When the mass media got into their stride after the war, and began appropriation of the masses’ free time, many whose talent took them out of the working class expressed their hatred of what was happening.

Fifty years ago, Arnold Wesker’s play Roots created the character of Beattie Bryant, daughter of Norfolk farm workers, lifted out of her limited life by an educated boyfriend, Ronnie Kahn. Beattie, finding her voice, tells her family: “The whole stinkin’ commercial world insults us, we don’t care a damn. Ronnie’s right – it’s our bloody fault. We want the third-rate – we got it!”

Two years before, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy had put it as starkly: “In many parts of life, mass production has brought good; culturally, the mass-produced bad makes it harder for the good to be recognised.” Hoggart, born in Leeds’ proletarian terraces, had given the East End Jewish boy, Wesker, an intellectual justification.

That’s mostly gone now. There was an echo last week, when the interviewer Sir Michael Parkinson (son of a Yorkshire mineworker) wrote of the late Jade Goody that she was “barely educated, ignorant and puerile ... (she) came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today” – and he was deluged in ordure for his elitism.

Jade Goody and reality TV are now cultural artefacts; Professor David Buckingham of London’s Institute of Education has sought to impart a “critical approach” to soap operas by having children aged 11 to 14 critique episodes of Grange Hill. Soaps are serious: to say otherwise is to confine oneself to an old order of cultural hierarchies.

There has been criticism of TV columns, like this one, which laud such minority programmes as Mad Men and The Wire and ignore soaps, which regularly top the viewing figures. Conceding the argument, I watched all last week’s episodes of EastEnders (Tuesday-Friday, BBC1) and, for contrast, the US comedy/soap Desperate Housewives (C4, Wednesday).

Among the complex interweaving of individual and family narratives in EastEnders last week was a main storyline about a youngish and beautiful woman, Ronnie. Ronnie had, in her mid-teens, given a baby up for adoption, and this week discovered an ache where maternal love might have been when the child, a girl called Danielle, died. Not only could Ronnie now express grief in tears which earlier would not come, she could also understand, and be understood by, her daughter’s adoptive father. Elsewhere, a first-generation West Indian immigrant wrestled with his dislike of a young black man courting a member of his family. And one of the series’ matriarchs, Dot – who began the week reminding us that it was the season of Christ’s resurrection – is found to have a manipulative granddaughter, who will no doubt give her trouble.

Desperate Housewives, though only partly within the soap genre, still has similar elements – marital infidelity, jealousy, obsession and unrequited love (in this episode’s case, of a lesbian for a straight woman). Yet its treatment was of a different order. Where the approach of EastEnders is to ask for its audience’s absorption in the dramas of its characters, Housewives thrusts them into the ironic distance. The lesbian gives a speech about her loneliness: her self-pity is defused by her would-be lover’s insouciance. A man’s obsessive thefts from friends’ houses turns farcical when his wife returns the objects clandestinely – and mixes them up. A jealous wife’s suspicions of her husband’s former girlfriend is defused when the latter is revealed to be fat: when she mocks him for having had sex with a fat girl, he says: “You think I’m that shallow that all I go by is looks?” “Yeah,” she replies, “I thought we had that in common.”

So? My conclusion was that I might watch Housewives again, but not EastEnders. The wit of the former is often flaccid, but at least it says: these people are playing games. EastEnders says: you should care about these people because they’re like you – or if you don’t think so, you’re a snob.

Conventional education, at least until recently, pointed to Great Art as a means of self-improvement: it privileged King Lear’s mourning for Cordelia over that of Ronnie for Danielle. This was not just improvement of the mind, but of the wallet: the better educated and skilled usually ended up richer, too. Jade Goody, who found another route to wealth – one dependent not on Great Art but on a frank ignorance of it and of much else besides – was a magnificent exception.

In choosing what of culture to ingest, you take responsibility for what moves and absorbs you. The response elicited when Anna Karenina hurls herself below the train is less manipulative and more conducive to reflection than contemplating Ronnie’s grief. It doesn’t lift you to be a better human being, but it does drill down deeper into what may make you a nasty one.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd