I am too busy to be blogging right now, but this morning I am in a particularly bad mood; nay, fury is bubbling in my brain, and must be safely vented before I can get any productive work done.

The cause for my anger is, unsurprisingly, the government's education policies. After the second national protests on 24th November, it seems that some sort of serious momentum is gathering against the cuts to higher education, the imposition of massive fees on students, and the scrapping of Educational Maintenance Allowance. However, with the news today that the government is to demolish Aimhigher, it is hard not to feel that we are trying to march up a slippery slope of inequality, tilted against the youngest and poorest members of society.

Aimhigher was set up by the Labour government - after their wrong-headed invention of tuition fees - to encourage aspiration among those who might not otherwise aim for a university education. It ran mentoring schemes which paired up university with A-level students; provided summer schools for children from local schools; top universities, previously guilty of elitism, ran schemes to allow youngsters from weaker educational backgrounds to apply to university with reduced grade requirements, provided they could demonstrate their potential by attending workshops.

As I blogged back in September, I had the privilege of working for one such scheme in my university. My university has an undoubted elitism problem. Situated in the northeast, which has some of the worst unemployment and poverty in the country, my university nevertheless takes around 50% of its students from independent schools (and up to 75% in my own subject of English). It is viewed as a bubble world by the local community, who believe that only those with London accents are allowed to break through its glass barriers and join in the quaint rituals of gowns and academic processions.

However, through the efforts of a small team of students and staff, supported by those at the top, things were changing. Funded by Aimhigher, the schemes in which I briefly participated had, over the past two years, really begun to make a difference. Those children I met on the scheme bowled me over with their raw enthusiasm and ability which, though that alone may still not have sufficed to give them the three As that are a common entry requirement of my university, would nevertheless have amply compensated for their less strong educational background were they still allowed to start their degrees.

Scrapping Aimhigher and the university schemes it funds, at a time when the popular understanding is that both rich and poor alike are going to have to stump up £30 000 to study at university, sends out entirely the wrong messages, and can only narrow rather than widen access. I can already hear the voices of privilege echoing ever louder in the corridors and tutorial rooms of my university over the coming years.

Compounding this is the government's cutting of Educational Maintenance Allowance for 16 to 18 year olds. The tabloid press and coalition spin doctors would have us believe that this £30 a week, given to those poorest students who opt to stay on in some form of further education or training, was being frittered away down the pub. However, my experience is very different.

My partner works for BTCV, an environmental charity which, among other things, provides training in practical conservation skills for this age group. In a scheme she ran last year, she took out eight lads who had dropped out of college, but who had volunteered to spend 25 hours a week working out in cold and soggy nature reserves, mending fences, laying paths, and layering hedges, serving both the community and their own skills in the process. For coalition millionaires, £30 a week might seem like loose change, so scrapping it won't make much of a difference. However, for lads like these, that £30 often provided a necessary support to help them buy food or pay for heating; without it, their parents would have demanded they return to the dole, where they could get more money on benefits.

However, more important than the money itself was the message it sent out, one that should have been music to the ears of Iain Duncan Smith: work pays. It may have been far below minimum wage, but for their 25 hours a week outdoors these lads received some form of recompense. They were in constant touch with careers advisers and (at least before the spending cuts hit) could see the sorts of jobs to which their training would give them access: council work, conservation work. These may be poorly paid, but are £15 000 a year better than benefits. I am not surprised that recent surveys suggest up to 60% of England's poorest students would drop out of education or training without EMA. Would you want to spend 7 hours a day up to your ankles in mud, mending fences without any kind of financial reward?

My recent blog posts on the Browne review show how concerned I am about the proposed rise in tuition fees. Yet my concern is tempered by my awareness that were I faced with them when I was a child, higher tuition fees would have had little effect on my life, only on my bank balance. Born in a middle class family, my dad came back from the library every weekend laden with books for me to read, before taxiing me off to my music lessons and drama clubs. I was supported every step of the way through my education, and there was never any doubt that the final one would lead to a good university. The prospect of £30 000 of debt might have caused a brief tut, as I strode through the oak doors of my traditional university, which had been held open from moment of my birth into the middle classes.

I am sad at the financial situation I would be facing had I the misfortune to be born a decade later. But my anger, my real fury, is reserved for the way in which the coalition has targeted those who have the misfortune to be born into the wrong sort of lifestyle: those who have the temerity to grow up in households where no one has previously been to university, which is seen as a privilege not a right; those who have the gall not to consider becoming bankers or lawyers, but to do practical, outdoor jobs. In their different ways, Aimhigher, and Educational Maintenance Allowance encouraged people to put the fluke of their birth behind them, and take the opportunities of training and development that the state could place there. To cut off these opportunities at the root is to destroy that fragile seed that ought to be nurtured to fruition in all young people: aspiration.

