An early scene from the series is included in The British Working Class, featuring the late, lamented Ena Sharples.As with the more recent Shameless by Paul Abbott, the characters were inspired by those that surrounded the writer - Tony Warren - while he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood. Yet the project that pulled in the viewing masses at that moment was Coronation Street. Some of which brought to mind the criticism that HG Wells once levelled at authors that took the masses as their muse: "The son of the alcoholic proletarian has suddenly replaced the woman with the past in the current novels."The Loach films have since come to summarise the output of the BBC drama department of the time, but Dennis Potter was just one of a number of regulars who eschewed the v?t?ethod for a non-naturalist approach that attempted to get inside the minds as well as the homes of working-class characters, in the pursuit of The Real. "Haven't you heard about Burton's? We dress differently nowadays."Taking its cue from ITV, the BBC poached the producer behind the series and had him create the Wednesday Play, which delivered Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, both directed by Ken Loach. The latter was adapted from the novel by Nell Dunn, which itself was reminiscent of Henry Green's observations of the working class, and both television plays were a bid to move away from filmed studio drama, and introduce the documentary style that was then shorthand for authenticity.But the themes of abortion and homelessness, which were to distinguish these two films, also set the trend for formulaic dramas that grafted standard working-class characters on to issues.

London-based middle-class actors were still hitting the north to be cast in roles that required cod-Liverpudlian accents. And clothes in which these characters were dressed continued to owe a debt to Andy Capp. One of the regular TV playwrights from that "golden age", Alun Owen - author of No Trams To Lime Street and Lena, O My Lena - recalled having an argument with a wardrobe mistress, who simply lined up a play's cast to be dressed in mufflers and caps "My life!" he said. It relied to a large extent on dialogue, and didn't comment on the lives of the working class, but eavesdropped: "Another thing I can't understand about the lower classes," he said, "is this business by which they pay 1d per week for all their lives and get a whopping £60 funeral at their end."It was the emphasis on the ordinary rather than the exceptional that made it pass as an authentic slice of social realism.

Similarly, in television, the writers commissioned to contribute to ITV's Armchair Theatre were inspired by what Ted Willis, the scriptwriter for Dixon of Dock Green, later summed up as "the marvellous world of the ordinary". But the writers were alone in attempting to present a more realistic portrayal of the working class. You can't help thinking that this might have been the downside of the Reithian ethos that permeated the corporation after his exit. (Even though this first director general resigned before television put radio in the shade).