The Mailbag: Being Working Class is a Superpower

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How are you doing?

This is producer Andy, and you're listening to Here Comes the Guillotine: The Mailbag, with Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, issue, or a dire need just to be heard, then email hctg at global.com.

Enjoy the episode.

Hi, Susie, Frankie, and Christopher.

Many thanks for your efforts to accompany my Monday morning coffee-making routine.

Also, an extra special thanks to Frankie for being at least one spot of seriousness amongst the dross that was the late 2000s TV scheduling during my formative years.

I think this may have well have influenced my decision to study a very politicised PhD at Glasgow, to which the following problem pertains.

As you all grew up working class and have to exist within what can be a very gentrified and middle class area of culture, comedy, maybe you can lend some thoughts on coping mechanisms.

I grew up in a council of state, have always had to mix working and studying to support myself, and very few people who make it this far in academia share that background.

How do you guys survive, thrive, and hold your tongue

around some of the most ignorant people in the world?

I am starting to think my current method of imagining them all skinless and dounced in pedro is sending me down a bad path.

All the best, anonymous.

I hate the structure.

But you can understand why.

If I worked out university, I would be picturing a lot of people dripping and unwedded.

I think.

I think one of the problems with

class in your work environment is that it's pervasive and it becomes

the norms are middle class, the norms of behavior, the norms of language used are middle class.

Even listening to this podcast, there'll be people who will totally reject this on the basis of we swear.

And we don't really think about that because we all come from working class backgrounds, right?

Or

Scottish, you know, demotic Scottish speech, what that involves, right?

I know a Scottish woman who refused to book Scottish female acts who swore.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Like, and that's a fucking hard shift.

Because it's really conservative.

Yeah.

I think you've got to

understand sometimes that the frustration comes from the fact that you're within someone else's kind of paradigm.

You're within someone else's rules

one of the things you can do to dilute that is to understand what the rules are do you know what i mean so i understood in my career that if i swore on live at the apollo that that was a choice that would mean certain things and it would close certain doors and would open certain doors i guess you've got to talk to people and you've got to be informed and you've got to not be cowed by other people's rules because ultimately

if you follow all the rules you'll never get in trouble but you'll also never do anything particularly interesting because you're just, you know, maybe you'll luck out and you'll end up presenting a fucking kiggery show or something.

You're not going to be creatively fulfilled, colouring between the lines.

Yep, and you know,

I completely agree with all of that.

And I think there is a thing where,

and it's all very easy to see this when you're in the arts and you're maybe not within the fucking realms of everyday working life, as it were.

You've just got to fucking do your shit.

You've got to do your thing, and whatever your thing is, just do it and do it well.

And you just need to go, do you know what?

They are what they are.

I am what I am.

We're incredibly different.

I mean, I'm sitting and watch things on the TV, you know what I'm saying?

I've gigged with that person a fucking million times, and I have genuinely watched audiences every time just stare at them, right?

And then the next thing you know, it's like they're hosting this, they're doing that, right?

And it's that, and you go, Well, that's because that's what they are,

and that's the box that they fit in, and that's what they want to do because clearly they want a really big house, and that's absolutely fine because that's not me, and you kind of just need to accept that.

You just need to accept that

sometimes

people are cunts, and generally they're middle class.

There are more opportunities for you if you're middle class in Britain.

There's been a certain amount of pushback against that over maybe

10

years or so that seems to me now to be ending.

And that pressure that people had on television, for example, to have

non-white people or women or working class voices in, say, a writing room, even, never mind on screen or in the production.

is kind of lessening now and everybody's kind of reverting to type.

Yep.

So the other day I was at Janie Godley's funeral and I think Janie's the prime example of someone who never got the career she should have had.

You know what I mean?

Like if Janie was twenty years younger, it would have been different for Janie.

But I think there was always classism as well.

Yeah.

She sounded so

um identifiably working class.

Yeah.

Um that so you get the double whammy of she started out in a time when it's really sexist but also like people were openly kind of classist.

Ah, ah, yeah.

Yeah, and also, you know, I mean, you sit in green rooms and you see these older kind of middle class comics as well, just

being really sneery about it.

You know, but each of them.

Here's the thing, they moan more.

So people who are middle class and get more opportunities actually take it worse.

So I remember talking to this guy, and he's like, I would consider him pretty successful.

And he was sort of talking about, oh, god, I've had these like half a dozen pilot scripts, and none of them have got past pilot stage, and blah blah blah.

