Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture by Davies Helen O'Callaghan Claire

Author:Davies, Helen,O'Callaghan, Claire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Lads at Work: Private Welfare, Silent State

Stable employment and financial security, however, are not presented as unproblematically desirable. While the leisure of both Tony and Gary is contingent on Gary’s job security, his stable employment is not presented as fulfilling or inherently desirable. Gary’s experience of a job-for-life is unique in the programme; he took an office junior position straight from school and has consistently been employed by the same security firm ever since, hoarding the majority of his pay, with his only significant expenditures being a home purchase and his excessive beer consumption. His employees, George and Anthea, are caricatures of harmless but tedious middle-aged people; they function as a constant reminder that Gary awaits their fate later in life. He endures his work life by offsetting the tedium of employment with beer and TV at the day’s end; career climbing or career change are not options available to him, since work exists only to pay for his leisure. The stasis of this daily cycle is presented as inescapable and sedating, obscuring Gary’s frustration while precluding any alternative to it.

Gary’s unfulfilling work not only provides the capital which facilitates the main characters’ leisure, but also Tony’s ‘privatised’ welfare. Throughout the show, in both Deb and Tony’s experiences of unemployment, the idea of state support of any kind is not mentioned or even hinted at for either character. The only potential recipient of state support is the affluent, stably employed homeowner Gary, who sarcastically comments that his subsidy of Tony’s unemployment makes him ‘eligible for a grant from the council’ (‘Rich and Fat’, series five, episode six). Not only is there no expectation of state assistance for the unemployed, Gary’s private bankrolling of Tony’s lifestyle is suggested as more deserving of reward, hinting at the 1990s growth of middle-class state support at the expense of traditional welfare.

The only other hint of state service provision in the show is through another female figure, Dorothy, and her job in nursing. While it is not confirmed that she works at a public hospital, Dorothy’s interest in documentaries on the NHS and workplace fundraising hint at her possible employment by the state. In the episode ‘Rich and Fat’, Dorothy fundraises for operating tables. But rather than questioning why a hospital could not afford such basic equipment or why private subsidy by individuals is the appropriate response to this financial support, the episode uses this incident purely to represent Gary as miserly. As such, through Dorothy’s work the state’s under-resourcing of welfare provision becomes an acceptable given and responsibility for welfare is wholly individualised. In this context, then, it is unsurprising that Deb’s experience of unemployment is so fundamentally distressing; without the safety net of a well-paid friend, she has nowhere to turn.

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