Across Britain, new voices are reshaping stage, screen and shelves, while a row simmers over who really speaks for you.
A year of awards, sell-out shows and bold programmes has cracked open old barriers. One debate keeps returning: who gets to define the working class, and who actually gets heard?
Stephen Graham’s moment, and what it unlocked
Stephen Graham’s tearful Emmy speech landed because it felt like a turning point, not a fairy tale. He spoke as a kid from a Kirkby tower block who made it, and his success now reads less like an exception and more like a signal. Doors long stuck are nudging open for people with similar backgrounds, often because artists like Graham have kept pushing from the inside.
In 2025, talent from estates and ex-industrial towns is not asking for a handout. It is proving its value on the biggest stages.
The signal flashed early with Two Temple Place’s Lives Less Ordinary show, which centred humour and resilience rather than misery porn. London’s National Theatre filled with Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down, a knotty family wedding drama with a Polish groom at its heart, alongside James Graham’s freshly minted Dear England. In Salford, Gods of Salford cast 25 local youngsters next to seasoned actors, vaulting Greek myth into terraces and trading estates.
From salons to stadiums: the new cultural weather
The wave stretches across screens and pages. Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal, drawn from life in and out of care and work in Bolton, collected major prizes including a Bafta and three RTS awards. The Booker shortlist features Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper and Natasha Brown’s Universality, both by writers who make class structure a live, present-tense issue rather than a museum piece.
On TV and in publishing, the class lens is sharpening, not blurring: who rises, who stalls, who pays the hidden costs.
Music is not standing aside. Bashy’s album Being Poor Is Expensive struck a nerve by naming the tax of low pay and high bills. Oasis returned to arenas, their swagger reframed as a reminder that pop once teemed with kids from council stock, even if Liam Gallagher’s crowd-pleasing attack on the Edinburgh authorities inflated numbers to cartoon scale.
Stormzy, meanwhile, has matched mainstream fame with targeted support. His scholars’ programme for Black UK students at Cambridge sits alongside a £10m, ten-year commitment through his foundation to tackle racial inequality. That is pipeline money, not rhetoric.
Pipeline beats platitudes: £10m over ten years, two Booker nominees from working-class backgrounds, and one ITV/BBC era shaped by working-class leads.
Pictures, platforms and the people who built them
Galleries and bookshelves echo the same shift. Johny Pitts’s touring show After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024 documents intimacy and pride as well as hardship. Tish Murtha’s photographs, lifted by last year’s documentary revival, now front Sam Fender’s latest record, bringing North East grit and warmth to a national audience.
Editors and mentors have done the spadework. Kit de Waal’s Common People anthology gave new writers licence to write plainly about class and gatekeeping. Shane Meadows and Stephen Graham proved, a generation ago, that working-class drama brings audiences with it. That faith put Vicky McClure on screen, gave Jodie Comer early momentum, and now ushers in Owen Cooper.
The numbers that still jar
Progress matters, yet the figures remain lopsided. Researchers tracking UK television found a thin pipeline compared with the 1970s, when the arts drew far more heavily from working-class streets and schools.
Only 8% of people working in UK TV come from working-class backgrounds; the proportion in the arts has roughly halved since the 1970s.
Michael Sheen has used his platform to change that picture, co-founding A Writing Chance with New Writing North. The scheme backed Tom Newlands, whose Only Here, Only Now became a word-of-mouth favourite in 2024. At the Edinburgh TV Festival, James Graham called for a reset, not special pleading: equity of opportunity, not a dead-end argument about talent.
Why representation beats caricature
This is where Tommy Robinson enters the frame. His act feeds on the idea that the working class is a block vote: white, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim. That caricature travels easily because many people still feel shut out of cultural life, so a loud voice claiming to “speak for you” can sound plausible.
The art says something different. Alina Akbar’s photography, Ishy Din’s plays, Willan’s scripts and Graham’s performances show a working-class Britain with many accents and faiths. They share honesty about money, housing and transport. They refuse to punch down.
The more rooms Stephen Grahams open, the less space there is for Tommy Robinsons to pretend they speak for everyone.
What’s changing on the ground
Beyond headlines and hand-waving, real nuts-and-bolts changes are taking root. Some are small but compound; others are structural. Together, they build routes in and ladders up.
- Casting with community quotas alongside professionals, as in Salford, to grow confidence and credits.
- Scholarships tied to living costs, not just fees, to block the slide back to low-paid work.
- Regional commissioning that pays travel and child-care, so talent outside the M25 can say yes.
- Mentoring that includes contract literacy and time management, not only craft.
- Open, paid traineeships in TV and theatre to avoid the unpaid internship trap.
A quick reality check on costs
Talk of opportunity collapses if the maths does not work for a newcomer without family money. Here is a simple monthly snapshot for a trainee actor living outside London and travelling to jobs.
| Item | Cost | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Shared rent and bills | £650 | Regional city, modest room |
| Travel to auditions | £120 | Train and bus fares |
| Classes and coaching | £150 | One short course per month |
| Phone, data, headshots | £60 | Essential tools |
| Income: bar shifts | £600 | Three evenings a week |
| Income: bursary | £200 | Small local grant |
| Monthly gap | £180 | Without family help, the gap persists |
That gap is where many dreams stall. It is why paid placements, travel stipends and regional rehearsal rooms matter as much as talent-spotting.
Culture wars versus cultural work
The easy content is argument. The hard content is craft, rehearsal and editing. Stephen Graham’s own words about needing others bear that out. Humility and cooperation, not swagger, tend to hold careers together. The current wave feels grounded in that ethic: small ensembles, shared credit, community casts, patient editors, persistent curators.
Politicians love the phrase “the working class” when it flatters their brand. Artists who grew up in it tend to talk instead about rent, trains, childcare, free school meals, strike days and odd jobs. Their details land because they are lived.
What readers can watch for next
Signals to track in 2025 are concrete, not abstract.
- Booker and Bafta shortlists that keep naming debut voices from estates and small towns.
- Network schedules with paid trainee credits outside London, not only in office roles.
- Touring shows that leave subsidised tickets behind for local schools and colleges.
- Publishing advances matched with hardship funds, so writers can finish second books.
Extra context that widens the view
Two terms matter in this debate. The class ceiling describes barriers that appear after entry: networking rituals, accent bias, unpaid overtime. Cultural capital covers the unwritten rules, from how to pitch to how to behave on set. Training can teach both; mentoring can soften the shocks.
There are risks as the wave grows. Token casting breeds cynicism. One-season wonders burn out writers who need time to learn. A single hit can trap actors in stereotypes. The safer bet is range: fund comedy and drama, commission across regions, back both heritage and new writing, keep routes open to behind-camera jobs.
There are advantages too. Mixed rooms spot blind spots earlier. Regional shoots spend money where audiences live. Stories with real-world budgets travel because the details make sense to viewers juggling their own costs.
If you want a yardstick, try this simple test on any new project: does it expand who gets paid, who gets credit and who sees themselves on stage or screen? When the answer is yes, the country gains. And the space for loud men claiming to speak for everyone starts to shrink.
Does cutting through the 8% ceiling actually hinge on paid traineeships and travel stipends, as you suggest, or is commisioning power the real bottleneck? Would love to see year-on-year hiring data split by region and role, not just headline numbers.
So is this a culture war or a spreadsheet war? If “pipeline beats platitudes”, show the reciepts—how many working-class writers got second-book advances, not just debuts. Otherwise it’s vibes over value.