More on How Leeds Has Changed the World.

Guest blogger and local author, Mick McCann, gives us another lesson in how Leeds has changed the world . . .

Leeds creatives and representations of the ‘ordinary’.

In my mad and ongoing quest to pin down some of the ways in which Leeds has influenced the world I’m going to have a quick shufty at the city’s impact upon representations of ordinary people – previously known as ‘the working class’. How have Leeds artists and thinkers helped construct a people’s history rather than that of the narrow elite? I blogged a while ago about the role of Leeds’ 19th Century rabble rousing writers – Tom Maguire, Wilson Armistead, Isabella Ford, Richard Oastler, Charles Turner Thackrah – and how they helped shape the world of civil rights, equality and personal freedoms and they could be included here but I’ll stick to the twentieth century…..well almost. I can’t include everything but here are some of what I consider the most interesting bits.

Before humanity was bombarded by the new-fangled radio and TV the most powerful form of mass communication, certainly in visuals, were cartoons and caricatures. Working in Victorian times, Wortley-born caricaturist Phil May earned the tag ‘the grandfather of British illustration’. His often witty, sympathetic sketches of ‘guttersnipe’ (street children) brought him success and were influenced by the poverty of his own upbringing and experience of sleeping rough. His sketches were too wide ranging to easily pigeon hole but his most popular work were studies of the lower and middle-class and these positive drawings of the everyday life of poor children – with the occasional poignant one that, no doubt, pricked consciences. I’m trying very hard to resist a comparison with the 1990s excluded childhoods chronicled in Bernard Hare’s hit book Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew which depicted children so far outside society that to describe them as marginalised is to underplay their abandonment…..but I’d best leave that.

During research on my last book I interviewed the daughter of radio and TV pioneer, Calverley’s Barney Colehan. She told me stuff which was exactly what I wanted, quirky, extremely interesting, new info. With a little digging around it got better. During WWII when the BBC was completely dominated by Received Pronunciation (see the accurate Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse sketches) the BBC introduced the first ever regional accent to their broadcasts in the form of a newsreader, the Halifax-born, Wilfred Pickles. They allowed this West Yorkshire accent to be heard not out of some wish to represent the nation but to make it harder for the Nazis to impersonate their newsreaders. As the war ended Barney seized the opportunity to bring to the airwaves a completely new type of radio show. Fronted by Wilfred and his wife Mabel it ruffled feathers by featuring ordinary people, along with their unseemly accents. In Have A Go Barney brought, for the first time, a cross-section of regional accents to the nation’s airwaves as people told stories from their lives, introducing ordinary people to themselves and each other. It was a huge success, attracting audiences of around 20 million, and ran from 1946 to 1967.

As a bit of footnote, in the 1950s Barney also brought Britain its first TV talent competition, Top Town, where’ talent’ from different British locations competed against each other. Might seem a bit old hat and cheesy now but imagine seeing for the first time on TV that ordinary people may have a talent, a show where ordinary people were the stars.

Leeds poet Tony Harrison’s rise can be seen as a battle to establish the legitimacy of working class/ordinary people and their speech both on a personal level and through his writing (see Them & [uz] on YouTube). Tony pointed out that literary giants like Keats and Wordsworth were ordinary people with pronounced, regional accents and Tony took dialect, colloquial speech, and political struggle and fused them with traditional forms and classical references. (I saw his The Trackers of the Oxyrhynchus play at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, it was ace and extremely accessible even to an oik like me).

Representations of ordinary people can be seen through other famous Leeds writers like Mr Alan Bennett, Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse – incidentally, Wilfred Pickles (above) played Billy Liar’s dad in the film. Although it isn’t classed as such and it’s almost a contradiction in terms, I see Billy Liar (1959) as a playful ‘kitchen sink drama’. A Kind Of Loving (1960) certainly was kitchen sink. Now, Horbury born – an area which my mother’s side came from – Stan Barstow isn’t strictly ‘Leeds’ but Stan got encouragement to write and earned his first money from the Leeds BBC Studios in Woodhouse Lane. The film of A Kind Of Loving – adapted with Waterhouse and Hall – was an early and influential ‘kitchen sink drama’ and part of the movement that revolutionised the face of British film making/drama by giving a more realistic portrayal of the, usually northern, working class. (Were I to cast the net over a 10/15 mile radius of Leeds I’d also chuck in John Braine, David Storey and the legendary director who brought so many of the stories to life, Tony Richardson. )

I’d argue that kitchen sink realism fed through into British soap opera, its influence stretching to the present. Coronation Street, with its early gritty realism – turned down by our Barney Colehan – came from the same time and place. The show also set the trend for our TV soaps to concentrate on ‘ordinary’ people as opposed to later US soaps like Dallas and Dynasty.

