A recent YouGov survey revealed that just over 8% of creatives sustaining a career in film and television hail from working-class backgrounds. Statistics for on-screen representation of ethnic minorities is better, but with significant room for improvement.
As a brown-skinned kid from a working-class Northern household, I rarely saw myself represented in the books I read or the films and telly dramas I’d watch. The brown characters I encountered were generally baddies – gypsy thieves in The Famous Five or pickpockets in Indiana Jones. Working-class voices were the preserve of Coronation Street. Everything else seemed cut-glass and alien.
My Malaysian mum worked long hours as a district nurse. In school holidays, the library doubled up as free childcare, and it was here that a 1950s American novel set in the Brooklyn docklands spoke to me on a personal and visceral level. Last Exit to Brooklyn was the first book that made me feel seen. Perhaps it was the otherness of Selby’s novel – the intersectionality of class, race, sexuality and gender (and its throbbing racism, homophobia and misogyny) – that brought it searingly to life in my young head; or perhaps it was the conversational, syncopated prose that bounced off the page.
There was no ennobling or fetishising or mythologising these working-class characters. The depictions of street culture I’d seen on television tended to lionise working-class characters as entirely dignified, and principled and stoic in the face of life’s iniquities, but real life isn’t like that. Selby’s characters were flawed, vulnerable, unlikeable and scheming, and all the more compelling, to me. After Last Exit, there was no looking back. The book brought it home to me that working-class writers could have a voice and be heard.
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After university (I was the first person in my family to go) and months of hustling, chasing up, hearing nothing back and exhausting every tenuous contact I’d ever made on the rave scene, I finally landed two interviews in the same week. The first was an absolute dream job – a junior staff writer at a classy, high-end men’s fashion and lifestyle magazine, with a clear pathway to writing features. The catch? A starting salary of £7,000 that automatically ruled out any applicant who wasn’t supported by affluent parents.
It’s still the same today, if not worse – aspiring, low-income writers are expected to work for no or low salary, in order to get a start.