- Home
- Membership
- Thatcher, pubs and poverty porn: a gritty history of British sitcoms
Thatcher, pubs and poverty porn: a gritty history of British sitcoms
From Del Boy’s rags-to-riches-to-rags tale to The Royle Family’s quiet revolution, Laura Minor explores how British sitcoms have portrayed working-class lives down the years – and why it matters who tells these stories
Published: September 23, 2026 at 4:00 PM
Save
- Share on facebook
- Share on twitter
- Share on whatsapp
- Email to a friend
Del Boy Trotter stands beneath an expensive chandelier in a stately home. “Look, this is the chance I’ve been waiting for – now don’t let me down Rodney, now don’t let me down.”
Ad
The two brothers from Peckham have just launched their latest enterprise, a chandelier cleaning business, and this is their first job. They stretch a large sheet beneath the chandelier, ready to catch the priceless fixture. “All right, now brace yourself Rodney, brace yourself.” The camera frames their faces through the dangling crystals, cutting between them and Granddad Trotter unscrewing the light’s holding bolt. Yet the crash, when it comes, isn’t from above. Behind them in a different room, another chandelier explodes against the floor. They’d been under the wrong light fitting all along.
In Only Fools and Horses’ famous moment from 1982, the comedy lies in its inevitability. You watch Del and Rodney position their sheet beneath a chandelier and know exactly what is coming. But the failure is even more spectacular than you imagined. Two working-class brothers from Peckham have come to clean their way into high society and instead end up destroying their already slim chances of social advancement.
Del Boy peddles his wares in Only Fools and Horses’ 1980s pomp. The sitcom’s genius lay in its ability to transform class anxiety into laughter | Credit: BBC
The scene is a prime example of what British sitcoms do best: transforming class anxiety into laughter. For 60 years, these comedies have been Britain’s way of discussing what we can’t quite say out loud. They take our deepest tensions – who belongs where, who deserves what, who’s allowed to aspire to more – and make them safe to examine. When Del destroys that chandelier, we’re both laughing at the slapstick of it all and the absurdity of the class system itself, at the impossible gap between where Del is and where he dreams of being.
British sitcoms work as a social barometer because they catch us with our guards down. We think we’re just watching comedy, but our prejudices, fears and fantasies about class are played back to us through recurring characters stuck in unchanging situations. Where the dominant American model promises transformation and growth, British comedies tend to trap their characters in the same circumstances. It’s in the portrayal of working-class life that these class tensions become most visible, and where the question of who tells these stories matters most. Over the decades, those voices have changed. It’s a story that began in 1962, when working-class life on television meant entrapment above all else.
Generational tragedy
Harold Steptoe was entrapment personified. At the age of 37, bitter and desperate, he remained stuck in a Shepherd’s Bush junkyard with his father, Albert. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe and Son (BBC 1962–65, BBC One 1970–74) centred on the two men running a rag-and-bone business, locked in mutual dependency and loathing. Harold had already lost his best years. “On the cart at 12, in the army at 18, and back on the cart at 22,” he lamented. Delivered by Harry H Corbett, an ex-Royal Marine who said he had killed two Japanese soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, it’s a line that embodies the generational tragedy of working-class men whose youth was swallowed by a combination of labour and the Second World War, and who found themselves back where they started when the fighting ceased.
In 1957, Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan told Britons they’d “never had it so good”. For Harold, that meant nothing. Macmillan insisted on Britain’s prosperity. Within a few years, researchers at the LSE were combing through the household spending figures and finding something else entirely: seven million people barely surviving, and 40 per cent of the elderly scraping by on means-tested National Assistance. Harold’s inheritance wasn’t prosperity but the same junkyard, the same cart, the same life his father had lived. And Albert, grubby and manipulative, was content to keep it that way, sabotaging Harold’s attempts to escape.
Steptoe and Son’s portrayal of rag-and-bone men locked in mutual dependency and loathing won over millions of viewers | Credit: BBC
The show struck a nerve. At its peak, Steptoe was pulling in 28 million viewers – more than half of the UK population. True, there were only BBC and ITV to choose between, but Britain kept choosing the Steptoes. Harold’s desperation, and Albert’s grip on him, resonated more than anyone wanted to admit.
