The Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl

Latest Episodes

• Trouble Ahead

  Changing attitudes to work and money, contrasting the positions of respect enjoyed by professional people prior to Margaret Thatcher's cultural revolution with their current loss of status, and how the qualities of commitment, prudence and loyalty prized by stalwarts of the City have been replaced by pragmatism and self interest. Tim Emens explains how financial gain has failed to compensate for the lack of job satisfaction enjoyed by his father Mike

• Lessons in Class

  The importance of education in the success of the middle classes over the years, comparing and contrasting the social mores and cultural differences between Winchester College and a nearby comprehensive school and illustrating how generations of parents have used academic achievement as a means of social climbing

• Troublemakers

  Members of the middle classes with a taste for political protest, including a profile of defiant bourgeois Angie Zelter. Ostensibly an ordinary home-loving mother who bakes her own bread in a converted farmhouse, Angie has been imprisoned 16 times for participating in a variety of radical movements, resorting to direct action when she feels the Government isn't pulling its weight