Social mobility is a joke: Working-class women and British TV comedy on ‘the social floor’

Abstract

This article examines a range of recent autosociobiographical representations of and by working-class women in the contemporary UK, focusing on Rain Dogs, Chewing Gum and Alma’s Not Normal. It argues that what unites these different representations – all of which are TV comedy-dramas, some with connecting iterations as memoir and play – is a vigorous critique and rejection of the neoliberal meritocratic dream. These representations show that the idea of a level playing field in which working hard to activate talent results in success is simply not a possibility for most working-class women: upwards social mobility is a joke. Yet crucially, this situation is not simply portrayed as a thwarted tragedy of the downtrodden, or as poverty porn in the tradition of reality TV. Instead, through life-affirming exuberant comedy, they show how the wider socio-political landscape is unjust while energetically refusing to accept its limits or internalise its stigma: they ‘reject respectability’. Unlike the majority of autosociobiographies, these representations primarily use a comedic tone. Their focus is not on ‘escape’, ‘transcendence’ or the aspiration for a middle-class life, but on the complexities of working-class lives as lived in context, and on critiquing institutional structures. They do value collective community support and crave the security of putting a ‘social floor’ on their circumstances, of not having to constantly worry about losing everything. Considering why the televisual is a useful vehicle for these narratives, the article asks: what do these women’s exuberant rejections of neoliberal meritocracy and bourgeois standards of judgement indicate about the wider cultural, social and political context, or current conjuncture?

Introduction

‘I write this slumped on my cream pleather sofa’ begins Skint Estate, ‘My fat, tattooed arm wobbling as it scribbles down memories in between greedy mouthfuls of pasta’. [. . .] ‘Later, I shall leave my child alone [. . .] before getting my fanny serviced after closing time in an alleyway by a manual labourer. (Carraway, 2019: xi–xii)

These lines are from the opening paragraphs of Cash Carraway’s 2019 memoir Skint Estate: Notes from the poverty line. Over several pages in blistering prose it takes many of the disparaging and scornful stereotypes used to frame working-class women and flings them right back. Carraway pulls no punches in rejecting these dehumanising tropes and caricatures them from the very off. She is clear about the social mechanisms used to divide and rule (‘a witch-hunt intended to inject anti-female propaganda into our already divided communities’) and the media mechanisms and conduits through which they are generated (‘sneering producers . . . and privileged men of the right-wing press’ (xiii)). Carraway locates herself as a subject of this bitter vilification, not as an isolated example, but as part of a wider social formation.

I am one of 2 million demonised single women in the UK banished from the sisterhood of posing against Insta-perfect urban walls in gentrified areas because we can’t afford to cook Deliciously Ella on Agas. (xiii) ¹

This is not a singular misery memoir but an angry rejection of working-class pathologisation that works by making spectacular the experience of living structural limits.

Skint Estate was the basis for the TV series Rain Dogs (BBC/HBO, 2023) which similarly begins totally unapologetically (‘I’m a scrounger, a liar, a hypocrite, a stain on a society with no basic morals – or so they say’). Like the other recent British TV comedy-dramas, or ‘dramedies’, that we study here, Alma’s Not Normal (BBC, 2020–2024) and Chewing Gum (C4, 2015–2017), which first appeared as a play, Chewing Gum Dreams (Coel, 2013), Rain Dogs is notable for clearly showing via comedy how the wider socio-political landscape is both absurd and unjust, and for its main protagonist flamboyantly refusing to internalise such denigration as a working-class woman. These texts reject the long history of representations of working-class claims for respectability (Skeggs, 1997). They show that neoliberal ‘meritocracy’, used to cement the ideology of contemporary capitalism (Littler, 2018) is simply not a possibility for most working-class people; that the idea of a level societal playing field, in which ‘having aspirations’ and working hard to activate talent will result in success, is a joke. Their protagonists are concerned more with subsisting on a stable social floor than in cracking the class ceiling. In the process these texts offer a range of different ‘takes’ on social mobility, from flat-out rejection (or anti-mobility) to nuanced critique.

As the above example indicates, this seam of female working-class TV representation derives from memoirs and autobiographical writings. Chewing Gum is set on a housing estate in Hackney in London and is based on Michaela Coel’s own teenage years in Tower Hamlets, including her years of religious zeal. ‘It’s about my life, my upbringing – every character is made up of people I know’ (Berrington, 2015). Alma’s Not Normal is based on writer-producer-lead actor Sophie Willan’s experiences growing up in Bolton with a heroin-addicted mother, and in and out of care (‘I was the baby in Trainspotting if it had lived’) (Saner, 2021). ² Consequently it is worth bringing them into discussion with the expanding interest in ‘autosociobiography’: autobiographical reflections which are situated in wider social and collective contexts in which class analysis is to the fore (Jouvet, 2023; Twellman and Lammers, 2023; Littler, 2025) and to which this special issue is dedicated.

