The renewed interest in class revealed by next week’s White season on BBC2 may indicate a welcome, if nervy, cultural shift but there is another zone of British television where class never went away. Reality TV, all those programmes offering us the chance to snoop into other people’s lives on the pretext of reflecting upon or improving our own, has always had class as its shaping social force. Using the rubrics of taste and self-improvement, these series scupper the fantasy that Britain might be a “classless society”. Adjudicating on the nuanced gradations of class is an enduring British pleasure: reality TV caters for the inner nosey neighbour.

Consider, for example, the recently concluded third series of Ladette to Lady . Its premise, couched under a disingenuous veneer of social concern, is to whisk young women suffering from what it calls the “shameless affliction” of drunken rowdiness to a finishing school where they can learn such essential 21st-century skills as flower arranging and dressage. A tabloid revamp of My Fair Lady, it requires its participants both to clamber up the class ladder and to step into a time machine (its image of “ladylike” behaviour evoking a pre-Beatles era of debutante demureness).

Class and taste fuse seamlessly across the reality TV landscape. What else can explain the wildly popular sartorial bullying of Trinny and Susannah with their wildly superior accents and their dormitory-dominatrix personas? When Gillian McKeith raids the cupboards of the overweight in You Are What You Eat, it is always in the houses of those at the proletarian end of the culinary spectrum. If she were as driven by the imperative of dietary health as she insists, she would be kicking down Nicholas Soames’s door to scrape the foie gras from his plate. Instead, she force-feeds quinoa to those more accustomed to kebabs. As a witty piece of editing on Harry Hill’s TV Burp made clear, the downmarket food McKeith lines up to show her gluttonous victims what they consume looks all but identical to the treats Kerry Katona presides over in her advertisements for Iceland. What the ads exalt , reality TV castigates as a failure to abide by middle-class norms.

There are some exceptions. When Supernanny Jo Frost descends upon a household to discipline over-indulged children, she is just as likely to scold a Silas or a Freya as a Ryan or a Demi, while the more affluent families in Wife Swap often emerge looking pretentious and repressed. Yet in most cases, reality TV demands that we know our place. If politicians genuflect at the altar of meritocracy, reality TV knows that snobbery sells.

Andy Medhurst teaches at the University of Sussex and is the author of ’A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities’