- guardian.co.uk, Saturday November 4 2000 03.19 GMT
The episode is significant precisely because the medium in question was television, the greatest single transformer of cultural life since 1945. The transformation took place with remarkable speed. In 1946 there were only 15,000 TV licences, mostly in London; by 1956 there were over 5 million, and pretty much the whole country could receive transmissions; by 1960 this had doubled to 10m, and by 1969 nine out of 10 households had a television. Clark himself did not possess a television at the time. In its early days, it was understood that television was a medium principally watched by the lower orders: television, Noel Coward explained with camp magnificence, "is for appearing on, not watching".
But the potential of TV quickly became clear. Indeed, Clark himself was to become one of its great beneficiaries, especially as the presenter in 1969-70 of a 13-part BBC series simply called Civilisation. Civilisation here meant the high art and music of western Europe, and Clark made clear that he thought culture in the present was going to the dogs. The barbarians were now well inside the gate in cultural terms, and as Clark crisply put it, "popular taste is bad taste, as any honest man with experience will agree".
Clark's manner of social grandeur was part of his authority in this role, and in measuring the distance travelled in Britain's cultural journey over the last half-century or so, perhaps no change has been more important than the loosening of the connection between social status and cultural authority. There are, necessarily, elites who exercise disproportionate power in most areas of social and cultural life, but there are now a far greater variety of such elites than 50 years ago, and, crucially, they are much less likely to overlap, still less to form a series of concentric circles. Concomitantly, the notion of a single hierarchy of cultural forms now has to coexist with a much more pluralist acceptance of a diversity of equally legitimate cultural activities. At the beginning of the 21st century, even the distinction between "high" and "low" culture no longer works. For many people under 30 today, the ministry responsible for the most significant part of their cultural life is the Ministry of Sound.
This expansionist narrative partly rests on a shift in the sense of "culture" itself. As Stuart Hall, doyen of that form of sociology-plus-street cred that has become known as "cultural studies", influentially put it: "Culture not as a body of work, or particular media, or even as a set of ideal standards and rules, but rather as lived experience, the consciousness of a whole society; that peculiar order, pattern, configuration of valued experience, expressed now in imaginative art of the highest order, now in the most popular and proverbial of forms, in gesture and language, in myth and ideology, in modes of communication and in forms of social relationship and organisation."
In the middle of the 20th century, Britain was, numerically speaking, still overwhelmingly working class. And it was a highly class-conscious society, with class identities recognisable at a glance and strong patterns of deference governing relations between classes. Half a century later, inequality and exploitation may be no less pervasive in British society, but an enormous rise in general prosperity and an accompanying change in social attitudes mean that the rigid pyramid of the class structure no longer corresponds to the lived experience of daily life in the way it once did.
The seeds of this change were sown in the 40s, a decade which saw the working class register substantial gains in their standard of living and their political influence. The second world war had the greatest impact here, rescuing large swathes of the population from the long night of un- or under-employment and disturbing many of the assumptions of service and subordination on which prewar social relations had been based. But although the radicalising experience of the second world war, the confidence and bargaining power which full employment gave to the working class, and the consequent electoral triumph in 1945 challenged the established social order, it is important to remember just how little cultural radicalism there was among Labour's leaders (apparently Attlee "suffered acutely if the port was circulated the wrong way at his dinner table").
Nonetheless, the social changes consequent upon greatly increased prosperity were highly visible in the ensuing decades. One of these was the rise of what was called the "affluent worker": a long period from the late 40s of full employment and rising real wages meant that the average manual worker and his family were enjoying a much greater level of prosperity than ever before. A second change is what was called "the embourgeoisement of the working class". This was not just a matter of increased prosperity, but a fundamental change of identity. It involved repudiating the old self-consciously separate, fatalistic, working-class stance, and adopting broadly middle-class attitudes and ways of life, including saving and the pursuit of upward social mobility, as well as the development of more individualistic and self-interested political allegiances.
Contributing to this blurring of class identities, the decades of postwar prosperity brought vast new markets into existence, and the technological innovations which responded to these markets introduced a greater diversity of cultural media. The development of commercial television after 1954 is an obvious example; the multiplication of radio stations, at first in the form of "pirates", is another. And the phenomenon of the "pop star" - the new celebrities of the 50s and 60s - would have been impossible without widespread ownership of record players. What records were to music, the paperback was to books, leading to what one might call the Penguinification of British reading. Paperback publishing had been in its infancy in the 40s, but in the course of the 50s the whole commercial exploitation of this medium was transformed: from selling a few hundred thousand copies in total, Penguin's sales rocketed to the point where in 1959 alone they sold 12m paperbacks. The 60s saw an even more extraordinary expansion, and by 1968 their annual sales had risen to 29m.