At times it can seem as if a disproportionate amount of attention in autosociobiographical studies is given to memoirs by men: Richard Hoggart’s ‘scholarship boy’ (Hoggart, 2009); Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of his ‘cleft habitus’ (Bourdieu, 2008); Didier Eribon’s bestselling book Returning to Reims (Eribon, 2013). This should not surprise us, given that the auto/biographical genre emerged from Rousseau in the eighteenth century as a way of legitimating the white male ‘possessive individual’ and his colonial adventures, as endorsed and lionised by western capitalism (Skeggs, 2004). Yet it was the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize, Annie Ernaux, who recently coined the term autosociobiography in her creative contextualisations of her working-class upbringing. Indeed, if we take a broader perspective, this has been a genre marked by an expansive creative engagement by feminist, sometimes queer, Jewish, Black and white working-class women: Angela Davis (1974), Audre Lorde (1982), Carolyn Steedman (1986), Joan Nestle (1987), Valerie Walkerdine (1990), bell hooks (1994), Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek (1997), Tess Cosslett et al. (2000), and Lynne Segal (2023), to name but a few. All these texts deal with class, race, gender and sexuality with a strong focus on power and political engagement. In fact, it could be argued that a substantive amount of feminism, gay, lesbian, queer history and anti-racism was built on the architecture of autosociobiography.

The majority of the texts cited as examples of ‘autosociobiography’ dwell on literary/scholarly narratives of upwards social mobility, a process and state that Chantal Jouvet terms ‘transclass’ (Jouvet, 2023). The divided self, the cleft habitus, the ‘price of the ticket’ and the pain of reconnection are continually explored themes. The desire to ‘move up in the world’ as indicative of ‘social success’ has been integral to post-war meritocratic dreams of advancement (Payne, 2017). Under neoliberal meritocracy, ‘striving’ has become aggressively presented as a universal moral obligation while those ‘failing’ to achieve/escape have become increasingly viciously stigmatised (Littler, 2018; Sandel, 2020; Tyler, 2022). Such injunctions have been widely internalised. In her influential article analysing women’s narratives of class mobility, ‘Getting out and getting away’, Steph Lawler analysed how her interviewees strongly show an impatient desire to leave and to forget working-class existence entirely (Lawler, 1999).

Yet, in contrast, most of the TV characters in the series we are discussing are not motivated by a desire to become middle-class and ‘get away’. Our three dramedies are based on lives lived through the decades of destruction of the neoliberal welfare state since the 1980s in the UK, both as experienced by their parents and then firsthand during the decades of austerity since 2010. The ‘autosociobiographies’ of Caraway, Coel and Willan are not written by academics and are located in the devastated and disinvested northern towns and inner-city London council estates that have been shunted into disrepair, mould and violence, and where a substantial number of collective, vibrant, absurd, comedic and tragic things occurs. Very different autosociobiographical narratives are put on display compared to those demarcated within the ‘transclass’ oeuvre. These women do not track their progress after ‘moving up’: instead, they know such trajectories are rare. Crucially, they also energetically reject the narrative that makes lack of mobility their fault. They refuse to let the symbolic violence that is flung at them stick. As Sophie Willan says:

The whole point of why I started . . . is to humanise welfare recipients and people with mental illness through my own personal experiences and through the people that I know and love, and who are very loveable. (Murphy, 2018)

As we argue here, taking these dramedies into account expands our understanding of the autosociobiographical beyond the literary form: beyond the traumatised male who ruefully leaves his working-class habitus. Their perspective is firmly located in working-class culture, one which refuses to stigmatise it, celebrates its collectivities and critiques middle-class neoliberal dreams of upwards social mobility, challenging the solution of an ‘escape’ to middle-class respectability.

Notably, several of these TV texts have won critical acclaim and have begun to be recognised and analysed by a range of innovative new work in feminist media studies drawing attention to the recent explosion in female-led television comedy and dramedy (see in particular Bowen, 2021; Minor, 2024; Sobande, 2019; Woods, 2019). In this article, our analysis draws on this pioneering work, alongside texts on social mobility and cultural studies, and on analysis of the conjuncture. As Minor (2024) and Woods (2019) discuss, the boom in female comedy programmes over the last decade have birthed different contemporary iterations of the ‘unruly’ woman. We analyse ‘autosociobiographical’ working-class women’s programmes within this seam, highlighting a range of dramatic indicators across these TV series and the paratextual material of media interviews to focus on how they interact with and critique social mobility narratives.

The article is developed through four parts. First, it outlines the social and political context, or the wider conjuncture, of these ‘anti-mobility’ narratives; second, it analyses how the programmes specifically relate to this savage context; third, it considers how the programmes fit into and deviate from recent histories of comedy and class; and finally it teases out the complexities of class and mobility in the text, showing how these representations relate to the authors’ classed experiences in writing and TV production. Throughout, it argues that these programmes work by drawing our sociological attention away from the class ceiling and towards the meaning, texture and experience of what we call ‘the social floor’.

