Potter deliberately used TV’s mass reach to make class embarrassment a two-sided confrontation

Evidence

With Stand Up, Nigel Barton I knew that in small family groupings — that is, at their most vulnerable — both coalminers and Oxford dons would probably see the play. This could add enormously to the potency of a story which attempted to use the specially English embarrassment about class in a deliberately embarrassing series of confrontations. In the theatre — or, at least, in the West End — the audience would have been largely only on one side of this particular fence. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 336

Categorization

• XREF: The rhetorical strategy of forcing both sides of a divide to witness each other recalls Brechtian alienation and the chapter’s earlier notes on expressionistic frame-breaking.