These large sales were the fruits of new marketing strategies which skilfully exploited the potential links between different media. The success of John Braine's Room at the Top illustrates this trend. It appeared as a hardback, with accompanying newspaper serialisation, in 1957; it was published as a paperback in 1959, and in the same year, crucially, it appeared as a film. A sequel and a television series came later. Critics of the expanding cultural forms complained of "Americanisation", as the great engine of capitalism exploited new markets, but this can also be seen in terms of a diminished deference towards Europe as the traditional home of inherited culture. Increased national self-assertion in other parts of the British Isles could be seen as loss of deference towards the internalised values of Englishness. In the spaces thus opened up for groups, most notably ethnic groups, to assert their demands for recognition and dignity, public respect for distinctive forms of cultural self-expression has partly functioned as compensation for lack of political and economic power.
But the disorienting speed of such social and technological change generates nostalgia, and nostalgia can sometimes seem to have been the dominant ethos of British culture since the 70s. Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and a host of costume-drama producers have fed this appetite for self-definition through loss. At its core is the self-indulgence involved in revelling in the defeat of the stylish and the graceful by the harsh realities of the functional, the effective, the modern. The result is the psychological or cultural mechanism by which sheer pastness confers a charm, the frisson of irrecoverability, the pleasures of longing. Things not in themselves particularly beautiful, things considered the height of new, functional vulgarity when they first appeared, come to seem the quintessence of a more lovable age. Think how this has happened to 19th-century terraced houses, or to 30s cinemas, or to 50s railways, and so on. Culture is regarded as something that happens elsewhere, and in England the elsewhere of choice for many people is the past.
As a result of these complex, dislocating changes, much contemporary cultural debate consists in trying to pick one's way between, on the one hand, an embattled nostalgia expressed in ill-directed cries of "dumbing down" and, on the other, a knee-jerk cultural correctness that locates virtue exclusively in whatever can be claimed to have been previously neglected, marginalised or, best of all, suppressed. In this situation, bewilderment and indifference disguise themselves as relativism and tolerance. But abstaining from making cultural judgments is not necessarily the best way to show respect for other people's differences: that can be simply to hand control over our lives to the unsleeping drive of capital to maximise its returns.
We are, by and large, very pleased with ourselves about the distance we have travelled from a world dominated by the values of the Athenaeum dining room circa 1954, and to express our self-satisfaction we rush to damn all that we suspect still belongs to that world by calling it "elitist". The elites represented there have indeed lost much of their prestige, but the elites gathered in boardrooms have thereby only increased their power. The complacent and intolerant attitudes on many issues of those who took their social and cultural superiority for granted half a century ago may indeed be part of a world well lost - but those muted boos were not altogether wrong in identifying the force that would transform British culture beyond the powers of even the Kenneth Clarks of this world to regulate it.
Kenneth Clark on St Paul's
"In spite of the awkwardness of imposing a Roman elevation on to a gothic plan, [Wren] has achieved areas of such refined and inventive detail as to make St Paul's Cathedral the chief monument of English classicism. Wren's buildings show us that mathematics, measurement, observation - all that goes to make up the philosophy of science - were not hostile to architecture; nor to music, for this was the age of one of the greatest English composers, Henry Purcell "
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation was first broadcast in spring 1969
Janet Street Porter on St Paul's
"After the building boom of the middle ages no cathedral was built in Britain until St Paul's at the end of the 17th century. By then tastes in architecture had changed and the gothic was decidedly out. The classical and baroque were in Not surprisingly, St Paul's is a must-see attraction for visitors to London, but for people who run the cathedral it is a mixed blessing. All our cathedrals need the money that tourists bring in - St Paul's costs around £5m per year to maintain - and there is no money from the state for their upkeep. At times you'd think St Paul's was more like an ecclesiastical theme park than a place of worship."
Cathedral Calls, Janet Street Porter's series on British cathedrals, was broadcast in January 2000.
• Stefan Collini is Reader in Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University. His survey of 50 years of British culture concludes next week