Forget the class ceiling, it’s the social floor

These texts show a version of class that at the least complicates, and at the most rejects, conventional neoliberal mobility narratives. Why is this? To answer we need to look to the socio-political conjuncture, with the expansion of ‘late’ capitalist power increasing major disparities of economic inequality between rich and poor (Piketty, 2017). Inequality has fermented savagely in the UK and decades of purposeful government destruction of the working class have made the very idea of social mobility a joke. This context largely emerged from the late 1970s via financial deregulation, Thatcherism’s attacks on the trade unions, the decimation of industrial heartlands and the dismantling of the socialised welfare state, which has been incrementally sold off to private and corporate interests with asset managers taking over state and public services (Christophers, 2023). As Will Hutton (2024) notes, ‘for 45 years Britain has been blighted by Conservative ideologies that promised a path to prosperity but achieved nothing of the sort’ (Hutton 2024), culminating in the Brexit wreckage of the national economy, leading to devastation through poverty for at least 3 million adults and 30% of all children by the UK government’s own figures (Hayes, 2024). The blame for inequality was particularly directed via the right-wing media onto single mothers in the 1980s, Black male youth in the 1990s, with immigrants and working-class ‘fecklessness’ added to the scapegoating mix in the 2000s (Golding and Middleton, 1982; Jensen, 2018; Tyler, 2013).

The first wave of ‘austerity’ policies in the UK was introduced in 2010 by a Conservative-led coalition government which purposely subjected the working class, and in particular the disabled, to a decade of shrunken security, support and livelihood (Bhattacharyya, 2015; Forkert, 2017). The second wave of austerity, otherwise known as ‘the cost-of-living crisis’, rolled out this time under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, reduced support and security even further, resulting in the stark choice offered to so many between either paying for food or paying for heating. The implementation of Universal Credit during this period by the UK government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) exposed those already impoverished to even greater hardship and avoidable death (Disability Rights, 2024). In between Thatcher’s failed monetarism and two rounds of government-enforced austerity was the Covid-19 pandemic (2019–2021), which was leveraged by the UK government in classic ‘shock doctrine’ mode (Klein, 2008) to capitalise on the crisis, by syphoning off millions to Conservative party supporters and the super-rich. This left the working class even further impoverished and depleted, either by death through proximity at paid work and/or lack of healthcare, or by loss of paid employment; Britain had the second highest excess death rate while the burden was again primarily placed on women to do the work of social reproduction (Skeggs, 2021). In addition, the extreme neoliberal economic experiment of a ‘mini-budget’ by Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss managed to ‘lose’ £30 billion in a week in September 2022. Reviewing nine books on the results of Conservative policy since 2010, Tom Crewe (2024) describes Tory rule as a ‘carnival of self-harm’.

Britain now has a working-class context of high unemployment and zero-hour exploitative employment, dependence on food banks, freezing and mouldy homes, high suicide rates, decreased life expectancy, decreased height, high birth mortality and difficulty accessing basic services such as doctors, social care and hospitals. ³ Education cuts have further impoverished depleted provision, with many teachers now providing food and washing clothes for their students. Local government funds have been cut by between 40%–70% resulting in drastic service cuts and bankruptcies. Child and elderly care have mainly been privatised (90%–94%). Libraries have been closed, transport costs increased and/or public provision slashed. Access to legal redress has been cut and accountability at local and national government levels withdrawn (Dorling, 2023). Even refuse collection and maintenance of public spaces have been cut, while privatised water companies pump sewage into public waterways, creating not the affluent, but ‘the effluent society’ (Clarke, 2023). The arrival of a new Labour government in July 2024 has notoriously done little to unpick these devasting legacies; indeed, in some areas it has attempted to make them worse, such as its plan to cut sickness and disability benefits by £5 billion, a proposal thwarted by a rebellion of MPs (Yeung, 2025). UK governments endorsing different shades of right-wing neoliberal agendas have, in other words, been ‘failing forward’ (Jones, 2020) since the 1980s and it is primarily the working classes who absorb, or are killed by, the failures.

In this context, having spent the last three decades just trying to keep a social floor on their circumstances, the idea of meritocratic advancement through social mobility appears to so many not just as an impossibility, but a tragic joke. Our use of ‘the social floor’ draws from two different trajectories. First, from the ethnographic research of Skeggs (1997) in which ‘the social floor’ was regularly referenced by the working-class women interviewed in her ethnography, conducted during Thatcherism, to refer to the architecture of their lives and their concern to hang on to the small securities that they had, which even then they saw disappearing: employment, housing, food, hospitals, education. Second, within contemporary social policy discourse, ‘the social floor’ has, like ‘the social protection floor’ become a term recurrently used to indicate an adequate baseline of material conditions (see for example Deacon, 2013; Raworth, 2017) Here we propose also to reclaim it as a useful term for sociology and cultural studies, that can be used to understand life as lived as well as an ‘ideal’ imaginary baseline for existence.

Representing sustained working-class destruction

Chewing Gum, Rain Dogs and Alma’s Not Normal all understand the effects of this history and the limits working-class people are placed under. They make comedy of the pettiness and nastiness of the state and marketized systems designed with malevolence in mind. They show how the DWP penalise the vulnerable and disabled who cannot find a way of dealing with an incredibly complex system. For instance, when Alma (played by writer Sophie Willian) is trying to get support for her mentally-ill mother, who has a history of addiction to heroin, she explains why she is this way: as a result of lack of structural support when it was clear she was profoundly ill. In Episode 1 we are shown a montage of her mother having to cope with the unravelling infrastructure: from buses to mental hospitals to a lack of housing. Against this backdrop, Alma acerbically comments, ‘heroin was her medicine’. We are shown the cumulative punitive sanctions faced by the working class: a spiralling system headed only downwards. All three authors and main characters have experienced homelessness as routine; Tracey in Chewing Gum has a spell in a homeless shelter; Alma runs us through her uncaring experiences of the care system; Costello in Rain Dogs shows the pain of being rehoused multiple times and miles from anyone she knows. Yet the characters steadfastly refuse to be totally controlled by the horrific conditions they endure and by being mistreated and judged. It is the social floor, not the class ceiling, which concerns them; the structures are likely to collapse and that is where they look with concern. As Michaela Coel writes, ‘It’s about having no safety net at all, having to climb ladders with no stable ground beneath you’. (Coel, 2021: 44)

Basic existence and security – food, housing, heating, health, hygiene, safety – shapes the lives of these characters. Their employment prospects consist of zero-hour contracts if they are lucky, illegal employment if not, at a time when in-work poverty has become the fastest expanding category of ‘the poor’ (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2024). The characters are in and out of various forms of poorly-paid work: in corner shops (Tracey) sex work (Alma and Costello) and corporate sandwich retailers (Alma) as they live within unsupportive and unfunded infrastructures. It should not surprise us if a traditional form of working-class survival – turning tragedy to comedy – is used to deal with these circumstances. It is also predictable that it is women who, having had to deal with the majority of the domestic, emotional and social labour (Littler, 2023) as well as the toll insecurity brings, are those now using their lives to speak out.

Yet the tone and technique of the three dramedies is very different: Alma exudes warmth; Tracey is vibrant and exaggeratedly naïve as she depicts and deflects the power of racism; Costello is much more edgy and angry than either of them. Costello (played by Daisy May Cooper) is nearly always defensive and combative; her scathing humour deprecates those with authority who try and exploit her. Tracey is relentlessly upbeat and the programme offers political critique using the absurd: for instance, homelessness is represented through erectile failure. Although all the key characters emerge from very difficult conditions, they are all unrepentant about how they live their circumstances.

Best friends are central to all the main characters. Costello trusts two people: her female friend Gloria who is godmother to her daughter Iris (Fleur Tashjian), and stands as the voice of the sensible and supportive, and the opposite, her university friend, a wild, charismatic, rich, gay, druggy, violent, gambling-obsessed man, Selby (Jack Farthing). Her family is a ‘chosen’ one, not connected to the abuse of her upbringing, whereas care-experienced, excessive, alcoholic, druggy Alma’s family is biologically connected, with her mentally challenged mother, Lin (Siobahn Finneran) and highly sexed anti-maternal Grandma, Joan (Lorraine Ashbourne). Alma’s primary relationship is with her best friend Leanne (Jayde Adams) who is the quintessential down-to-earth working-class woman, offering sane and sensible advice when faced with Alma’s wild fantasies. The men close to Alma’s family are totally useless (her ex-boyfriend, her mother’s boyfriend) and not central to the family drama, whereas for Tracey, her religious fundamentalist single mother’s judgement is always in the background, reaffirmed by her sister. Her primary relationship is also with her best friend Candice (Danielle Walters) (not a Peckham Princess) and white boyfriend Connor (Robert Lonsdale), but also located in a close friendship circle. The comedies explore the different types of relationships in which they are enmeshed, with other women providing the primary sources of support and stability.

Sexual relationships are used to explore different forms of exploitation. For Costello it is abuse and exploitation (via sex work). For Alma it is betrayal (her boyfriend ‘trading me in for a foetus’) and direct class-named exploitation (e.g. via sex work where ‘even posh men can be twats too’); for Tracey it is confusion about sex produced by her religious upbringing and racialised exploitation via white boyfriends who want her to dress up as an African princess and love her ‘black boobies’. In all three programmes sex is presented with a frankness and disregard for middle-class prurience or morality. A particularly nuanced take on sex work is shown: neither celebrating it as some post-feminist fantasy of ultimate liberation, nor blanket moral condemnation as patriarchal oppression par excellence. In particular, Alma’s Not Normal shows many of the different facets of Alma’s experience of sex work, including emotional confusion, joy at huge earnings, as an arena of deep danger and painful exploitation, as a space of fun, as just another mode of work under capitalism, and also the rejection of moralisation against it (see also Minor, 2023). In other words, it provides a complex take on a controversial topic that is often approached in a reductively simplistic manner.

