Why we need more TV with more middle-class heart

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, never misses an opportunity to tell us he’s the son of a bus driver and is a “council estate boy”. Good for you. Really, I mean it. Let’s all wave our working-class credentials – I was born in a council house, where I spent the first few years of my life.

It was great, we had a garden and I had a fabulous view of the huge steel plant where both my granddads worked. Oh, and on really good days the huge blast furnaces belched orange smoke that left a weird dust over everything. Probably even my tiny lungs.

So, are we OK – have I established my authenticity to everyone’s satisfaction? No? Would it help if I added that my ancestors were illiterate farm workers?

There you go, that’s the clincher. But it’s tiresome, isn’t it? Just reading that bit back to myself makes me sound as though I’m trying to prove something, that I’m “real” in a way that people of, for want of a better phrase, “higher birth” aren’t.

Television, though, just doesn’t stop trying to make the middle classes – a BIG chunk of its audience – look cruel and emotionally illiterate and invariably personified as bent property developers (DCI Banks), murderers (The Fall) or crooked businessmen (Unforgotten), while the working classes are almost always portrayed as noble, funny and right about everything.

Maybe it’s because so many middle-class people work in television – they feel guilty and want to lionise (and therefore, incidentally, patronise) a whole group of people they know very little about.

When I was growing up, being middle class was something to aspire to, it was a goal, the reason to work hard.

I’m not at all sentimental about my family’s history, and neither would I dream of co-opting those agricultural peasants in a Who Do You Think You Are? kind of way by claiming, “Aye, they made me the person I am today.” That’s just tosh.

Now that I’m middle-aged and middle class I fall upon any television drama or comedy where I don’t have to feel guilty about coveting a character’s kitchen island or those beautiful floor-to-ceiling Georgian windows.

So after much initial scepticism I’m delighted that Cold Feet has returned. It’s been reworked by writer/creator Mike Bullen and is really rather good (though we’re only two episodes into a run of eight so it might all turn to dust in moments).

It has middle-class characters. Admittedly one of them is a buffoon (Robert Bathurst’s desperate businessman David Marsden) and the not-so-well-off Pete and Jenny Gifford (John Thomson and Fay Ripley) suffer just a bit too stoically.

But Cold Feet has a middle-class heart. I love Karen Marsden (Hermione Norris) – poised, clever Karen, who never raises her voice and who has a good job doing something or other. And yes, she has a lovely kitchen.

Comedies, too, are beginning to mine the middle classes (hey, we can laugh at ourselves!) for material – the recent The Circuit and Motherland were both funny and astute, if a little heavy-handed with the “aren’t middle-class people awful” thing.

Despite all of this, I can’t believe we are still discussing class in 2016. But as long as people keep talking nonsense about the lack of working- class representation in dramas and comedies – have these people ever seen anything written by Kay Mellor or Sally Wainwright? – the longer this will drag on.