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| Tom Hollander is wrong. Posh cultural dominance goes far deeper than fashion | Tom Hollander is wrong. Posh cultural dominance goes far deeper than fashion |
| (about 20 hours later) | |
| Perhaps, and it’s just a theory, the privately educated actors on our screens and stages got there by accident. Maybe it’s just happenstance that Benedict Cumberbatch (Harrow), Tom Hiddlestone (Eton), Eddie Redmayne (Eton), Damian Lewis (Eton) and Dominic West (Eton) are leading lights in their profession. Just possibly the fact that these actors’ parents could afford the fees of Harrow and Eton (the latter currently runs at £35,721 per annum) did not substantially contribute to their later career trajectories. It’s possible. | Perhaps, and it’s just a theory, the privately educated actors on our screens and stages got there by accident. Maybe it’s just happenstance that Benedict Cumberbatch (Harrow), Tom Hiddlestone (Eton), Eddie Redmayne (Eton), Damian Lewis (Eton) and Dominic West (Eton) are leading lights in their profession. Just possibly the fact that these actors’ parents could afford the fees of Harrow and Eton (the latter currently runs at £35,721 per annum) did not substantially contribute to their later career trajectories. It’s possible. |
| Related: From Downton Abbey to Kirstie's crafts … the New Boring is everywhere | Related: From Downton Abbey to Kirstie's crafts … the New Boring is everywhere |
| Here’s something else that is possible. The fact that there are so many posh actors on screen and stage is symptomatic of fashion. This is the possibility the actor Tom Hollander sets out in an interview this week. A few years ago, he argued, there were “lots of working-class-hero leading actors – it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now I’m middle-aged it’s fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me.” | Here’s something else that is possible. The fact that there are so many posh actors on screen and stage is symptomatic of fashion. This is the possibility the actor Tom Hollander sets out in an interview this week. A few years ago, he argued, there were “lots of working-class-hero leading actors – it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now I’m middle-aged it’s fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me.” |
| Think of it this way. Back in the day, acting was dominated by the Shameless ethos, in which leading roles were written by, for and about prole scum. The Cumberbatches of the time had to sit home unemployed buffing their monocles, poor loves. Now? In Britain today, pompous posh is bankable. | Think of it this way. Back in the day, acting was dominated by the Shameless ethos, in which leading roles were written by, for and about prole scum. The Cumberbatches of the time had to sit home unemployed buffing their monocles, poor loves. Now? In Britain today, pompous posh is bankable. |
| It looks like the posh have staged a counter-revolution. Back in the Britpop era, chippy nobodies like me with regional accents and state educations were the last word. In those halcyon days, those with the misfortune not to have been born in Manchester were compelled to affect Liam Gallagher’s lairy Manc swagger and irrepressible idioms like Kathy Burke’s troubled teen Perry in the Harry Enfield show. Otherwise you were nobody. Now? Autre temps, autre moeurs, as Liam used to say. | It looks like the posh have staged a counter-revolution. Back in the Britpop era, chippy nobodies like me with regional accents and state educations were the last word. In those halcyon days, those with the misfortune not to have been born in Manchester were compelled to affect Liam Gallagher’s lairy Manc swagger and irrepressible idioms like Kathy Burke’s troubled teen Perry in the Harry Enfield show. Otherwise you were nobody. Now? Autre temps, autre moeurs, as Liam used to say. |
| What worries me about Tom Hollander’s remark is that it hides a conservative agenda. He uses a notion of what fashion isn’t (namely that fashions unaccountably change; that hemlines rise and fall as inexplicably as the motions of sub-atomic particles) to obscure class problems in British society of which those in the acting profession are the most clamorous exemplars. | What worries me about Tom Hollander’s remark is that it hides a conservative agenda. He uses a notion of what fashion isn’t (namely that fashions unaccountably change; that hemlines rise and fall as inexplicably as the motions of sub-atomic particles) to obscure class problems in British society of which those in the acting profession are the most clamorous exemplars. |
| Fashions, like our tastes in TV, cinema and theatre, often express the prevailing power relations of a society. Why was the writer of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, elevated to become Baron Fellowes of West Stafford in 2011? It wasn’t just because he depicted a reactionary social order but because he helped to create one and thereby served a Conservative-dominated coalition. He contributed, as I argued at the time, to a movement best called the New Boring (which also included Ed Sheeran, Kirsty Allsopp’s craft programmes and the Great British Bake-Off), to the acceptance of the austerity agenda of our leading Etonian (the prime minister, David Cameron). | Fashions, like our tastes in TV, cinema and theatre, often express the prevailing power relations of a society. Why was the writer of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, elevated to become Baron Fellowes of West Stafford in 2011? It wasn’t just because he depicted a reactionary social order but because he helped to create one and thereby served a Conservative-dominated coalition. He contributed, as I argued at the time, to a movement best called the New Boring (which also included Ed Sheeran, Kirsty Allsopp’s craft programmes and the Great British Bake-Off), to the acceptance of the austerity agenda of our leading Etonian (the prime minister, David Cameron). |
