How to beat Tim Nice-But-Dim – and smash his glass floor
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Version 0 of 1. The phrase “glass floor” is relatively new. The phenomenon isn’t. It evokes a memory from years ago. I submitted a TV pitch to an independent production company. When I went in for a meeting, they circulated copies of the pitch that had been expanded and revised. Aside from the fact that the argument of the piece had been obliterated, the spelling of the location (Bournville) had been changed throughout, which was annoying as I do know how to spell the name of my home town. I suggested, politely, that we might be more likely to sell the programme if it were clear that we could spell the place where it was set. The woman in charge of the meeting blew her stack. “The girl who did that is an intern, she’s working for free,” she snarled. Might payment yield a candidate who could spell a word written on bars of chocolate in every newsagent in the country, I asked her – and took the pitch elsewhere. Television is a hugely desirable industry to work in, but the barriers to entry are considerable. Unpaid internships have been commonplace for years, which limits the pool not to the best and brightest, but to those who can afford to work unpaid in central London for months at a time. The meek don’t inherit this earth. Rich parents count for a lot. And now we have figures to prove it. New findings from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission reveal that less academically able children from richer families are 35% more likely to become high earners than their brainy but broke peers. We’ve tried to block the enduringly upward trajectory of Tim Nice-But-Dim. Largely we have failed. That failure is explicable. One of the primary forces driving on parents is the desire to see their children succeed. And you would be a shoddy parent indeed if you had no problem with your child slaving for the minimum wage when you could help them achieve something more remunerative. Related: Social mobility barely exists. So don’t expect it to solve inequality | Gregory Clark The trouble is, there aren’t limitless supplies of great, well-paid jobs; and there aren’t many industries where parental connections cannot help in some way. But I worked in one of them. And one of the reasons I loved being a stand-up comedian was its egalitarian nature. No education, no wealth and no parents pulling strings can force an audience to find you funny. Audiences don’t care where you came from, unless you’re telling them a joke about it. But stand-up is not for everybody. We needn’t bother asking how we can stop privileged parents passing privilege on to their offspring. That almost defies intervention. The question we might more usefully ask is: can people without family connections and wealth make it into higher-earning industries if they want to? There are many practical measures we could take, not least the end of those unpaid internships that separate the rich from the poor at the very beginning of their working lives. But there is also a question of ambition. I visit a lot of schools each year, sometimes to talk about classics, and sometimes to talk about broader careers stuff: I was a comedian, I am a writer and broadcaster, and I’ve had to run my own business to get to here. I have spoken to a lot of students about all of these things. I charge the private schools, and visit the state ones for free: a small redistributive act (to which most private schools happily agree). The difference between the students I meet at private and state schools isn’t just in their confidence levels, it’s in their outlook. When I go to a state school, especially outside London, the sixth-formers have realistic – perhaps fatalistic – expectations. They know they’ll need to earn money straightaway, thus they question what kind of a living they could make as, say, a writer. Teachers will often say, this is the first time pupils have met anyone from a creative industry. That matters. Tim Nice-But-Dim may seem annoyingly indestructible, but by expanding the horizons of others, we can undermine him. |