Pathetic as is the (is it defunct?) South Bank Show upon which Bragg pontificated tiresomely we all knew ITV only showed it as it’s token pretence to the arts and kept the wanker in Brylcreme. Oddly enough in the UK today you want arts stuff on TV Sky Arts 1 & 2 knock the pompous self-frigger into a cocked hat showing things like proper opera and stuff and not the Adventures of Baron Wankenstein. God knows what they enobled him for – services to Mandelson’s cock most likely. ITV has for many years now given-up it is anything but prole-feed. It’s fucking chronic. And don’t get me started on the BBC… Some OK stuff on BBC4. But Jebus the science stuff on 1 or 2 is cock or rather Cox. Brian-fucking-Cox staring wistfully into the middle-distance – “In’t the Universe fuckin’ brilliant our kid.” Mop-topped Manc cunt.

Things can only get better though.

ITV1 are interested in my format, “Celebrity Donkey Punch Bingo – on Ice!!!” with Ant & Dec. I’ll be able to get to meet Louis Walsh and drown the deranged fucker in a toilet.

I’d like to think Bragg has either hit the nail on the head with this statement, or it is at worst a few years ahead of its time in terms of general applicability. I can comfortably confirm and deny various “tribal affiliations” as described, but in terms of class, I can only say that my circumstances are such that I’m not Upper Class as I have no hereditary title, but “everything else is open to interpretation”.

Looking at a few of the articles which have been published over the years regarding “how to determine one’s class”, many of the questions don’t even apply to me.

Cue the Frost Report “Class Sketch” .

Whereas Bragg, of course, would prefer it to be in the hands of the modern looters, the State, of which he is such a prominent ornament.

Same old same old.

It is, as someone says above, just a puff piece for his TV show.

Imagine the uproar if such a thing were to happen today.

*Player’s Weights, for those who are too old or foreign to know, were a small type of cigarette, rather than an exotic piece of sporting kit.

As to class, it’s still a nation of the upper ten thousand. Beneath them are the leisured rentiers of the welfare class and beneath them are the working class, people like me who, er, work. And that’s even before we consider the unconfined joy that are the classes and snobberies are recent immigrants.

The class system in Britain isn’t diminishing, on the contrary, it’s expanding. Now we have a new addition to the social strata of our society, it’s called the Underclass.

And to top it off, social mobility in Britain is in decline. Now-a-days, if you are born wealthy the chances are you will die wealthy. And again if you are born poor, you will probably die poor. No class system in Britain my arse. Melvyn Bragg is a limousine liberal living in the Westminster bubble.

If I was a teacher I’d fail him, but at the same time I’d give him 2 bonus points for trying.

PS. Adrian, Good one! – dear ol’ Dame Edna! “She” can be such a b*tch.

He has not. He believes he has spread Culture more widely, when he has perhaps, at best, dumbed it down.

Class still exists irrespective of education and tastes. Indeed we have imported an invisible new version of it. How do immigrant Indians of different Castes relate to each other when on our soil? Has anyone done a study? Not to my knowledge. Or indeed different immigrant groups to each other as to worth and status between themselves, let alone to the indiginous population,

He is a Grammar School kiddie (like me) who seems to hate the Public Schools (though I don’t), which Grammar Schools are/were, a mirror image, minus the Tuck shop, midnight feasts and pillow fights in the Dorm.

He seems in short to be utterly fuckin confused about who he is, what he is and why he is, as this article conveys only too well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/feb/12/melvyn-bragg-interview-class-system-culture

My favourite Melvyn Bragg moment was when he was on Dame Edna.

She asked him how many books he had written. ‘Twelve’ he answered sniffily.

Dame E then turned to the audience and asked them if any of them had ever read one.

Not a single hand went up.

To which Dame E said ‘slow down Mel, we can’t keep up…’