Common People #0021
"A privately educated nepo baby who has a TV show with daddy the showbiz agent"
Hello!
Welcome new subscribers, especially those who joined after our talk at the Southbank Centre (clang) last month. Yep - we do talks! And what a lovely bunch of people they were. Good eggs.
Whether this is your first newsletter or you’re a seasoned follower, we’ve put a few useful links together below. We also have a WhatsApp group for Commoners in the creative industries that somebody kindly described last week as “a supportive, helpful and hilarious community”. Drop us a message if you’d like to join.
The useful links
Waitrose Wally
Singer Becky Hill told Jack Whitehall about himself last week after the comedian called her “Wetherspoons Whitney” while hosting the Brits. Hill took to instagram to point out that Whitehall is in no place to question anybody’s talent, being “a privately educated nepo baby who has a TV show with daddy the showbiz agent”.
The fact Whitehall felt confident to stand on stage while hosting the country’s biggest music awards, on national TV, and make a nominee’s Midlands accent the butt of a joke about a cheap pub chain, only highlights how normalised Classism in the creative industries has become. We read accounts of workplace accent bias every week in our WhatsApp.
The joke might’ve landed better if the industry wasn’t in the midst of a widely publicised Class crisis, with access to creative jobs, education and funding increasingly out of reach to all but society’s most privileged. This feels like a good time to bring up Youth Music’s Blueprint for the Future report, which found that above all else, social class is the biggest barrier to earning money through music in the UK. If you were wondering where all the raw creative energy went from mainstream British music, that’d be a good place to start.
Meanwhile, The Tab listed the private schools the major winners at the Brits attended. Jack Whitehall’s cost £52,000 a year, in case you were wondering. All that money just to end up a clown mocking a woman’s background for cheap laughs. Daddy must be proud.
We’re celebrating…
If you’re a PR professional from an underrepresented background, Socially Mobile offers a fully funded 10 week training and development course with a recognised certificate at the end. Applications to this year’s programme are now open.
A new exhibition explores the richness of Working Class life in Britain from the 1950s to now, taking in photography, painting, ceramics, sculpture and film. And it’s caused some beef!! The Guardian’s lukewarm review, which opens by suggesting photos of ‘common people’ don’t belong in fancy galleries, prompted a response letter from the exhibition’s curator Samantha Manton. If you’d rather see for yourself than take the word of The Guardian (lol) Lives Less Ordinary: Working Class Britain Re-Seen is on at Two Temple Place until April 20th.
“Working-class creatives don’t stand a chance in the UK today” warned...The Guardian.
The Boy With A Leg Named Brian, Pete McKee’s exhibition at Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum, received high praise in our WhatsApp group.
Are you a Working Class journalist, poet, novelist or anyone else who puts words together for work or fun? If so, Indie Novella are taking submissions for an upcoming essay collection, Bread Alone. FYI, 80% of journalists come from professional and upper class backgrounds, according to the NCTJ.
Even if orange-man-who-shall-remain-nameless takes the momentum out of DEI, arts organisations can still work towards a better and more inclusive future. The Hyperallergic substack had some thoughts on how.
We’re often asked whether any unions exist for creative industry workers. The answer is yes! The Creative Comms Union is open to workers in PR, advertising, media, design, production and associated UK creative industries, and there’s also Bectu, who represent almost 40,000 creative industry staff, contractors and freelancers.
Pregnant then Screwed has set up a giant CV shredder to expose the shocking number of women whose careers are destroyed every year due to pregnancy and maternity discrimination. 74,000 women are forced out of the workplace every year in the UK. Help expose this massive waste by shredding your own CV.
Sam Diss interviewed Danny Dyer for GQ about Pinter, EastEnders and being Working Class in TV-land.
Creative industry leaders are clubbing together to tell the government to keep AI’s grubby robot hands off our work. The Make it Fair campaign argues that allowing tech companies to train AI models on human-made creativity without compensating the owners is immoral and poses an existential threat to the industries themselves.
Common People is, and always will be free to read. No paywalls. Nada. But if you like what we’re about and want to help the cause, you could shout about us on socials or share this with a friend. Or your co-workers. Or get us in to do a talk at your office. Or just drop us a message with a friendly word to commonpeoplelikeus@gmail.com.
Until next month,
Much love.