The Rag Trade:'Everybody Out!'Gender, Politics and Class On

Northumbria Research Link Citation: Irwin, Mary (2015) The Rag Trade: 'Everybody out!' Gender, politics and class on the factory floor. In: British TV Comedies: Cultural Concepts, Contexts and Controversies. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 66-79. ISBN 9781137552945 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan URL: This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/27991/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. 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British TV Comedy: Cultural Concepts and Contexts The Rag Trade “Everybody Out!” Gender, Politics and Class on the Factory Floor The BBC television situation comedy The Rag Trade (series one BBC 1961-63, revived LWT 1977-78) chronicled the weekly exploits of a group of female machinists employed at Fenner Fashions - a small clothing factory in east London. Led by their clever, manipulative shop steward Paddy (Miriam Karlin), the women were constantly in conflict with the factory’s owner Harold Fenner (Peter Jones). Paddy was always ready to call a strike on the slightest of pretexts, initiated by her rallying cry and catch phrase “Everybody Out”.1 In total, five series of The Rag Trade were made. Series one to three were broadcast on the BBC between 1961 and 1963 in a prime Friday night viewing slot. After a gap of fourteen years, the series was revived by London Weekend Television (LWT) for a further two series from 1977-78, broadcast on Sunday evenings. This chapter concerns The Rag Trade’s first and most notable incarnation, however the reimagining of the series for the late 1970s will be considered towards the end of the chapter when examining the further development of the series. The Rag Trade followed what Mintz identifies as the traditionally recognised formula for a television situation comedy: A half-hour series focused on episodes involving recurrent characters within the same premise. That is, each week we generally find the same people in the same setting. The episodes are finite whatever happens in a given episode is generally closed off, explained, reconciled, solved at the end of the half hour. (Mintz in Mills 28) Each week, whatever chaotic events took place in the factory, usually revolving around the women’s attempts to evade work, schemes to make extra money, union disputes or the farcical mix ups that ensued when strangers came into the factory, everything returned to the status quo by the end of the episode, with each fresh episode beginning as if nothing untoward had happened the week before. The series was created by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, who met professionally as writers on the BBC radio comedy Educating Archie (1950-1960), a series featuring ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. Wolfe and Chesney continued as a writing partnership working on a television version of Educating Archie (ITV 1958-59). It was conceived at a time when some of the earliest British television comedies were being written and broadcast. Most significant and successful amongst these were Hancock’s Half Hour (BBC 1956-1961) and Steptoe and Son (1962-1974), both written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who are generally regarded as having created and established the blueprint for what became the British television situation comedy. The Rag Trade, like Hancock and Steptoe and Son, focused on the trials and tribulations of ordinary, everyday British life. At a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when so-called ‘kitchen-sink realism’ and its gritty depiction of working-class life was emergent in British art, literature, theatre and cinema, The Rag Trade, with its factory-floor setting and female ensemble cast of smart opinionated working class women accorded with something of the current cultural mood. It is these women who are at the centre of the narrative, driving the action and constantly challenging the management personified by factory owner Mr Fenner. At the same time, the series offered, through these women’s frequent triumphs over authority and limiting middle-class convention, an implicit celebration of female, working-class strength and ingenuity. At the same time, The Rag Trade shared common ground with a popular film comedy of the period: I’m Alright Jack (1959). Naïve, well-meaning Oxford University graduate Stanley Windrush’s (Ian Carmichael) general ineptitude means he fails to secure a permanent job in industry. His unscrupulous uncle (Dennis Price) sets him up with a job in a local munitions factory, where Windrush’s enthusiastic suggestions as to how to improve workplace productivity end up causing an all-out strike. I’m Alright Jack picked up on contemporary unease about the perceived growing strength of the trade unions and satirised such developments, with Peter Sellers giving a memorable performance as militant shop steward Fred Kite. Comic comparisons can be drawn between Kite and The Rag Trade’s Paddy’s constant rallying of their workforce to take action against what they perceived as unreasonable management demands. The Rag Trade drew upon the working worlds that both Wolfe and Chesney knew from their own lives. In Writing Comedy: A Guide to Scriptwriting for TV, Radio, Film, and Stage, Wolfe wrote of The Rag Trade and its origins: The first sitcom that Chesney and I wrote was set in a dressmaking factory. The one reason for the success of the show -The Rag Trade- was that we really knew what we were writing about. The setting was authentic and realistic. Chesney at one time had a business share in a clothing factory, while I had worked on the bench in a factory making radio equipment. (Wolfe 94) Wolfe saw their experiences both as a fertile source for comedy writing and something that viewers would be able to connect with: “From my experiences there, I always thought there would be a good series about factory life” (Ibid 94), continuing that, “With our personal recollections we were never short of story lines for The Rag Trade. The secret of the show was not only we knew what we were writing about but many of our viewers worked in factories and could identify with the situations” (Ibid 94). The daily goings-on of the factory staff he and Chesney observed did indeed provide much of the raw material which formed the basis of both plots and comedy in The Rag Trade. Such goings-on involved every possible ruse to avoid work, or do as little as possible while you were there. Wolfe recalled that, “When work got a bit boring we’d creep into the toilets for a smoke and chat or sit in the cubicles for a quick read, do our football pools or have a little snooze” (Wolfe 96). Management’s response as he recalled it, and the workers’ reaction, is dramatised in encounters that he and Chesney wrote for The Rag Trade. Thus, “The management worried about our low production – tried to time the workers in and out of the toilets. The workers immediately called a lightning strike and there was even less production” (Wolfe 96). He also recalled other activities that took place when work should have been going on: “But life in the factory didn’t just consist of skiving; there was also pilfering, petty larceny and romantic assignations between the factory boys and girls which usually took place behind the factory during working hours of course”. All the events described found their way into the Rag Trade plots. Finally, Wolfe highlighted the type of disruptive real-life incidents which were to drive the highly physical comedy of The Rag Trade. He mentions pranks played with the hated time clock on which the workers had to clock in every day: “There were various ways of cheating the time clock. Sometimes we would squirt glue into the clock to slow it down; other times we would arrange for a couple of the lads to get in early and clock in the rest of us who staggered in later” (Wolfe 96). Also, “fiddling the clock was great fun especially on the night shift. We’d clock in at eight o’clock at night, sneak out go home, and come back at six a.m., creep in and pretend we had been working all night” (Wolfe 96). In episode three of series one the plot revolves around Fenner’s installation of a time clock to increase the women’s productivity. The Rag Trade and the Female Ensemble Cast What is particularly significant about The Rag Trade is that in contrast to the contemporary male-dominated domestic comedies which surrounded it such as Hancock and Steptoe, this series had a female ensemble cast, and moreover one located in the workplace.

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