Three years after the Steptoes first appeared on screen, another angry man emerged from working-class London. Till Death Us Do Part (BBC One, 1965–75) gave us Alf Garnett, a West Ham-supporting docker ranting from his East End home about race, politics and women’s liberation. The 1960s were supposedly swinging, but not for Alf. He watched the British empire crumbling, immigrants arriving and women demanding equality, and raged against it all. Creator Johnny Speight intended his sitcom, which reached more than 18 million viewers weekly, as satire. But a 1973 BBC audience research report (‘Till Death Us Do Part as anti-Prejudice Propaganda’) revealed an uncomfortable truth: among older working-class viewers, the show appeared to reinforce existing views rather than challenge them. While most viewers agreed Alf was “too extreme”, 84 per cent also thought “some of the things he says are true”. The satire had backfired. Audiences weren’t just laughing at Alf, they were laughing with him.
Get-rich-quick schemers
Harold would remain in his junkyard, Alf in his East End home, both trapped by a class system that modernisation had only disguised, not dismantled. But the promise of better outcomes lay ahead. In 1979, prime minister Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street armed with a new gospel for the working-class, one that urged them to stop waiting for rescue and instead to rescue themselves. Enter Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter, wheeling and dealing his way through Peckham in John Sullivan’s Only Fools and Horses (BBC One, 1981–2003). Del lived in a high-rise council flat with his younger brother Rodney (and other relatives during the show’s run). He scraped a living flogging dodgy goods out of an open suitcase in markets and pubs, always convinced the next deal would make the family millionaires. Whether cleaning chandeliers or selling ‘genuine’ Rolex watches, every scheme was the one that would finally deliver.
Viewers laughed at (and with) Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell) as he raged against immigration and women’s liberation | Credit: BBC
While Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher’s most loyal ministers, was telling the party conference that his father had got on his bike and looked for work, Del Boy was already mobile, transforming his three-wheeled Reliant Regal into an unlikely symbol of makeshift enterprise. Del’s delusions of sophistication – the Caribbean stallion cocktails, the borrowed SAS motto (“He who dares, wins”) – suggested that class was just performance anyway. Why not perform your way to wealth? Where Steptoe had treated aspiration as tragedy, Sullivan recast it as farce. The difference mattered because Sullivan had grown up in working-class south London, knew these people intimately and could write them with warmth. By 1996, Only Fools was pulling in 24.3 million viewers for its Christmas special, making it Britain’s highest-rated sitcom episode ever.
There was another story that wasn’t being told, though. Television’s working-class protagonists remained stubbornly white, even as real working-class communities had been multicultural for decades. The Fosters (LWT, 1976–77) tried to bridge this gap with a black family in south London. But, written by white creators adapting an American format, it felt hollow to many black British viewers who recognised neither the dialogue nor their experiences.
The 1980s brought about some degree of change. Channel 4 launched in 1982 with an explicit remit to serve minority audiences, while the decade’s uprisings in Brixton, Toxteth and Tottenham made working-class black experience impossible to ignore. These communities faced unemployment rates twice the national average and systematic police harassment.
Against this backdrop, sitcoms written by black writers about working-class life finally began to emerge, although support proved short-lived. No Problem! (Channel 4, 1983–85), created by Farrukh Dhondy and Mustapha Matura, followed black working-class siblings in Willesden, but lasted only two series. Trix Worrell’s Peckham barbershop-set sitcom Desmond’s (Channel 4, 1989–94) lasted longer, though not all its characters were working class.
Norman Beaton (middle) stars in Desmond’s. The longest-running British sitcom with a mostly black cast, it ran for 71 episodes | Credit: Channel 4
The real breakthrough came from abandoning sitcom conventions entirely. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash did exactly that in 1998. The Royle Family (BBC Two, 1998–2000, plus specials to 2012) stripped away everything the traditional sitcom had insisted upon. There was no studio audience and no laugh track. What remained was a working-class family in Manchester who didn’t want to escape.
Jim Royle sat in his chair criticising the neighbours (“Earl and Lady Muck”), while his wife, Barbara, made endless cups of tea, daughter Denise and her husband Dave occupied the sofa, and son Antony was sent to answer the door. Aherne and Cash had created something revolutionary precisely because nothing happened. The Royle Family started quietly with just a few million viewers initially. But word spread. By 2000, 10 million were watching, drawn to something they hadn’t seen before: themselves, unvarnished and unashamed. Without canned laughter to cue viewers, audiences had to decide for themselves what was funny.
