Melvyn Bragg is tackling a subject even more sweeping than his hair
It's a good job the classless society has not yet come to pass. The television schedules would be bereft. No more point-and-laugh/cry/gasp/reach for the hotline to social services documentaries about those who have less than us, no more point-and-shout/cry/gasp/go puce with fury and take to the barricades films about those who have more than us. No more Upstairs Downstairs. No more Downton Abbey. Who could comprehend such absurd divisions in a purely egalitarian world? It would be like insisting that the Eloi and the Morlocks were real. And not only real, but forever having strange tingles in allegedly defunct genitalia, slipping on soap and gassing monkeys in prams.
No, it wouldn't work at all. People would just have you committed. Better we remain riven. In addition, a classless society would deprive us of the joy of the latest Bragg-o-rama, whereby a massive, sprawling and unwieldy subject ("All of literature! The English language! 2,000 years of history! My hair!"), surely too big for one man to render into any recognisable shape or digestible form, is duly conquered and divided into as many episodes as can be squeezed out of his intellectually and financially impoverished employers. Last night saw the opening episode of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture (BBC2), which powered through the years from George V's coronation to the end of the second world war, examining how upper-, middle- and working-class cultures differed from and acted on each other, changing irrevocably but by no means completely after each of the two wars.
It took in everything from Diaghilev to Deeping, Rupert Brooke to the Beveridge report and Evelyn Waugh to In Which We Serve, sweeping you up on waves of fact and enthusiasm and depositing you on the far shore, panting, exhilarated, a little bit more knowledgeable and just a little bit happier about life, television and everything in between. You'll come on in next week, I hope. The water's lovely.