The privileged are taking over the arts

It takes chutzpah to gainsay Richard Hoggart, especially on class and pop culture. But when he wrote in The Uses of Literacy (1957) that “the finest period in English… popular song seems to have been between 1880 and 1910,” he was wrong, or at least premature. Hoggart believed this was the era when working-class performers and audiences held greatest sway, dominating British music. Though he couldn’t have known it, that golden age was just about to come. As he wrote his venerable text in the Hull of the mid-1950s, not far down the road, in another northern port, a bunch of Scouse teenagers were strumming the overture to an entertainment revolution (albeit one with music hall roots) that would eclipse the reign of Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno.

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The actress Maxine Peake (Bolton-raised, resides in Salford, went through Rada in the 1990s) told me recently that she could not afford to train for the stage now. And the actor David Morrissey told the Radio Times: “We’re creating an intern culture—it’s happening in journalism and politics as well—and we have to be very careful because the fight is not going to be there for people from more disadvantaged backgrounds.” In the media generally, preferment often comes through nepotism, or through those internships that only children of well-off families can afford. A Sutton Trust report of 2009 found that the proportion of leading journalists educated privately had increased over 20 years. In 2006, only 14 percent had gone to a state school, a statistic as worrying as it is remarkable. It’s happening even in the once resolutely proletarian world of football. Frank Lampard, Will Hughes, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Victor Moses are just a few of the Premier League players who attended fee-paying schools.

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