The cleaner who won an Oscar

Wasn’t there something about the media coverage of her award?   I remember now. Alongside coverage of her heart-warming acceptance speech  - just what we needed as austerity was really biting hard at home  - UK news headlines repeated a little known fact about Olivia, (now that I’ve binged the third series of The Crown I get to call her by her first name) – she once worked as a cleaner.  The Daily Mail described Coleman as a ‘penniless cleaner’, who, as The Express had it ‘conquered Hollywood’ through hard work and tenacity. Actually, she once worked as a secretary too, but ‘cleaner’ offers more in the way of humble origins for a ‘rags-to-riches story’ that The Mirror and other press celebrated at the time.

What happens to these rags-to-riches stories when social mobility stalls?  This is an important question, because in recent years, social mobility has pretty much halted and wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Research shows that in the past 30 years many people’s economic status has stagnated or fallen. Yet, the wealthy have seen gains: we know now that the top 10% of households take home 25% of all earnings and own more than half of all wealth.  The concentration of wealth into the hands of the few has required new ways to describe them: ‘rich’ doesn’t cut it, ‘billionaires’ gets close, but the best term so far is the ‘Super Rich’.  At the other extreme ‘Food bank’ is also a newly commonplace term. The Trussell Trust Food Bank provided 1.6 million people with emergency food last year and has already seen an 89% increase in demand over the Lockdown period.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation remind us that high levels of social mobility rely on low levels of poverty: as wealth becomes unequally distributed so too are the resources, opportunities and networks that are needed for talent to shine.

Lockdown offers chance to take a critical breath: to reach behind the headlines to ask more critical questions. This is more than fact checking – yes Olivia was a cleaner – it is more thinking about the myths that shape our cultures and lives.  As lockdown eases and we move into a ‘new normal’ it has never been as important to flex our critical muscle, to put our academic skills to work, to question and to wonder.  If we want a better ‘normal’ one of the first steps is fighting against a likely continuation of funding cuts to the arts, drama and cultural industries:  we need to protect the resources to secure a wider access to opportunity.