-81, which is essentially a variant of 'Which Class I Belong To', that concludes: "I cannot make the transfer from my own class into the middle class. I cannot, not for anything in the world, forfeit my passional consciousness and my old blood-affinity with my fellow-men and the animals and the land, for that other thin, spurious mental conceit which is all that is left of the mental consciousness once it has made itself exclusive." [181] 

Note: 'Myself Revealed' was included in Assorted Articles (1930) under the title 'Autobiographical Sketch'.