The new Channel 4 series Class in Britain begins with a documentary on the working class, in which I have taken aspects of my book The Likes of Us from the page to the screen. Originally published last summer, the text was an attempt at "a biography of the white working class". It chronicles the experience of this native tribe within the confines of Southwark in south-east London from the beginning of the 19th century until the present. A change, incidentally, that had been initiated by the birth of broadcasting. He was not alone in these endeavours, as Richard Hoggart had chartered similar territory, in a less localised and personalised approach with the publication of The Uses of Literacy.

Years later, Alan Bennett made the point that when writers return to their working-class roots or overstate these origins - a sin he believed himself to be guilty of - it is not solely in pursuit of a sense of belonging: "It is a mild form of inverted snobbery, which Richard Hoggart might dignify by calling it 'groping for the remnants of a tradition'."I might now be guilty of a similar, sinful grope. As with his book of the time, The Changing Forest, the programme was a means of documenting the state of working-class culture in the face of major social, cultural and technological change. As if to herald the news that the revolution would after all be televised, the BBC screened the Dennis Potter documentary Between Two Rivers. Potter was an Oxford graduate taken up as a trainee at the BBC, and the documentary recorded a return to his working-class roots in the Forest of Dean. Clipped accents, along with the right postcode and the right pedigree remained paramount, but cloth caps and whippets were also in the running. As a signifier of the role that class played on the small screen in television's first full decade, this snatch of televisual history was pitch perfect.

Here we had the clipped accents and the class that was imperative for a career on camera at the time, and the nepotism that took you to the parts of the BBC to which Oxbridge alone would not provide a swift entr? A few years later, with a new director general at the helm of the corporation, determined to reflect the social shifts expected to make the Sixties swing, class remained key to British broadcasting, both behind and in front of the camera However, this time the spotlight absorbed the lower orders. By way of an appetiser to the current BBC series A Portrait of Britain, its presenter, David Dimbleby, introduced a clip from his first television appearance, 50 years earlier, as the Lake District provided the setting for both programmes. The previous documentary was presented by himself and his brother Jonathan, presumably as a dress-run for when they would share the shoes of Richard, their celebrated broadcaster father, as though taking over the family business. We met at a function in Washington DC.Have you ever dated a white woman? ADELE WEEKS, HOVENo, I didn't.