Abstract
While a small number of contemporary animated television shows have sought to represent – and interrogate – the British social class system in explicit ways, there remains a bias within contemporary scholarship towards live action representation over the animated form. This chapter seeks to address this imbalance by considering: the way our understanding of class has changed in recent years; how the animated ident intersects with notions of class in both provocative and formative ways; how Crapston Villas animates the aesthetics of class; and how representations of conspicuous consumption inform newer frameworks of class identity in the shows 2DTV and Monkey Dust.
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Notes
- 1.
ONS data indicates that unemployment rose from just over 1 million to 3 million by the mid-1980s, and remained just under that figure until the early 1990s. See, ‘The Thatcher years in statistics’ (2013): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22070491 [Last accessed 26 April 2016].
- 2.
The website BBCeng.info, which is a not-for-profit project seeking to collect and archive ‘recollections of BBC engineering from 1922 to 1997‘, contains documentation that refers to the use of an ‘Animation Decoder’, which decoded data for the ‘BBC1 Logo Generator’ in ‘real-time’ (BBC, 1987: 40).
- 3.
For a more detailed discussion of Channel Four’s ident history see Brownie (2013). A comprehensive archive of British television idents can also be found on the website The Ident Gallery at http://theident.gallery/menu_section_channel4.php [Last accessed 26 April 2016].
- 4.
Sarah Ann Kennedy email interview with Chris Pallant, 25 April 2016.
- 5.
‘Realist’ can be read here to evoke both the aesthetic and contextual frameworks of British Social Realism and also a style of animation that prioritises verisimilitude over metamorphosis. For a more detailed discussion of British Social Realism, see Forrest (2013), and for a more comprehensive account of animation styles, including realism, see Paul Wells (1998).
- 6.
For the full transcription of the Margaret Thatcher (1987) interview with Douglas Keay in which this declaration appeared see http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 [Last accessed 26 April 2016].
- 7.
Sarah Ann Kennedy email interview with Chris Pallant (25 April 2016).
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Pallant, C., Newton, J. (2017). Animating Class in Contemporary British Television. In: Forrest, D., Johnson, B. (eds) Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55506-9_15
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