I stumbled across Conversations With a Working Man on YouTube. It stayed with me. I’ve been thinking about it while watching footage from protests outside migrant hotels in Essex, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire. Journalists turn up with cameras and clipboards, file quotes from angry locals, and move on. But they aren’t really having conversations. Not like this. It takes longer than ten minutes to understand the life of those protesting, and those being protested against. What are their wages? What’s their housing situation? What are their dreams and aspirations? What broke in their world, and when?
In June 1971, Granada’s World in Action aired a quiet revolution. It had no soundtrack, no pundits, no speeches from Downing Street. Just a working man named Jack Walker: 36 years old, a dye-house labourer in Keighley, West Yorkshire, who spoke plainly, unsentimentally, and with a clarity that now rings prophetic. The programme’s presenter, John Pilger, introduced Walker not as a hero or victim but as “the silent core of this country”. A man with no voice in the national conversation but who nevertheless paid most of the bills. “People whom politicians and many of us in the press and television now readily blame for this country’s economic problems.”
The idea. That you could build a documentary around one man’s life and treat it as a political event, feels almost absurd now, when TV has become either polemic-as-drama or voyeurism-as-entertainment. But Conversations With a Working Man never needed polemic. Its politics was in its structure: Jack is filmed getting up before dawn, waiting in the cold for the bus, tending machines that blast him with 120°C heat. “They have no idea what work’s gone into that two to three yards of cloth to make that suit,” he says, of the upper classes who “buy a soap” with no thought for the hands that dyed it. That single sentence compresses an entire world: alienated labour, the commodity fetish, and the unbridgeable distance between those who wear and those who make.
Walker’s speech is not polished (there are false starts, digressions, localisms) but it’s alive with insight. Asked what he wants for his daughter Beverley, he replies: “All I can hope for is that my daughter she’s a lot better than we’ve been … Probably the only way to keep her out [of the mills] is if she turns out to be a glamour girl and a fellow with a Jaguar comes along and she’s gone into the middle class.” It’s half a joke, but only half. Jack Walker doesn’t believe in social mobility; he believes in escape. Marriage to a man with a car, not education or class struggle, is the imagined exit. In 1971, that was hope.
The film moves slowly, allowing Walker to speak at length. We learn about his garden. He grows snapdragons, tomatoes, cabbages. “Gardening is more than a hobby … it’s a way of life.” It is, he says, a return to origins: “We weren’t used to all this, Mills, factories … I like to come back to the land.” In a single breath, Walker connects industrial labour, class trauma, and the alienation of the working body from its natural rhythms. His greenhouse becomes a metonym for a quieter, better life: one not structured by the clock, or by production quotas, or by a boss shaving 18p off your pay for being three minutes late. That 18p is mentioned three times. It’s a quiet obsession. A number that embodies humiliation.
Midway through the film, we learn about the 1963 Denby Dye Works lockout, where Walker and 250 others were fired for refusing to renounce their union membership. “The very next day, each man (the 250 of us) were sacked. We all got our cards and a letter to say we were sacked.” The bluntness still stings. Management didn’t break the union with violence; they did it with paper and protocol. A lesson not lost on successive generations of capital. In Walker’s account, the betrayal cuts across time: “I think it’s diabolical that any management in this country can turn round and say, ‘We don’t want a trade union movement at all,’ and you’re sacked.” His loyalty to the union is deeply felt. He speaks with the bitterness of someone who saw something sacred (solidarity) treated as disposable.
He hasn’t forgotten the strike-breakers, either. “If I saw one that were on fire in my garden, I wouldn’t pee on him.” The line isn’t metaphor. It’s affect. Loyalty, memory, betrayal—they sit side by side in working-class experience, where the smallest action can fracture a community for decades. Even now, there are “fellas [who] lives up the road that still working there.” They aren’t forgiven. To forgive would be to forget what was fought for.
There is no romance here. No sentimentality. Walker is not a “salt of the earth” figure. He is a class-conscious worker with a long memory, a sense of historical injustice, and a clear analysis of how the world works. Asked about the government’s new Industrial Relations Bill, he answers that it’s already obsolete. “We work in closed shops … and we don’t have the troubles.” The implication is clear: the law is not written for men like Jack Walker. It is written for their employers, to break what power still remains.
The fear of redundancy is never abstract. It haunts the conversations at the local working men’s club. One man says, “If a fella about 50, 55 … don’t say good morning to the gaffer t’ right way, he could be out.” There’s no protection from management whim. Another adds that at 50, there’s “no damn chance” of getting hired again. Too old. Washed up. One minute you’re running a machine, the next you’re scrap metal. Walker reflects bitterly: “You can go fight for your country at 40 … but at 45 you’re too old. At 50, you’re over the hill.” The state will arm you, exploit you, send you to war, but not employ you. The cruelty is systematic.
When Walker discusses pay (£20 a week, with deductions) he lays out the household accounts: rent, insurance, milk, bread, bus fares, cigarettes, food. “We’re back to square one again.” The figures sound distant, antique. But the cycle is familiar. By the time all is paid, there’s nothing left. Audreys’s wages help keep the household afloat. Without them, he says, there’d be little difference between his life and his father’s.
That’s one of the most devastating moments. Jack Walker works 82.5 hours a week between himself and his wife. He saves when he can. In three years, they’ve put aside £100 with the building society. “That’s my total,” he says. “That’s my assets.” It’s a brutal summation of working-class life in postwar Britain: decades of labour, nothing accumulated. Yet Walker wants to save £500 for Beverley, to give her a better start. He still believes in something better. Not for him (he’s given up on that) but for the next in line.
This quiet intergenerational yearning (to not bequeath your own immiseration) is at the heart of the film. It’s what makes the documentary political, not just observational. It’s also what separates Conversations With a Working Man from later representations of the working class, which so often veer into either patronising pity or moral condemnation. Jack Walker is neither a hero nor a chav. He is simply a man trying to live with dignity in a system designed to grind it out of him.
The closing scenes show Jack on holiday in Bridlington. “We stay at the back,” he says, describing what he calls the “bed and creck business.” He pays for the bed, brings the food, and the landlady cooks it. It’s a quiet ritual of managed austerity, domestic labour outsourced to a stranger in a coastal town so that, for two weeks, the family can pretend at ease. The luxury is not Majorca. It’s not even the Isle of Wight. It’s being cooked for, briefly. That’s the working-class dream here: rest as delegation. And even that costs ten pounds, plus groceries.
There’s a moment when he reveals that, thanks to price hikes, even £500 might not be enough by the time Beverley turns 21. But “to us, £500 is still £500.” It’s not a mistake. It’s a philosophy. Money, like time, isn’t just about value. It’s about sacrifice.
What strikes the viewer now (half a century on) is how little has changed. The factories may be gone. But the precariousness remains. Today’s Jack Walkers are Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse pickers, care home staff, Deliveroo riders. The uniform has changed, but the wage hasn’t. The fear of redundancy, the feeling of being voiceless, the desire for one’s children to escape, all remain.
Yet no broadcaster today would make Conversations With a Working Man. Not because the story isn’t there, but because the structure is no longer permitted. Contemporary television demands conflict, reaction, spectacle. Jack Walker offers none of these. He speaks with a slow-burning anger, an unshakable pride, and an absence of performance that now feels radical.
In 1971, World in Action offered the working class not just a platform but an honouring of their interior world. It gave shape to a politics that begins not with speeches, but with steam, routine, and the refusal to be made small. We would do well to listen again, not for nostalgia, but for instruction.
