Beverley Skeggs

And obviously you've mentioned that, Angela, we're all going to do it at Hogwarts as people that have been quite influential in your work.

So what brought you to look, I know that you sort of worked with other sociologists, Bev Skeggs being one of them, in regards to this, but what brought you to, you know, working class women is an area of research that lots of sociologists, particularly obviously Marxist feminists have looked at, but why within the context of comedy, first of all, what made you, what was, why were you drawn to that area?

Well, it's a number of different things.

So, I mean, we just we partly we noticed that there were quite different representations happening of working class life that were very different from, say, 10 years ago and the kind of stigmatising, castigating representations that you see on programmes like Little Britain.

um which are now you know quite roundly pilloried aren't they the tide has really turned um so that was part of it and then Bev Skeggs obviously has written a lot about class and gender about working-class girls learning how to care rather than say learning to labour as Paul Willis put it.

So she's been interested in how bourgeois norms of respectability have been rejected, as well as, you know, she's written about comedy in the past.

And then I've written quite a bit about meritocracy.