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Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars

Series 1

Identity Crisis

Duration: 58 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC ScotlandLatest broadcast: on BBC Scotland

Available for 3 months

Far from his birthplace of Glasgow’s Pollok, Darren finds himself in the stately home of Lauriston Castle in Edinburgh. Beginning with a linguist examining Darren’s accent, this journey quickly spirals out into an authored examination of the impact of social class today and Darren’s own identity crisis.

Along the way, Darren tries his hand at Scotland’s ‘secret’ sport, cricket, meeting two diverse teams in Inverness who are doing what they can to remove the image of cucumber sandwiches He nearly comes to blows with a butler who tells him to get his hands out his pockets, and over a game of croquet, Darren begins to realise he has much in common with the upper classes.

Later he sits with a voice coach as she helps clients 'posh up' or even change their accents, before meeting some people from a 1950s cohort study in Aberdeen that is now being used to examine how people move between social classes.

Ending his tour with a researcher who has been examining marriage between the classes over the last 50 years, Darren begins to wonder if his own marriage might just have had unintended consequences. Show less

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