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How To Crack The Class Ceiling
Rating: **
The Traitors
Rating: ****
Knees together, ankles crossed to one side, back as stiff as a ramrod . . . Amol Rajan is learning to sit nicely, like the Princess of Wales.
The Beeb’s star interviewer was visiting Cumberland School in Newham, East London, where pupils applying for sixth-form places at public schools, via its Prestigious Colleges programme, are taught deportment.
How To Crack The Class Ceiling (BBC2) also saw him learning to walk with a book balanced on his head. I thought that nonsense was abandoned in 1958, when aristocratic young women ceased to be presented to the Queen at court.
But according to Amol, you can’t be posh until you’ve done a lap of Buckingham Palace with a first edition of Vanity Fair on your bonce. Don’t ask me if this is true — I never went to finishing school.
Anol Rajan and Nadhim Zahawi in How To Creak The Class Ceiling: This two-part documentary looks at the obstacles young people from working-class backgrounds face
This two-part documentary looks at the obstacles young people from working-class backgrounds face when they try to break into professions such as banking and law.
‘Is it time to change the way we fill our top jobs?’ asked Amol, talking to experts who believed that regional accents hold back aspirants who drop their aitches.
His definition of a posh accent was R.P. or received pronunciation — apparently unaware that this firm, clear way of speaking was once considered classless.
According to lexicographer Frank Vizetelly, it took hold after World War I, spreading through London and then — thanks to radio and the BBC — across the country.
R.P. replaced the ‘debased, effete and inaudible speech’ of the Victorian toffs. It became universal, because people in every part of Britain could easily understand it.
Still, Amol wasn’t
