‘What we need to shake things up a bit is a new breed of Angry Young Men — and Women’.

Maybe because it’s been on my mind of late but Janice Turner's piece in the Times on Saturday about NEETS, unemployment and being creative caught my eye.

She writes ‘Even before the coalition gets cracking with its deficit-reducing cuts, nearly one million under-24s are neither in college nor work. So who could blame these jobseekers if they give up seeking non-existent jobs and head for the garage or back bedroom to write that album, tortured verse or become YouTube auteurs. The best spin you can possibly put on the dole — as the Clash, Gallagher brothers or Boy George can attest — is that there’s a creative fearlessness when you have nothing to lose.

And whatever comes from a generation treading water until the economy rallies can only exceed the current teen fodder of horny vampires and High School Musical. When Alan Sillitoe died a few weeks back, I reflected that what we need to shake things up a bit is a new breed of Angry Young Men — and Women.

Recently, piling through a Michael Caine boxed set, I found myself watching Educating Rita, a film I haven’t seen since it came out in 1983. Willy Russell’s tale of a Liverpool hairdresser who escapes the confines of her working-class background by “finding herself” in literature seemed in one sense hopelessly dated. The idea that “high art” can liberate — that “high art”, with its implied assumption of superiority, exists at all! — seems as other era as the pub piano singalongs in which Rita joylessly joins in. It was a notion of the humble, questing scholar that hadn’t changed since Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

Yet when I first saw Educating Rita, as a book-mad teenager, the first of my family to go to university, it affected me hugely. “I am a half-caste,” says Rita in despair at how her education has destroyed all sense of belonging. She is trapped between her family — a husband who burns her books to make her have babies — and her snotty middle-class classmates who mock her accent and taste in garish pulp fiction.

It was a tale of a traumatic class journey, which came 20 years after that initial literary movement of angry young (mostly) grammar-school boys — Braine, Waterhouse, Osborne and Sillitoe — depicted their desire to flee their parents’ limited and monochrome world for London, fun, sex with posh girls, the life of the mind, the room at the top.

Social mobility, we are told, is lower now than it was a decade ago, with even once-egalitarian professions like journalism now solidly middle-class closed shops. Girls from wealthier backgrounds have filled the increased number of college places, not bright, poor students. Indeed, for all the media scare stories of dim plebs being positively discriminated into Oxbridge, a clever working-class pupil is less likely to enter a top university than 15 years ago. Their schools do not push them forwards, but more importantly, they do not feel entitled to apply.

And why would they, when they see no books or movies that reflect their own probable experience or unrealised dreams. University seems only a scary step into a hostile, sneering world. One woman I know who went to Oxford from the Welsh valleys was so scared by the sophisticated social scene that she spent three years “in the library or washing my hair”.
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