Not even I’d like to list all the Leeds writers and creatives who’ve shaped soap – mainly because I don’t know them and I need to cook tea – but one notable Leeds writer who cut her teeth in soap (including Corrie) is Kay Mellor. Kay’s dramas, such as Band of Gold and Playing the Field are stuffed full of ordinary people. They also include that scarce TV commodity, roles for women over 40. (I’ve researched this extensively and can confirm that women over 40 do exist.) In her dramas there’s also a lack of the over preened actress/models, with top lips pumped up by collagen into a salami moustache, mouths that struggle to move and foreheads stretched back to resemble ironing boards. i.e. they present ordinary, real people – not silly, aspirational fantasies.

It was fitting that it was in another of Kay’s celebrations of the ordinary, Fat Friends, that James Corden and Ruth Jones (who also wrote for Fat Friends) met and went on to bring us the beautifully observed, real life portrayal of ‘ordinary’ people and a huge TV hit Gavin and Stacey. One of the Fat Friends created a female character, with a strong regional accent, who is the coolest person on TV – move over Clint, Nessa is here. A show that started with half a million viewers went on to reach audiences of over 10 million.

They may not be to everybody’s taste but it would be remiss of me to exclude Lads’ Mags and Chick Lit. The London media village will tell you that the first Lads’ Mag was Loaded in 1994 – launched by Leeds lad James Brown. The actual first Lads’ Mag (that I know of) was Ex Magazine conceived, written, printed and launched in Leeds in 1991. More graphic than Loaded, the basic concept of sex, beer, football, music, fashion was the same.

And for the ‘chicks’, the Chick Lit literary genre is widely regarded to have begun with Helen Fielding’s (from Morley, Leeds) Bridget Jones’s Diary which spawned from her anonymous, confessional column in The Independent. Now we can be sniffy about these genres but their cultural impact is unquestionable.

I’ll wind this up with probably Britain’s biggest shift in cultural perception of the last couple of centuries. The field of Cultural Studies is often seen as the starting point for modern academic studies of the ‘ordinary’, what I think of as identity politics. The term Cultural Studies was coined by Hunslet-born, Leeds University educated, Richard Hoggart and is widely regarded to have been rooted in four books, the first of which was Hoggart’s The Uses Of Literacy (1957). Add to this Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society and The Long Revolution and the final book in the quartet, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), written and published during his 17 year stint at Leeds Uni.

The Uses Of Literacy contrasted the commercialised, mass and Americanised culture of the 1950s against what Hoggart saw as the more self-produced, ‘authentic’, urban 1930s culture of the streets of Hunslet. It became a cornerstone of a school of study that strongly influenced literary studies, sociology, philosophy, communication studies, art criticism, politics, history, geography and psychology. Moving academia and thus social consciousness into reflections on what was historically seen as peripheral through the study of gender, race, social class, ethnicity, sexuality etc. Ironically this book, questioning ‘massification’, also knocked on into a serious study of subjects like film, popular music, fashion, football, comics, television, gaming, social media. The pursuits and interests of ordinary people and a move from ‘high’ culture to ‘mass’ culture.

Across the centuries Leeds creatives have made some important contributions to how we perceive ordinary people. The city helped move society from a prescribed, top down view of the world, of people, their behaviour and culture, to the vista from the bottom. Who are we? How do we view and fit into our world? How do we understand and relate to each other? For me, that’s quite important….oh botheration, I’ve forgotten to include Jake Thackray….and Leigh Francis….Woodbine Willy….Jeremy Dyson…. ooh and there’s Steve Delaney or maybe Harry Corbett and….