Everyday people
The true revolution lay in who was writing. The old sitcoms had been written by men about men. Women were wives, daughters, accessories to male frustration or ambition. Aherne changed that. She had grown up in Wythenshawe, once reportedly Europe’s largest council estate, and she gave the Royles the dignity of being ordinary. Victoria Wood did something similar with dinnerladies (BBC One, 1998–2000), set among the women of a Manchester factory canteen. Wood and Aherne, both northerners writing their own material, represented a quiet revolution: northern women telling their own stories during primetime.
Written by and starring Victoria Wood (standing, second from right), dinnerladies was a critical hit before reality TV turned the portrayal of ordinary lives on its head | Credit: BBC
These shows debuted shortly before Big Brother arrived in 2000, before reality TV turned ordinary people into performers and made everyone conscious of being watched. The Royles had no such self-consciousness. Jim’s constant refrain of “my arse!” to any pretension rejected the decade’s dominant ‘lifestyle’ ideology, where consumer choices were supposed to signal aspiration and self-improvement.
The Royles could afford to sit still. Two decades later, that luxury was gone. In an era of zero-hours contracts and austerity, working-class comedy had to move as fast as working-class life.
The joy in precarity
Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum (E4, 2015–17) captured this new restlessness. Here was something British television had barely attempted: a black working-class woman, Tracey Gordon, navigating her Tower Hamlets estate with irrepressible enthusiasm for losing her virginity and for self-discovery. As we’ve seen, this wasn’t the first attempt at black working-class comedy. But where The Fosters lacked authentic voices and No Problem! lacked institutional support, Chewing Gum was different.
Written by Coel herself, it won critical acclaim, with audience reception strong among younger viewers, especially women aged 16–34. Yet even this success didn’t open floodgates. Tracey remained an outlier – a singular achievement rather than the beginning of a new wave. Nevertheless, Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two, 2020–24) pushed further into precarity. Alma – sex worker, aspiring actress, daughter of an addict and product of the care system – embodied the instability of modern working-class life. Despite this, Alma was defiantly, chaotically joyful.
Caroline Aherne as Denise and Craig Cash as Dave in The Royle Family, which, writes Laura Minor, projected viewers back to themselves: unvarnished and unashamed | Credit: BBC
Both Tracey and Alma represent something new, a rejection of the grim realism traditionally associated with estate life. Tracey’s colourful jumpers and sexual awakening, Alma’s bright pink coat and jubilant energy: these women dress vibrantly and refuse the drab aesthetic of ‘poverty porn’, the kind of television that treats hardship as spectacle. Working-class life, they insist, isn’t monochrome misery.
These insider perspectives are reinforced formally through direct address. Alma narrates her own life with a bold, matter-of-fact delivery, while Tracey breaks the fourth wall to share her inner monologue with gleeful confidence. They don’t explain themselves to outsiders. Instead, they address viewers directly, offering psychological depth and subjectivity on their own terms. This personal mode of address gives us accounts of precarity told with wit rather than self-pity.
- Read more | “It’s rare that a television show actually changes people’s lives”: 15 years of Horrible Histories
These sitcoms remind us that working-class life is a culture, with its own values and its own humour, and not a set of deprivation statistics. The journey from Harold Steptoe’s junkyard to Tracey Gordon’s estate is a story about authorship as much as about comedy. British sitcoms stopped laughing at the working class when working-class writers started writing them, and this transformation accelerated when working-class women picked up the pen.
Chewing Gum, Michaela Coel’s comic take on life in Tower Hamlets, gained acclaim and a host of young viewers | Credit: Channel 4
In 2023, however, research found that lower-income audiences were convinced that television was made “by someone else”. One viewer complained that working-class people represented on BBC shows were “either being criticised or laughed at”. The rise of YouTube and TikTok has emphasised this disconnect. Younger working-class viewers now encounter content made by people who share their backgrounds, and can recognise when they’re being represented versus merely depicted. After 60 years, we risk television coming full circle, back to the working class being observed rather than heard.
Del Boy made his millions, then lost every penny. His response was characteristically defiant: “This time next year, we could be millionaires.” Maybe, then, money was never the point. What these sitcoms have held onto for 60 years is the hustle and the hope, and the laughter that comes with them. The question was always who got to laugh.
Laura Minor is senior lecturer in television studies at the University of Salford. Her books include Reclaiming Female Authorship in UK Television Comedy (Edinburgh, 2024)
Ad
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Ad
Ad
Loading...
Ad
Loading...