And everything he said was just to me describing the experience of being a comedian.

Like, well, that's everybody, pal.

We're all kind of floating pilots, and we're all kind of sending scripts to people, and we're all kind of doing an office run-through, and then not getting hired for the thing.

You're just sort of describing what the life is like, but you're describing it in tones of aggrieved, you know, entitlement.

Remember, kind of comparing, listening to somebody moan about it and realising, oh, you feel hard done by, even though you've had a success, because everybody that you went to private school now runs.

Yes, or you're like a doctor or a lawyer, whereas not to shit on anybody that I went to school with, but you know, I don't feel I briefly had a mortgage there and then I've had to like go with my mortgage.

But for a while, I wasn't like, oh my god, I haven't got a house or I don't have any of these things because nobody I went to school with did.

Do you know what I mean?

I've just got to beat people who were getting dragged out of a canal

yeah

competitions in the graveyard yeah man but if you're like try to keep up with the Joneses and you try to fucking like hang out with somebody who's a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or whatever you're like I find it fascinating that whole thing about you're a comedian

and your

social mobility is the same as somebody that has a

40 hours a week job but probably do 55

and they have their own office.

And you have that social mobility, whether that be through your partner or inherited wealth or whatever it may be, but you have that and it's still not enough.

And you're like, you have more than most comics

have because they will not live in a house like that generally.

Do you know what I mean?

They won't send their kids to that school or be able to afford a private nursery or any of these kind of things.

Do you know what I mean?

Lots of

comics who you would think of as kind of liberal left people send their kids to private school.

You know, quite common.

Yeah.

And what do we say about that, Frankie?

Well, that's because, you know, they're in a middle-class environment, and all your producers and all your channel people and everybody, they're all sending their kids to private school, and you're like, well, this is the world I'm in.

So I'm going to do it too.

And then you've got the people, the kids who then go to private school, but then try and deny that they went to private school, and you're like

a partial scholarship.

No, yeah, no, my dad, like

a lot of scholarships, yeah,

yeah,

yeah, I never actually thought of that, but I guess my mom applied for something, or

I had a baby brother who was actually made of coins, and we just kind of spent him.

He was like a coin baby,

yeah, it's like a piñata.

So, too anonymous, listen, do what you want to do be true to yourself and just fucking block them out because you know what

nobody's going to be like oh they went to uni with this person also it's clasgo fucking hell man you're not going to run out of working class people to fucking talk to yeah get yourself out of the fucking library i would also say that being working class is an absolute superpower and that most people are working class so if you want to connect with people obviously it's just not if you're doing whatever thing in academia he's doing he's fucked Anonymous, you're fucked.

But if you're a comedian, you're not, you know, you're only going to play, you could, no, not like playing an arena is the end gold for everybody or even anybody.

But you know, there's more likely to be working class people in your audience.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

So it's great to be able to connect with that amount of people.

Whereas if you're...

Podcast number 49 in Britain.

Also,

right?

I'm going to

see the absolute sneering that gets done with the working classes in this country, right?

Like that gets done to the working classes in this country.

It's just fucking disgusting, as if they don't contribute anything.

You know, like, I remember a bunch of comedians talking about having a fucking trade day come around the house, having a guy going all waiting for a builder or whatever.

And they're,

oh, remember him breathing through your teeth.

And, oh, I

remember make him a cup of tea.

And I'm just looking at these pathetic fucks going, this guy bothered to go and get a trade while you sat in university doing fuck all fuck off do you know like that really sneery middle class guy thing

because

he's just intimidated by here's something i distrust people who go i had a fag with my cleaner

i mean i had a cup of tea and a fag with the cleaner and stuff like that and i think why are you telling me that yeah why are you telling me that and also leave him alone

working class people don't do that it's only middle class people that do that because working class people secretly we think i should be cleaning the house yes you have a conversation like normal people you don't be benevolent to go i'll make you a cup of tea let's have a cigarette it's fucking patronizing man

you know whereas if it's just the if it's just a cleaner in the office or somebody that's working class you're just like you're right how you doing how's your day been you know just say hello i used to work for organizations where directors of companies would fucking walk past you and not say good morning and i was like,

You are an electrician to trade who's done very well for yourself.

Congratulations.

You would never do that if you were on a building site.

But you've just became a prick.

Do you know what I mean?

I think we've thoroughly answered this guy's

Daniel.

Yeah, I think he's got an academic job, but this doesn't really help.

I mean,

you can't even really go.

I became an academic and it's awfully middle class.