There are many interesting things one could say about Alan Bennett's thoroughly enjoyable play The Habit of Art. One that struck me most, however, was the way in which a faintly retrospective air hangs over the whole thing: looking at a stage set in a backstage rehearsal room, it is almost as if this play is a reflection on Bennett's career and the public perception of him as a dramatist.

This is, more than anything, a play about playing. It has a multi-layered quality, so that we see actors playing the part of actors, who are rehearsing for a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, who are in turn playing up to the personalities that the public expect them to possess: Auden the untidy, dishevelled but loquacious poet; Britten the inspiring conductor who is suffering from composer's block at the end of his career. This reflexive quality is exacerbated by the touring production which I saw. Firstly, performed in Newcastle's Theatre Royal, there is an ironic edge to the fact that the rehearsal is supposedly for a play for the National Theatre; this makes us think about the way in which theatres themselves impose expectations on actors, the audience of the National expecting to see only big name stars and intelligent productions, both aspects of which are somewhat lacking in the play within The Habit of Art. Secondly, Desmond Barrit plays Auden in the touring production, but he is highly conscious of Richard Griffith's inhabiting of that role in the original National Theatre one; thus Barrit plays as Griffiths playing as Fitz, the actor who plays Auden.

All these metadramatic elements frame one of the key themes of the play, the question of who owns a role: is it the playwright, is it the actor, or is it the character he or she is playing? Fitz objects to the depiction of Auden as being more concerned with the ideals of the body - bluntly, oral gay sex - than with those of the mind and the language. Contrary to Fitz's protestations, the writer of the play insists that the corporeal, sexualised Auden is validated by his letters, though it is hard to ignore the fact that the writer himself might have been mislead by his reliance on another artificial rehearsal of Auden's life, in the form of Humphrey Carpenter's biography of him (Carpenter too forms part of the play, though the actor playing him objects to his mere bit-part chorus role).

It is within these contexts, then, that we can start to see the play as a reflection on Bennett himself, and the way in which as an established (and establishment) playwright, Bennett too may seem to play a role, and that rather than writing about and influencing public life, Bennett is increasingly conditioned by that same public's perceptions of him. Although unlike in Bennet's earlier plays about the process of drama, such as The Lady in the Van, Bennet himself does not make an appearance, the characters of slovenly Auden and neat and tidy Britten are his analogues.

Quick-witted but camp, gay but faintly melancholic, the late Britten and Auden are surrounded by a faded mythology. Britten made his name as an avant-garde composer, but his place at the leading edge has been assumed by Tippet (and we are conscious that Britten today is a staple of that most populist of musical variety shows, the Last Night of the Proms). In the 1940s Auden emigrated New York in search of artistic freedom, and to escape the War, and has returned to Britain full of tales of the sexual freedom and poetic acclaim he had found in the United States, only to be seemingly half-disappointed that Britain in the meantime has become a sexually tolerant place, whilst his poetry is at best respected (by the BBC, no less) rather than greeted with ovations. Auden hates his own poetry being quoted back at him, which adds another layer to the dramatic role-playing: Barrit plays as Griffiths playing as Fitz, who plays a poet struggling to avoid inhabiting the role that he once defined, and that now defines him. Living in the cosy semi-retirement offered by Christ Church, Oxford, both Auden and Britten want to recuperate the controversy that attached itself to their earlier gay personas and artistic avant-gardism, and to avoid donning that dressing gown for the evening of their lives which has two damning words sewn into it: National Treasure.

Bennett himself, soft-spoken Northerner, mildly camp but not self-congratulatorily homosexual, possessing the dubious and simple virtue of having been around for a long time, is often talked of in just such terms. As Michael Billington complained, they make him "sound like a theatrical Queen Mum radiating beneficence over a grateful populace." However, this satirical observer of the foibles of national life deserves more than to be treated as the doyenne of the W.I. In another light, the self-reflexivity that many of his plays exhibit, none more so than this one, might a few decades ago have been seen as sharply postmodernist; as a realist writer true to the ironies of common conversation, he is unsurpassed.


