In a world of Tommy Robinsons, we need more Stephen Grahams

While Tommy Robinson claims to represent those who feel left behind, Stephen Graham’s moving speech at the Emmys told a different story about being proudly British. Richard Benson looks at the working-class creatives who are taking back control of the arts, and bringing change in a positive – not hateful – way

Stephen Graham moved millions of people in Britain with his emotional, self-deprecating Emmy acceptance speech. But he made an important factual error. “This kind of thing doesn’t normally happen to a kid like me,” he said, in case you somehow missed it. “I’m just a mixed-race kid from a block of flats in a place called Kirkby. To be here today in front of my peers, and to be acknowledged by you, is the utmost humbling thing I could imagine in my life, and it shows you that any dream is possible.”

Of course, we all know what he meant. But the fact is that, in 2025, this sort of success is starting to happen to kids from blocks of flats in places like Kirkby. And it’s partly thanks to the efforts of people like him.

This year has seen a long-overdue reset of who is thriving in many different areas of the arts; working-class creatives from left behind communities who are being met with huge critical acclaim, public affection and booming box-office sales. The tone was set in January when the unprecedented “Lives Less Ordinary” exhibition at Two Temple Place, London, presented art from people from working-class backgrounds, and focused on themes of humour and resilience rather than the conventional made-for images of struggle and crisis.

Not long since “Lives Less Ordinary” opened, came Beth Steel’s brilliant play Till the Stars Come Down, which follows the family of three sisters on the wedding day of the youngest, Sylvia, to Marek, a Polish immigrant. It opened at the National Theatre in London and promptly became a sell-out hit, running alongside the updated version of James Graham’s Dear England. Meanwhile in the North West, the brilliant Gods of Salford cast 25 young locals alongside professional actors in a reimagining of Greek myths in the context of Salford’s working-class culture.

On the small screen, writer and actor Sophie Willan won a number of TV awards – including three from the Royal Television Society and one Bafta – for Alma’s Not Normal, the brilliant semi-autobiographical series that draws on her experiences growing up in and out of the care system, her family struggles (mother’s addiction), and working-class life in Bolton.

If you wanted a marker of how things are changing, you could, by the autumn, look at the shortlist for the Booker Prize. You might recall that in 2022, the Booker had a moment of ignominy when director Gaby Wood, in a well-intentioned but clumsy way, expressed surprise that some of the book clubs that had contributed to the selection process contained – shock horror – steelworkers and dinner ladies.

This year, by contrast, the Booker shortlist features two books by writers from working-class backgrounds, in Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper and Natasha Brown’s Universality. The latter work is typical of this new wave of working-class creativity in honing in directly on class as a political issue, and discussing its relationship with identity politics.

Brown’s hero, Hannah, like many people, has tried to go along with the post-industrial, neo-liberal line that class is dead, but finds the reality of her life, career and finances can be explained only in class terms: “What allowed some people to ‘make it’ while others faded away, as Hannah herself almost had? She knew it wasn’t a matter of hard work; she couldn’t have tried any harder than she did those last few years. Luck was a possible answer, but it seemed too callously random. Increasingly, Hannah felt another, truer word burning in her throat: class. The invisible privilege that everyone tried to pretend didn’t exist, but – it did. Hannah knew it did. She recognised it, and saw its grubby stains all over her own life.”

This isn’t just a British feeling, incidentally; similar sentiments could be found in books from international writers, such as brilliant young French woman Claire Baglin (On the Clock, about a fast food worker) and American Lee Cole (Fulfillment, about a young man working in a distribution hub). They were also conspicuous on British rapper Bashy’s Mobo-winning album; its title, Being Poor Is Expensive, could certainly be said to have caught a certain mood.

From L-R: Lorraine Ashbourne, Willan, Jayde Adams capturing life in Bolton (BBC/Expectation TV)

If the theatre, art and literary world were too genteel for you, you could enjoy, in the midst of it all, the more, ahem, direct class-consciousness of the Oasis reunion tour. This was a triumphant return for the UK’s most famous working-class rock stars, all the more impactful for coming at a time when pop music – once one of the few arts areas where the non-posh dominated – is being notoriously colonised by the middle-class and privately educated.

Liam Gallagher in particular reminded us of that time when Britons were pushing back against snobbery, and life felt more egalitarian. He acknowledged the ticketless fans watching for free on Gallagher Hill in Manchester, and then in Edinburgh came a class-warrior outburst against the council.

After they were attacked by officials who said their Murrayfield stadium audience would be mainly “rowdy” “middle-aged men” who would drink to “medium-to-high intoxication” (so unlike the middle-class rugby union fans who usually pack Murrayfield, of course!) Liam let fly from the stage: “Three billion pounds we’ve brought into this city over the past five days. And that’s between you and us. Three billion f****** quid. You won’t see f*** all, because they’ll rob it and spread it among their posh ugly mates.”