| Just as Fellowes’ leading political achievement was the TV equivalent of bromide in soldiers’ tea to make living in recession Britain palatable for a people who ought to know better, so the effect of Tom Hollander’s remarks is to discourage us from exploring what has gone wrong and what is continuing to go wrong in one of the most sclerotic societies in the western world. | Just as Fellowes’ leading political achievement was the TV equivalent of bromide in soldiers’ tea to make living in recession Britain palatable for a people who ought to know better, so the effect of Tom Hollander’s remarks is to discourage us from exploring what has gone wrong and what is continuing to go wrong in one of the most sclerotic societies in the western world. |
| Acting, like politics, is a profession becoming the ringfenced fiefdom of daddy-bankrolled spawn | Acting, like politics, is a profession becoming the ringfenced fiefdom of daddy-bankrolled spawn |
| Culture, like fashion, like actors, doesn’t come out of nowhere. Think of last year’s comedy spy film Kingsman, starring Colin Firth as a mash-up of Gok Wan and Henry Higgins, in which he schooled some unfortunate pleb into the sartorial dictates of posh-boy espionage. The most striking aspect of the storyline was that our working class hero was co-opted into a system he would have done better to destroy. Much culture in our current years of austerity has this ideological role – to keep us calm and carry on, which really means to make us shut up and defer to our masters. | |
| Maybe, in this context, it isn’t entirely pointless to question why there are so many Etonians at the forefront of British acting and British politics. Maybe the preponderance of posh in one is linked to a similar stranglehold by the other? Only 7% of Britain’s school-age population attend private school but half the cabinet did. Maybe the lack of diversity that Idris Elba railed against when he spoke to MPs recently – holding black and other ethnic minority acting talent down – isn’t just “fashion” but something terrible that we could, if we had the will, change. | Maybe, in this context, it isn’t entirely pointless to question why there are so many Etonians at the forefront of British acting and British politics. Maybe the preponderance of posh in one is linked to a similar stranglehold by the other? Only 7% of Britain’s school-age population attend private school but half the cabinet did. Maybe the lack of diversity that Idris Elba railed against when he spoke to MPs recently – holding black and other ethnic minority acting talent down – isn’t just “fashion” but something terrible that we could, if we had the will, change. |
| Hollander (who attended Abingdon School, whose current day fee is £17,775 and full boarding fee £36,960) argues that British society doesn’t face the same class divisions that are depicted in Fellowes’ Gosford Park (in which he had a role) or Downton Abbey. This is hardly news: we all know we don’t live in Edwardian England. But citing the difference between the class system then and now serves to hide rather than help us think about the divisions in our society in 2016. What Elba overcame to get where he is today is not “nothing” and what holds back other actors from deprived social backgrounds are not merely the vestiges of an old class system but a new form of it. | Hollander (who attended Abingdon School, whose current day fee is £17,775 and full boarding fee £36,960) argues that British society doesn’t face the same class divisions that are depicted in Fellowes’ Gosford Park (in which he had a role) or Downton Abbey. This is hardly news: we all know we don’t live in Edwardian England. But citing the difference between the class system then and now serves to hide rather than help us think about the divisions in our society in 2016. What Elba overcame to get where he is today is not “nothing” and what holds back other actors from deprived social backgrounds are not merely the vestiges of an old class system but a new form of it. |
| Related: Fewer opportunities for state-educated actors, says Charles Dance | Related: Fewer opportunities for state-educated actors, says Charles Dance |
| Acting, like politics, is a profession becoming the ringfenced fiefdom of daddy-bankrolled spawn. Judi Dench, David Morrissey and other actors have bemoaned the opportunities for those less favoured. Tom Hollander could have joined that justified complaint. | Acting, like politics, is a profession becoming the ringfenced fiefdom of daddy-bankrolled spawn. Judi Dench, David Morrissey and other actors have bemoaned the opportunities for those less favoured. Tom Hollander could have joined that justified complaint. |
| Instead, Hollander’s remarks, if accepted, facilitate British quietism and deference. It’s our traditional posture in this United Boredom. We stand behind the velvet ropes of old aristos’ pads, we revel in the televised pomp of Downton and its eulogies to a past that never existed, we salute Etonian actors’ contribution to Britain’s exports, we say posh dominance of culture is just fashion. | Instead, Hollander’s remarks, if accepted, facilitate British quietism and deference. It’s our traditional posture in this United Boredom. We stand behind the velvet ropes of old aristos’ pads, we revel in the televised pomp of Downton and its eulogies to a past that never existed, we salute Etonian actors’ contribution to Britain’s exports, we say posh dominance of culture is just fashion. |
| We could do better. We could think about the self-hatred and delusion that our nostalgic culture industry caters for and makes money from. We could reflect on how distant we are from an egalitarian society. That isn’t fashion – it’s political reality. | We could do better. We could think about the self-hatred and delusion that our nostalgic culture industry caters for and makes money from. We could reflect on how distant we are from an egalitarian society. That isn’t fashion – it’s political reality. |
| • This article was amended on 2 March 2016. An earlier version referred to the film Kingsman as Kingpin. |