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).