The desire for ‘normality’ – not having to worry every time a bill comes through the door, not having to move house every time the rent is due, not having to place oneself in a position of heightened vulnerability to violent and exploitative men and not having to conform to extreme religious judgement, is ever-present. This is a very different experience to that of the ‘slacker’ or the ‘drifter’, for whom being irresponsible or not participating in social norms is a choice, and security is possible (as represented by the characters in US TV drama Girls, HBO 2012–2017) because they have a safety net of money or parental support. In contrast, and even though it can co-exist with hedonism and pleasure, the narrative drive of Alma, Chewing Gum and Rain Dogs is about taking responsibility, whether for themselves (all of them) or for other vulnerable family members (Costello’s daughter, Alma’s mother) because they have no choice.

All these formations represent the real precarity that the working class have lived since their inception (Todd, 2014). It is completely unlike the precarity that the middle class may experience for a short period of time, usually with a safety net or a social floor somewhere. While precarity has been theorised as a ‘universal condition’ (e.g. Butler, 2004) this can eclipse degrees of precarity – the violence of structural inherited precarity where there is absolutely no safety net. Alma was in care homes for most of her childhood; Costello escaped her family as soon as she could; Tracey spent time in a homeless shelter and slept on shop floors. Their precarity is not just material but also ontological: a sense of insecurity that shapes their whole experience of life right from the start, through inheritance of culture and throughout life. One would think that basic security is not much to ask for, but Costello, Alma and Tracey’s access to this security is highly circumscribed, and they show how this is the case for an increasing number of people. For them, ‘social mobility’ is replaced by the need to secure their social floor as a safety net against impoverishment and violence.

The comedy of exploitation

The comedy often arises from their inability to abide by the social norms of respectability and standards imposed by state systems. ‘Hide your dildos!’ Alma says to Grandma when a social worker is due. Grandma is very proud of her home-made pottery dildos and refuses to comply, creating momentary anxiety for Alma. Alma has a sense of what normality may be and her family’s behaviour reveals what it is not. Neither is interested in becoming respectable but in the long tradition of working-class lives they all know they have to perform it in encounters with the welfare state (Shilliam, 2018; Steedman, 1986).

The aesthetics of these series are bright and loud, paralleling and channelling their refusal of respectability and of victimisation. Chewing Gum and Alma’s Not Normal have a particularly bright mis-en-scene as a rejoinder to the bleak characterisations of housing estates. In this they are similar to the recent film Scrapper, for which the director repainted the housing estate where the film was shot in bright pastels as a counterpoint to ideas that all aspects of working-class life are perpetually grim (Kasule, 2023). Alma and Tracey wear extremely colourful clothes, while Costello has a more ‘indie’ aesthetic.

Crucially for the comedy, as for working-class life in general, they search for the comedic, absurd and surreal side of things. This is partly because a great deal of authority to which working-class people are exposed is comedic, including the imposition of manners and social codes and/or idiots telling us what to do. Ridiculous and punishing rules are repeatedly satirised, particularly in relation to the penalising austerity state and employment. Alma turns up at the job centre and when asked by a bored penpusher to explain ‘why don’t you have any qualifications?’ replies, with confident irony, ‘I guess I just wasn’t academic, Julie’ before the programme cuts to a montage of her impoverished chaotic childhood, making the difference between what is accepted by official categories, and the diminished life chances and deprivations she has experienced, only too stark.

Ridiculous rules are often imposed by ridiculous people. In Alma the manager of the sandwich shop in which she is offered a ‘free trial’ (i.e. unpaid employment) is presented by the comedy as a pathetic rule-contained idiot. He has fully internalised the post-Fordist idea that his work team functions as a family, which is subverted by Alma baldly pointing out the capitalist logic shaping the work culture (‘if you die, tomorrow, this Sub N Go family of yours, they would replace you within the week’). The characters invite our incredulity at the ridiculous and exploitative conditions they have to experience by presenting us with such moments which clearly lay out a social and political critique, in effect putting the ‘socio’ in these dramedies.

For instance, there is one particularly striking scene in which Alma, doing sex work, is paid to turn up to one of Manchester’s ultra-expensive penthouses and spank a man who wants to imagine that she is his angry mother (S1E4; see also Minor, 2023). In their initial casual chat, he reveals he’s a property developer who has relandscaped much of the city; now, he says, ‘we just need to get rid of the druggies and the homeless’. Alma’s spanking becomes more and more furious as she looks out of the window at the urban destruction, thinking about how he is responsible for many of the unaffordable luxury flats in the area. ‘Mummy’s very angry with naughty boy! Building all the fancy flats for the millionaires! And NO OTHER SOCIAL HOUSING FOR ANY FUCKER! Naughty boy! Naughty NAUGHTY BOY!’. On leaving, she gives her fee to the homeless man outside. This powerful scene spells out, with incisive comic brevity, the landscape of socio-political exploitation, the scale of the housing crisis and the need for financial redistribution. As Costello sighs in Rain Dogs, ‘Capitalism! The REAL religion of the C21st!’.

In the process, the political consciousness of these programmes responds to and reverses the recent history of UK TV based around humiliating the working class, which spans a range of forms from ‘poverty porn’ to class-shaming sitcoms, exemplified par excellence by reality TV’s supposedly ‘morally transforming’ programmes like What Not to Wear (WnTW) (BBC 2001–2007) or Ladette to Lady (LtL) (ITV 2005–2010) which attempt to impose upper-middle-class norms on working-class subjects and thus legitimate social mobility ideology (McRobbie, 2004; Skeggs and Wood, 2011, 2012). It is important to note, however, that the the ‘neoliberal governance’ of such programmes often didn’t work; despite LtL beginning as a transformation programme, the Ladies became the object of humour instead of the Ladettes, given their comedic antics against the ‘Ladies’ instructions (which were absurd – such as ‘how to speak to a gentleman’). Similarly, in the final programme ‘reveal’ of WnTW, where the transformation to bourgeois norms of ‘going beige’ is celebrated, the working-class participants stubbornly reverted back to their original styles (‘they’re just boring’). As one participant on What Not to Wear said scathingly ‘I bet they have nannies: you couldn’t wear those clothes [those suggested by the presenters] if you were looking after children’. As Skeggs and Wood’s research showed, female TV participants frequently recognise the imposition of such ideology for what it is: a critique of their lifestyle without any understanding of the circumstances in which participants live (Skeggs and Wood, 2012).

The dramedies we discuss work in a similar way and build expansively on such strains of rebellion, exposing the ridiculousness and poking fun at the pretentions of those who have authority and the ability to intervene in their lives. They reject the moralising imperatives towards ‘improvement’ and upwards social mobility and ‘laugh back’ and deride those who attempt to judge and control them. There is an exuberant rejoinder of the imposition of middle-class authority inbuilt in all these dramedies. In Rain Dogs, Costello is told off for her lack of vulnerability (‘You just don’t seem very vulnerable. Abused women are usually a lot more . . . humble’(E6). The series also highlights the pompous vacuity of a middle-class photographer who blatantly states ‘You know I’m better than you, don’t you?’. In Chewing Gum, Tracey is shocked by the classed racism of the posh white boy from whom she expected better. In the long history of working-class comedy, pretensions are punctured. The comedy form facilitates such ‘talking back’.

For working-class women, knowing that they are judged to be immoral, unrespectable, improper and lacking in value shapes the class relations they experience, especially mothers (see Skeggs, 1997). From the 1834 Poor Law,shaped by Evangelical Christianity, through the beginning of social work, access to the welfare state, the ‘workfare’ programmes of ‘domestic apprenticeships’ to 1980s Youth Training Schemes, the working class have been exposed to a high dose of morality, and are always assumed to be ‘in deficit’. Yet ‘who do they think they are telling us what to do?’, ‘who are they to look down on us?’ are regular retorts (Skeggs, 1997; Skeggs and Wood, 2012). Alma, Chewing Gum and Rain Dogs capture the tone of that combative response. It is not just the words but their expression: sheer exasperation at the unfairness and injustice of circumstances; of the social context. The working class learn both to perform spurious adherence to authority while laughing and displaying derision at what they consider to be ridiculous and spurious standards. Such absurdity and injustice constrain their lives. Here they expose and dramatise that performance to excess, in true Brechtian style, while having a really good time publicly exposing the ludicrous rules they have to live by.

The significant difference in class comedy has become whether one laughs at a particular group or one laughs with. Alongside the snide humiliations of Reality TV, and the use of the word ‘chav’, the 2000s also produced some spiteful comedy with middle-class comedians using the working class as their derided comedy object of choice. The single council estate mother with numerous kids, ‘Vicky Pollard’ on sketch show Little Britain, was the most notorious and explicit example (Lockyer, 2010). But it hasn’t always been this way: in the 1980s, Alexi Sayle as a working-class comedian was given a platform to speak about class directly, and the then ‘alternative’ comedians such as Ben Elton critiqued the snobbish pretentions of their own middle-class cultures. French and Saunders in Absolutely Fabulous satirised the pretensions of individualism promoted by Thatcherism (Kirkham and Skeggs, 1998), while Victoria Wood and Julie Walters performed a political critique of class in a much more gentle vein. This is not to romanticise the intersectional dynamics of past UK comedy, which has had pronounced issues of both sexism and racism and domination by white and upper-middle-class men in particular (Tomsett, 2023). One particularly telling example is how Lenny Henry, for decades the only working-class Black comedian on British TV, for a time had to perform racism to get gigs (Henry, 2022).

Since the 2000s, as Laura Minor outlines so very well in her recent work (Minor, 2024), comedy by women, and particularly middle-class women like Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, has moved into the ascendant. As Sam Friedman (2014) notes, comedy is always marked by class inscription. His research in the 2000s showed how comedy was an emerging field for younger generations of the culturally privileged to activate their resources of cultural capital. In a similar way, this is why Steve Coogan (a British, northern, working-class comedy actor) maintains that the working class are ‘a super-power’ in comedy, because they are unfiltered. This is their cultural currency: they are not constrained by bourgeois restraint. Anti-pretentiousness, turning tragedy into comedy, revealing absurdity, faux-restraint and performing their positioning as authentic have long been characteristics of working-class life. Britain’s brilliant comedienne Caroline Aherne, for whom the BBC established a ‘Caroline Aherne Bursary’ that funded Sophie Willan, jokingly noted that Steve Coogan ‘lost his edge’ when he moved south.

Jessyka Finley’s (2016) research on Black women’s satire in the US has clear parallels to these comedic critiques, showing how the satire speaks to and exposes power in order to undermine it, and most definitely proposes not to take white middle-class power seriously. Comedy by definition is not serious, so it is a perfect space for critique – if you can access it. Yet this subversive potential is not politically guaranteed and can have complex articulations. Paradoxically we see an anti-authority position being taken up by the alt-right in the present conjuncture. Figures like Trump and Farage have learnt to use comedic tone, irony and attacks on any seriousness to undermine classic liberal power. The excessively rich, secure and powerful expressing anti-authority sentiments has clearly gained traction for some, having mobilised support through its ‘vernacular ventriloquism’ of working-class feelings of victimhood and resentments (Clarke, 2023). But throughout Alma, Chewing Gum and Rain Dogs, victimhood is resisted. As Lauren Berlant (2000) notes, it is only those that want to lay claim to power who individualise victimhood for its own use. Endurance and coping with shared contexts are more common and powerful working-class registers: they refer to collective circumstances, instead of being used to individualise and self-promote.

Complicating social mobility: resolutely social, resolutely local

What is interesting to us here, then, is how the ideological promise of social mobility is profoundly contested by these dramatic comedies, all of which variously tear class-based snobberies, material difficulties and individualising, responsibilising tendencies apart with great glee. In addition, while ‘upwards’ social mobility is marginalised in these texts, it is also dealt with in interestingly critical, complex and nuanced ways. For instance, Costello does ‘get away’ in episode 4 of Rain Dogs through upwards mobility, via an extremely short spell as a rich housewife in the countryside, living with and off her rich male friend. This plot is echoed in Carraway’s memoir, where she describes how ‘I was to pretend to be Kingsley’s wife in exchange for living rent-free in his beautiful cottage on the River Thames’ (Carraway, 2019: 182), in order for him to qualify for an inheritance from his homophobic father. The arrangement came to an end when he stole the little money she had and physically attacked her. In Rain Dogs, Costello’s experience of wealth is similarly ultra-brief and she doesn’t hide her class to pass. She sarcastically describes this brief adventure as a ‘typical rags to riches tale’, while commenting on what it involves and her distance from the everyday rich (‘we have coffee colonics – can’t believe I used to drink that stuff, should’ve just been putting it up my arse’). The ‘posh bitches’ remain undesirable even when aspects of their lifestyle are useful (giving her ‘lots of free time to write my books’). Any ‘social mobility’ for working-class women is therefore shown as contradictory: involving an appreciation of economic wealth, but with a negative association to the middle-class dispositions associated with it, and a perpetual awareness that for them it is usually temporary and always structurally precarious, only one move away from a social floor that is disintegrating.

Similarly, Alma knows her sudden wealth after experimenting with sex work will be temporary but enjoys it, dressing up in flamboyant clothes with Leanne (because ‘you know what free people have? MONEY!’). Her sporadic interest in being ‘a star’ actress is repeatedly undercut by her friend Leanne; although developing her skills and engagement as a regular, jobbing actress is taken more seriously, mirroring Willian’s own trajectory. In the finale of the first series she joins a touring acting group. When Alma rings up for an interview she has to work her way through different diversities, none of which are working-class, but finally and fortunately ‘care experienced’ (i.e. having lived in a care home) is. Both the paucity of opportunities and tokenism are made clear: by series 2 she has been marginalised by the touring group, and relegated to playing a tree in the ‘forest of diversity’. Alma returns to Bolton, where the finale depicts her developing a routine on stage talking to and about the locals. This is the very opposite of neoliberal narratives of individualised meritocratic success that are achieved by moving away from socially-deprived locations in order to ‘make it’ (Born, 2023; Littler, 2018).

In Chewing Gum, Tracey pretends to have a famous boyfriend, the musician Stormzy (who is briefly a guest star). Told by Tracey’s friend that she has cancer, Stormzy turns up with flowers only to realise he has been duped. Wanting to be part of ‘successful’ social codes while not being able to is key to Tracey’s characterisation. The comedic exaggeration of her naivete defamiliarizes social codes and renders them absurd. As Francesca Sobande highlights, Chewing Gum ‘challenges deep-rooted stereotypes that have traditionally defined the depiction of Black women on screen’ in terms of religion and sexuality as well as class (Sobande, 2019: 440). It also does so by emphasising the estate as a place of community survival. The young white mums are both caricatured in a palpable critique of Vicky Pollard and are shown instead to be resolutely part of the convivial multiculturalism, of classed belonging. When single mum Carly is confronted by men wanting to know if they are the father of her baby, she says ‘my baby’s got 20 fucking dads [Vicky Pollard had 12] sitting round this table and 20 fucking mums an all’. The final scene of the final episode (Season 2) shows a summer baptism party – the font being a bin – with all the community wearing white. This is the extended family of the estate. Tracey says to the assembled group, ‘we’re a mixed bunch but we stick together – like chewing gum on concrete’.