OK, maybe 3 billion was an exaggeration. But this wasn’t really about specific figures. He got a very, very big cheer, and it wasn’t just from drunk men. Doing his bit too is south London grime artist Stormzy, who not only has brought tales from the street into the mainstream, but has also launched a funding scheme for Black UK students at Cambridge “Stormzy Scholars” in partnership with his #Merky Foundation and HSBC UK. This is in addition to the rapper’s broader pledge to donate £10m over 10 years to causes fighting racial inequality in the UK.

In art galleries too, we have seen the curator and writer Johny Pitts’s touring show After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024, and Tish Murtha’s work – which has been growing in popularity since the 2023 documentary film of her life became a surprise hit – was chosen for the cover of Sam Fender’s latest album.

Why is all this happening now? It is tempting to see it simply as a biting back by a class of people who have been increasingly excluded from the arts. The stereotypical version of working-classness that pitches it as antithetical to creativity and the arts is in many ways a recent creation, and it is certainly misleading. The UK creative sector used to have a far higher proportion of working-class people; in fact, the number of working-class people in the arts has, for various reasons, halved since the 1970s.

Noticing this, and realising that the fightback wouldn’t happen without help, some people have been diligently working behind the scenes to encourage working-class voices to have their say. Talent that might otherwise founder is being spurred on to foster a new sort of class-consciousness. The 2019 anthology of working-class writers, Common People, edited by Kit De Waal, is now regarded by many people as a marker, having drawn together a diverse set of contributors and let them speak uninhibitedly about how class affected them.

There has been a big drive for change from people working in TV and theatre. Shane Meadows and Stephen Graham themselves have been hugely important, demonstrating that working-class drama would pull in viewers at a time if they were given a chance. As much as any other people in the British arts, they have cultivated and inspired a new generation: Meadows putting Vicky McClure in her first major role in his now-classic This Is England series, which also starred Graham, who, in turn, can be credited with launching Jodie Comer and now Owen Cooper.

Natasha Brown, whose novel ‘Universality’ is typical of this new wave of working-class creativity, focusing directly on class as a political issue (Alice Zoo)

The actor Michael Sheen has also been influential, speaking out on the issue and co-founding A Writing Chance, a writing programme for writers in left behind communities with the organisation New Writing North (NWN). That programme produced Tom Newlands, who wrote what has been widely recognised as one of the best novels of 2024, Only Here, Only Now. (Full disclosure, since last year. I have worked on The Bee, a literary magazine for working-class writing founded by Sheen and NWN.)

Last year at the Edinburgh TV Festival, James Graham delivered a McTaggart lecture in which he argued for greater working-class representation at a time when research showed only 8 per cent of people working in TV were from those backgrounds.

As one of the UK’s leading contemporary playwrights and screenwriters, who brought us Sherwood and Brexit: The Uncivil War, he said: “Recognising that those in our sector who come from more privileged backgrounds don’t choose the class they’re born into any more than the less privileged; this is simply about equity of opportunity, and a refusal to believe that this is the one area of unfair, unjust, under-representation that we simply cannot and will not crack. And it must be cracked.”

This encouragement of new talent is one reason why all this matters. It’s not just about fairness, but about quality; who would have wanted British telly to not have Stephen Graham or Jodie Comer on it? But it’s not just that. This new wave is also important because it features a varied set of talents, different genders, races and sexualities, at a time when politicians of all stripes are claiming to represent “the working class”, when we all know damn fine they’re really using that term to mean middle-aged and older white people nostalgic for a time when it signified something a bit different.

The new working-class artists are working-class people finally given a chance to talk about the realities of their own lives, which tend to be a bit different from the images conjured up by Keir “Toolmaker’s son” Starmer, Kemi “McDonald’s” Badenoch, Tommy “Stone Island” Robinson or Nigel “If you believe this you’ll believe anything” Farage.

Sophie Willan in ‘Alma’s Not Normal’ (BBC)

It is particularly important right now when people like Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins are trying to position the working class as definitively white, anti-immigrant, and anti-Islam. The tragedy is that the actual working class has been denied a proper voice for so long, and society has become separated in class terms, that middle and upper-class people are finding it disturbingly easy to believe him and his supporters when they claim to represent the majority of the working class. They don’t. If you want to know why, try the photography of Alina Akbar, or the plays of Ishy Din, or indeed the films and TV of Stephen Graham.

Graham said something else in his speech that attracted less attention than his “someone like me” quote. He thanked his friends and family for “helping me with something I can’t do on my own”. That’s the working-class version of achieving the dream: humility, cooperation, respect.

So often, what emerges from new working-class artists feels like this. It’s honesty and believing your own experience, and questioning ALL political rhetoric. It’s about mutual support and friendship, not the me-me-me individual that can leave you feeling lonely, staring at your own social media feed. It’s about being you, being British, and being brilliant at something you can be proud of without hating someone else.

In 2025, that feels quite important, really.