the unlikely marriage of jim royle and rishi sunak

the very short history of "council house tv"

In one memorable scene from the much-loved working-class sitcom The Royle Family, Dave, Twiggy, and Jim Royle, the reluctant patriarchs of the show, stand in a line and scratch away striped wallpaper with kitchen utensils. Down at their local, Twiggy reports he recently bumped into a friend: “He’s sorted himself out with Sky Digital, you know.” Dave is aghast. “Sky Digital Twiggy? Have they got the movie channels? The discovery channel? Sports 123 channels?” Exasperated and practically frothing with envy, Jim flings down his spatula. “They’ve got the bloody lot Dave! The jammy gets!”

In the outburst that follows, Jim Royle has recently found an apparent ally in a young Rishi Sunak, who made headlines last week with the revelation that his family were forced to “sacrifice” many things during his youth, of which Sky TV was the most egregious. Voters are understandably unconvinced by the suggestion that, given the fees at Winchester College, an expanded TV package would have broken the bank for the Sunaks. To working-class people living in a country with three times as many food banks as cinemas, these comments are deeply offensive. Yet much of the mockery aimed at Sunak seems to pivot around the suggestion that Sky TV is a political irrelevance. It simply doesn’t matter whether Sunak had satellite or not, some seem to think, and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with class.

Unlike Rishi, I don’t remember exactly how many channels I had as a child. What I do remember, though, is The Royle Family, watched over and over. Looking back now, I see it is a masterful example of working-class storytelling, one that my family loved nothing to see themselves affectionately reflected in. The show is set almost exclusively in front of the Royle’s own TV, which operates as something of a high altar to be worshipped throughout. At one point, an urn of ashes are placed atop it: the ultimate marker of respect. It seems inevitable, given this preoccupation, and the period the programme depicted, that Sky would come to be something of a running joke. Over the course of three series, Jim Royle, the family’s sedentary father, would salivate over constant fantasies of Sky Digital. Only in the final glorious moments of the show’s original run would he have his wish fulfilled.

An unemployed Mancunian, brought to life by former trade unionist Ricky Tomlinson, Jim and Rishi have little in common on paper. Yet their allegedly shared desire shows just how important Sky TV became at the end of the twentieth century. This in itself tells an important story about the relationship between cultural signifiers and class, increasingly important as the old industrial lines have blurred. Without him knowing it, Rishi’s comments tapped into a fascinating phenomenon in recent British cultural history, and ventriloquized a genuine strand of working-class desire.

Just as it was setting out its satellite programme, an advertising campaign from 1989 saw Sky brand themselves as unequivocally middle-class. It follows a flighty housewife reminiscent of Patricia Routledge’s Hyacinth Bucket, who plumps her cushions and peers through the curtains at the dish being installed across the road. Seeming at first to dismiss the latest endeavours of her equally comfortable neighbours, the advert ends with a faux reluctant surrender: “of course, we’ll have to get it, or what will the neighbours say!” As it understood itself, Sky was an aspirational product, a must-have for well-to-do families across the country.

It is presumably this version of Sky that Sunak had in mind when he recalled the apparently scarring deprivations of his childhood, but unfortunately for Rupert Murdoch’s PR department, this cosy image wasn’t to last. Instead, Sky was to rapidly become marred by the touch of the masses, synonymous instead with a new moniker: “council house TV.” As the occupants of social housing dared to desire their own giant satellite dishes, Sky would be forced to push back against a widespread snobbery for years to come. That same snobbery would, just a few years later, be directed at plasma screens, but the charge was the same: Sky was chavvy, tacky, the domain of benefits cheats. The noughties were a particularly grim time for the state of class discourse in Britain, and much of that prejudiced pantomime would be played out against the question of satellite expansion.

Therein lies a more likely reason that Sunak’s parents never permitted him access to the joys of The Simpsons. Yet his false complaint can point us in the direction of a genuinely felt desire, that between Jim and his Sky Digital, or more broadly, between working-class people and television itself. In this, Sunak’s class cosplay has at least a glimmer of truth to it. Many working families couldn’t afford the expanded package, but they longed for it, all the same. Some might critique that want for material things, but Carolne Aherne and Craig Cash insisted on the Royle’s otherwise dismissed aspirations as valid ones, and forced us to pay attention. The Royle Family is a love-letter to working people, and to their own love for their TVs. It paved the way for Gogglebox and much else too. In doing so, it appealed to a long history: television has always been important to tired, busy, working people. Why shouldn’t they aspire to the lofty heights of two hundred channels? Dreams of satellite weren’t Rishi Sunak’s to appropriate, but that’s not to say such dreams aren’t, in themselves, politically valid. When we dismiss them entirely, we forget that the real roots of Sky based snobbishness lie in the denigration of working-class pleasure. For low-income families to want more than their basic means has historically been, for many in Britain, a wild affront.

If Rishi’s artificial affinity with the likes of Jim Royle – and the furore it’s caused this week – can teach us anything about the current state of British politics, its that cultural signifiers matter, indeed they’re more fraught than ever before. Faced with Rishi’s pathetic efforts at relatability, we might channel Jim himself: sacrificed a lot, my arse - but we should be sure not to dismiss this whole affair for the wrong reasons. Those who pedal the lie that one’s relationship with something as trivial as television isn’t a political matter do so with a conscious agenda. To suggest as much is to consciously efface the hidden operations of this country’s class system, a system which, in a less legible economic landscape, is increasingly dependent on the silent judgements that surround leisure, taste, and the size of one’s satellite dish.