Strike a light! New research published this week from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has exposed that in film, TV and radio, just over eight per cent of ‘creatives’ are from working-class backgrounds – the lowest percentage in a decade. This does not surprise me in the slightest, though it is always nice to have some juicy stats to confirm what one already suspected.

When I started working in TV about 30 years ago, I was surprised, and rather delighted, by the backgrounds of the people I was working for and with (I had come from publishing, which was a different story). One of my first TV jobs was at Granada Studios in Manchester. I was a storyliner on Coronation Street, then one of the UK’s most-watched and most-popular shows. Working-class backgrounds were by far in the majority. The creative team included an ex-bus driver, an ex-paratrooper and a smattering of former local journalists and shop workers. Yes, Coronation Street is obviously a series about (mostly) working-class people but, as I later discovered elsewhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean those behind the scenes will share that background.

It seems funny now, but I used to worry back then that TV people were maybe a little too ‘normie’. I would scoff at AA Gill’s Sunday Times reviews where he talked about TV being run by middle-class ‘Tristrams’. Maybe there was an element of that at the high end of the industry. But, in my experience, it was rare to encounter anybody who hadn’t been state educated. In popular TV at least, there was a strong awareness of what viewers appreciated. We wouldn’t dare be preachy or talk down to them.

The history of TV – which only really kicked off properly after the Second World War – shows that this had long been the case, in the most part. Let’s look at a few renowned TV creatives from the misty past, going back to the supposedly unenlightened decades before my own entry into the fray. Jack Rosenthal, a prolific Corrie writer, was the son of a factory worker. Dennis Potter, BBC drama supremo, was the son of a coal miner. Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had extremely ordinary London backgrounds. As for children’s TV, you had Dennis Spooner, who left school at 14, or ex-policeman Robert Holmes. Both worked as script editors on Doctor Who.