I mean,

it was gonna help you plum something,

but not a bit right.

I'm fucking doing the TSA Elliott course, and this cunt's this cunt's doing the rest of modernising.

Monkey C, monkey do, get the working class guy in the lecture theatre, because then you'll get more working class people believing that they can achieve it.

So, I'm gonna go ahead and do that.

Here's the thing about fucking class expectations.

If middle class people in Scotland are Philistines, and if I've read a book that's like a a literary novel or something like that, I would ask my working class friends if they'd read it.

Or if the GFT had a fucking French New Wave film or something like that, I would ask my working class pals if they were going.

I fucking love Breathless.

But you know what I mean?

Because

they are more engaged and they have more time.

And like being middle class in Scotland, it's like a replication factory for the professions.

So in England, being middle class is, oh, you can go go to fucking Oxford and Cambridge and you can become one of the people that's the designers of the fucking culture.

You go into politics, you can be in the cabinet, you can be a Nobel Prize winner, all this fucking stuff, right?

But in Scotland, it's you can go to fucking St Alish's, then you go to a uni in Scotland or elsewhere, and then you come back and you fucking open an accountancy firm in Glasgow, or you and you become the next generation.

And it's literally about class replication and the fucking Philistines.

Like, there's quite a kind of Catholic trope involved in that because Catholics were denied employment, not denied full employment, but denied that kind of accountancy, that higher education thing for such a long time in Scotland that you know it was really difficult to get into university.

And then, when they got into university and they got out with a law degree, the fucking lawyers weren't going to take them on because they were like, What's your name, son?

No, no, no, no.

We're Finn, we're fucking Finlay and McCullough.

Your name Disney fit in this register kind of thing.

So

I think there is an element of that as well, where it's kind of just masking, isn't it?

And that whole kind of keeping up with the Joneses thing as well.

Do you know what it is in Scotland?

It's the gilly mentality.

So it's like you're service in England.

You're a service provider and a gilly would go and fucking make sure there's enough grouse for everybody to shoot.

Salmon in the lock and all that kind of stuff.

And they're kind of that.

And you don't really need to have read the fucking Booker shortlist to be that.

Do you know what I mean?

They don't have the same look at English middle classes, a francophile, they're very literate.

There's a lot of kind of fiction gets read, and

you know, they're not Philistine.

And Scottish, Scottish middle classes, it's all

away breaks.

They talk about all the time, they talk about getting away for every holiday, grabbing the kids, all going skiing.

They talk about

booze and they talk about house prices.

Yeah, you're absolutely spot on.

I think when you see people, you know, like Val McDermott and stuff like that, who just believe in

to help educate children, you know, like give them a book, do you know, like, encourage that.

And that is such a working-class thing, isn't it?

Because it's quite a basic thing, reading, and to educate children, and for children to be educated through that, even if you've had social mobility, right?

Like, like you've came from a working-class background and you've had social mobility, you're still reading, right?

You're because you're like, no, this is my thing, because this is what.

My eyes are gone, Susie.

I know, I know, I've seen you looking at that fucking ticket in the football the other week.

I was like, next time I'll need to get him one in Braille.

But

like, people who have now had social mobility from a working cla a Scottish working class background

for that first generation, but they're still reading.

They're still reading because that was their way out.

That was a teacher putting a book in their hand, or their parents are them just going into this world where they could just go away.

And that's a very working-class thing, I think, as well.

Of self-education, is that Billy Connolly thing, wasn't it?

The tunnel out of Heroes in the Library.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Christopher.

That was any final photo, though.

He had built a tunnel

out to Anderson, so you can just skip Finnison if you want.

And nobody credits him for that.

Nobody mentions the Connolly tunnel anymore.

My fucking tunnel network

utterly overlooked.

I was a human mole.

People don't think about it, but I was...

I had claws, like a sloth, and I was tunneling through the earth.

People

coming up from the sewer, and they'd just, you know, they were in their own reality bubble, so they'd just write it off.

Talking about a reality bubble, I've been with these two for five hours.

I need go home and lie down.

I am shattered.

People say I hear that banjo.

I'm going to eat Panjo.

And I'd take it.

I would eat it.

Even though it's covered in shade.

I didn't care.

Because we didn't back then.

It was better.

I'm away.

Fucking do him and see his later listeners.

Thank you for listening to Here Comes the Guillotine Mailbag for Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, dilemma, or issue that you think Frankie, Susie, and Christopher can fix, email hctg at global.com.

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