And there is another problem: if you define culture widely enough, then of course we are going to appear drenched in it. If you include football, or soaps, or (as the broadsheets obsessively do) comedy and the ever expanding roster of stand-ups, then yes, we are living with an embarrassment of riches, every day. But judged on this basis, we always have been—it's just that people didn't classify these things in the same way. When my grandmother laughed at Max Miller, or my mother religiously tuned in to Coronation Street, they didn't consider that they were taking part in a cultural act. Skateboarding requires skill but this doesn't make it a creative activity (although it certainly is to the more ingratiating of culture bureaucrats). Bragg's thesis might have worked much better if the series had been called Class and Leisure; but then the conclusion might have been that things had changed remarkably little.    

Class has not been redefined by culture. The industry I have spent much time working in, the broadcast media, used to be considered quite classless in a modern way, booming and expanding as it did after the 1960s. The dramatic halt in social mobility has put paid to that. Now most of the people I meet in the green room I can expect to be privately educated. The same is true of journalism, which used to be one of the traditional routes out of the provinces for bright young state-educated people. The professions have once again become the province of the public school-educated elite. And on a purely social level, there is less and less mixing between classes, although this is obscured by the superficial similarities of dress, speech and leisure pursuits. Class has not gone away, as Bragg himself agrees. But rather than its importance being diminished or changed by cultural activities, it is once again harshly defined by one's knowledge and one's prospects.