These programmes expose the contemporary limits and absurdities of neoliberal meritocracy, of the ideological ‘solution’ of upwards social mobility, rather than its possibilities. Its place within a social imaginary is critiqued as either a flawed and hyper-individualised dream or as impossible. Instead, meaningful and contextual components of social growth (for instance, developing skills within groups and community togetherness) are retained while the structural critiques of impoverishment and inequality remain. They are resolutely, unromantically, social.

Conclusion

There is a long history of analysis of the use of humour as political critique. Aristophanes (456–386 BC) emphasised the relationship between comedy and tragedy. We also know that comedy (and soap operas) are often the only forms available when other access to the mainstream has been closed down, as Latin American and Black US comedy show. The working classes of all ethnicities and contexts have developed their own forms of expression throughout history. They had no choice. Victorian music hall, for instance, featuring comedy queens of anti-pretentiousness like Marie Lloyd, who were at the time considered vulgar and excessive by middle-class commentators but adored by the working class. As the historian of British working-class comedy, Peter Bailey (1998), argues, music hall humour was a register and critique of material and social values: it was an emergent ‘second language’ for the working class. Comedy, in other words, has a long history as a vehicle for ‘talking back’.

Yet different forms of comedy represent the conjuncture in which they come into being. In the UK the 1980s produced ‘alternative’ comedy as a critique of Thatcherism; in the 2000s it used the working class as objects to humiliate and denigrate; later, middle-class comedy dominated. It is this recent history to which our three autosociobiography dramedies respond, and this is also why they are powerful, as Cash Carraway, Michaela Cole and Sophie Willan had to watch and live this long history of economic and moral attacks on the working class.

It is, however, remarkable that they have occupied a space at a time when working-class creatives in film and TV are at their lowest level for a decade (Stephenson, 2024). Fewer than 10% of film and TV workers have a working-class background, and most of them are based in London, which makes Sophie Willan even more striking. The UK TV industry is heavily middle-class dominated with middle-class concerns (Channel 4, 2024; Brook et al., 2020). There are small, useful if fetishized, spaces for tokenistic commissioning and sporadic bursaries. As a character in Alma notes ‘The working class are trendy right now!’ (S1 E6). Michaela Coel has been notably vocal about the piecemeal nature of intersectional inclusions and exclusions in the cultural industries, and their lack of care (for example, in her 2018 BBC Taggart lecture; see also Minor, 2024: 100–119).

What is radical about these autosociobiographical dramedies is that even though all three writers – Cash Caraway, Sophie Willan and Michaela Coel – have now experienced some degree of social mobility through their success, they refuse to individualise it or narrativize it as escape. Instead, they highlight industry discrimination and emphasise the power of friendships, family, local culture and support networks. In interviews, Coel has discussed not knowing that the arts could be for the likes of her – Black girls from working-class communities – and being the only person of that description in the production room (Little, 2018). Carraway points out that for working-class script/writers there is often a narrow set of expectations about their work, including a painful price paid for engaging in the memoir form (Rain Dogs, despite winning numerous awards, was cancelled in June 2024). Similarly, and ironically, in Rain Dogs, Costello addresses the expectations and parameters placed on her as a working-class writer: ‘Just because I’m not posh, everyone takes what I say literally [. . .] women like me must only speak the truth’ (Ep7).

The dramatic comedies all draw from a period of decreasing hope, in which life is a classed struggle that takes different gendered and racialised forms. They do not fit squarely into the mainstream UK (and US) mould of working-class sitcoms which are primarily based around the white heterosexual family, children and jobs (VanArendonk, 2018). Their genre as ‘dramedy’ is a vehicle in which a concern with presenting ‘survival’ has recently become popular (Bowen, 2021) and they are clearly part of a wider creative expansion in female authorship in televisual comedy (Minor, 2024). They fix their autosociobiographical gaze to the conditions they have experienced, and the context and social conditions in which they lived. In the process, they reveal the fatuousness of promises of ‘a good life’, ‘good jobs’ and ‘social mobility’, mirroring recent academic work focusing on the life experiences of those who didn’t ‘make it’ (Born, 2023). Instead, they reveal the racism, demonisation and degradation of trying to survive in a marketized state system, the infrastructure if which is visibly collapsing, having been purposefully unpicked by ‘structural carelessness’ (Care Collective, 2020), offering very little hope and slow death. In this new register, without either embracing victimhood or shaping themselves into paragons of neoliberal resilience, and while both rejecting ‘respectability’ and the cruel optimism of neoliberal meritocracy, these innovative programmes insist on drawing our attention, insistently, and with an acerbic smile, to the social floor.