I FINALLY GOT round to watching a few episodes of “Fleabag” to see what all the fuss is about. A few good scenes, I thought, and a magnificently disgusting character with a beard, but apart from that underwhelming. The breaking of conventions (addressing the camera, graphic sexual references, sleeping with a priest) was tediously conventional; the sentimentality, particularly about a pet hamster, was cloying….“Fleabag” and the “Fleabag”-related hype is nevertheless interesting for sociological reasons: it demonstrates the annexation of yet another area of British life by the self-worshipping upper-middle classes.
Comedy used to be a pretty working-class affair. In the Victorian and Edwardian era the upper-classes (including Edward VII) went to music halls to listen to working-class songs and jokes. Many of the giants of post-war comedy such as Eric Morecambe and Les Dawson (pictured, left) came from the northern working class, their talents honed in working-men’s clubs and local talent contests. The “Carry On” films traded in seaside-postcard smut while taking pot-shots at the pretensions of the British professional classes (“Carry On Doctor” is a masterpiece of doctor-deflation).
