Representation of class & status...

For our first extract we watched Shameless. There were many signifiers of the lower classes in this such as:

• council housing estates
• tracksuits
• police in the neighbourhood
• boarded up houses
• etc

And the themes that seemed to run through the extract we saw were ones which were associated with low class. Smoking, alcohol, violence, theft and many more along the lines of this.






In total contrast to this, we watched an extract from Wuthering Heights where the ladies were all wearing posh dresses and had maids and servants, everybody spoke with received pronunciation and they lived in a manor house. These things are also signifiers of higher class. 












(I will now compare the two extracts.)

In the mass media there are so many different representations of class; some of which may be true representations and some that are exaggerated for comical purposes. However are the exaggerated representations a fair showing of people from certain demographics, or are they considered offensive and fuel unreasonable prejudgements?

The story of ‘Shameless’ is based around a father and children living in a council estate. Immediately because they live in a council estate people assume that they will be from a lower class. The way in which the narrator (father) speaks is also slurred and sounds as though he is drunk. He uses simple English and a basic vocabulary - this would imply that he is not very well educated. The clothes that the family wear are tracksuits and lots of gold jewellery; none of which appear very clean. All of these become signifiers for the lower class.

There are also many negative themes throughout the programme such as alcohol and smoking, violence, crime and inability to care for children. Theses are things often associated with the lower classes however, as an audience, can we generalise the entirety of the lower classes to behave in such a manner just because of one representation on the television.

A viewer with a well-balanced view of the class system in Britain would understand that these representations of a lower class family have been exaggerated for comical/dramatic purposes. However somebody with not such a view could either take offence from these representations or have their already unfair prejudgements strengthened.

From even the first five minutes of footage we begin to build up a picture of exactly what this family are like. This is because the programme heavily plays on the stereotype of ‘council estate chav’. Using stereotypes enables the audience to quickly establish character types and then can begin following the plot. Within this first five minutes we meet many characters from the family all of who conform to this ‘chav’ label.

There are many issues confronted in this episode, some of which may be risky. For example there is a clear underlying problem with the father’s inability to care for the children; leading to the threat of social services becoming involved. The father refuses to go to the school to speak with teachers about his son’s progress. The son then tried to make him see that he must attend if not the social services will ‘get on their backs’. The father then immediately agreed to go to the appointment. His change of heart was blatantly due to the potential involvement of the social services. This would imply that the father knew he was an incapable parent and had something to hide; yet did not want to improve on that and better the care for his children. Now if an audience had generalised other ideas from this group of people to lower class people in the ‘real world’ then this is another factor that they may do so with. This was a very dangerous theme to include because of people making assumptions about others based on what they see on television. Also lower class people (like the one’s featured in this programme) could be highly offended by the portrayal of their class.

However part of this ‘chav lifestyle’ is that they don’t care what people think about them. So it is disputable that the type of people featured in ‘Shameless’ who watched it, would not care about the negative representations of themselves in the media.

In total contrast to the representations in ‘Shameless’ we have the positive depiction of the upper class in ‘Wuthering heights’.

In the short extract we saw, the ladies were representing the ‘giggling upper class’ and through a few simple signifiers, we can immediately identify that this piece is heavily based on the upper class.

For example the way the ladies are dressed would only be something that the upper class could afford. They had maids and servants in their house to tend to their every need – these maids and servants would presumably be lower class people looking for a job. The family clearly needed to the staff to assist in their house because it was so large. We saw a long, establishing shot of the manor and instantaneously knew that the family must be wealthy – being wealthy ‘makes’ you upper class. Also when the man is in his library, (even the fact that they have a library lets us know that they are upper class) he is reading and writing. This tells us that as well as being wealthy, he is well educated and would be able to use sophisticated language. (This is then demonstrated later in the extract when we hear him speak).

All of the family speak with received pronunciation (Queen’s English), which is not something that lower class members of the time would be able to do. This was mainly due to the fact that they received no (or very poor) education and had jobs such as farmers or servants – which didn’t have the need for them to be able to speak well.

So in conclusion, we studied two very different representations of two different classes. In the media the upper class are often represented as positively, wealthy and happy – something for an audience to aspire to, in comparison to the negative representation of the downtrodden and helpless or rude and uncaring lower class. These representations rely heavily on stereotypes and signifiers to get across exactly whom they are representing and in what manner.