The Habit of Art, then, is something of a paradox. This play could be seen as dominated by the anxiety of his own influence, about the formulaic repetition of old parts, stale dramas, hackneyed writing. Yet it also, paradoxically, must rank among Bennett's finest, for whilst this is a play about the habits of art, it also kicks against the habits of a lifetime in an ironic, self-conscious way that is poignant, metadramatic rather than melodramatic.

I have returned to preparing Huckleberry Finn and (helped mainly by Stephen Railton's outstanding resource, Mark Twain in His Times) have been thinking about its use of the tradition of minstrel shows. Minstrel shows were variety acts, featuring light song and comic performances, by white actors made-up in black face (more on that in a moment).

In Huckleberry Finn, Railton convincingly argues that Twain introduced aspects of the minstrel tradition, most evidently in the "King Sollermun" exchange between Huck and Jim, where Huck becomes frustrated at Jim's inability to understand the Biblical parable. Here, Twain clearly evokes - but alters - the format of the comic skit common in minstrelry, in which an educated "interlocutor" demonstrates the idiocy of a black fall guy. Often, this would entail the black fool missing the point of a common joke (see this example of the skit "Bones in Love"), and thus becoming someone we laugh at rather than with.

In Huckleberry Finn, Twain plays with this archetype. Here, Jim and Huck argue about the significance of the story of King Solomon, who was prepared to chop a child in half in order to determine his true mother. Their rapid fire exchanges evoke a minstrel skit, with Huck assuming the role of the educated interlocutor, and Jim the idiot who cannot understand the obvious point of the story. For Huck, the moral of the story - taught to him by Miss Watson - is that King Solomon was a wise man; he finds it both humorous and frustrating that Jim does not see this. For Jim, though, the "real pint is down furder":

You take a man dat's got on'y one or two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o' chillen? No, he ain't; he can't 'ford it. He know how to value 'em. But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A chile er two, mo' er less, warn't no consekens to Sollermun, dad fatch him!"

Whilst an ordinary man would value his own child, a man who has "five million chillen" would not be so troubled by the death of one. The thoughtful reader can see that for Jim, the allegory, derived from his experience as a slave, is that a slave owner with many metaphorical "children" would not put a price on the head of a mere negro. This is reinforced later in the novel, when Aunt Sally asks whether anyone was killed in the steamboat accident, and Huck replies, "no mum, just killed a nigger."

There is a really complex racial politics at work here, as a familiar Biblical parable seems to encode a very different moral depending on whether one looks at it from the point of view of a black or white man. The two ways in which Solomon can be interpreted therefore make it uncomfortably different to the way a minstrel show was viewed, which directed the gaze of the audience to see themselves as unambiguously superior to the black performers. 

In a minstrel performance, a black man is shown to miss the point of a well-known story or joke in a comic way. In itself, this would suggest the idiocy of the black race. However, exacerbating this, all the parts were actually played by white actors, wearing black make-up. Thus the comic skits reinscribed racial differences for the white audience in a more extended way: the white man in black face can wipe off his make-up and return to being a white man, whereas by implication the true black man remains black and – according to the evidence of the performance – stupid and ignorant, defined by his racial otherness rather than able to transcend it. Whilst the white man playing the black role can return to his white origins after the show, true blacks always retain the stupidity and inferiority which the white actor has only fleetingly and self-consciously demonstrated.

With no such visible indicators of skin in the novel genre, Twain employs the minstrel spat in order to confound our expectations. Whilst initially readers familiar with the Solomon story will assume that this exchange likewise shows up the clever and educated Huck versus stupid, black Jim, in fact we realise that it is Huck, not Jim, who has missed the point of the story when the context of slavery is taken into account. The roles they play in the spat are not defined by the colour of their skin - which is invisible in the textual form - but rather by the way their colour has determined their lives and experiences: slavery in Jim's case, some sort of education in Huck's. 

Here, then, is evidence of Twain's humanitarian agenda. As a child, Twain had seen his father trade in slaves, and became an advocate of the anti-abolitionist cause. In Huckleberry Finn, as the example above shows, Twain exposes the hypocrisy of white superiority founded on Christian values. However, herein lies a rub.

As one of the great literary personalities of his era, Twain - like his contemporary Dickens in England - was a showman as well as an author. He took his novels on tour, lecturing and reading to large crowds in popular performances. As the image to the right shows, he often headlined evening shows that also featured minstrel acts. Far from being uncomfortable at accompanying the sort of performance he so carefully adapts in Huckleberry Finn, Twain loved minstrelry, describing it as "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show," "the show which to me had no peer," "a thoroughly delightful thing." Indeed, Railton explains that this "King Sollermun" episode was actually performed as a stand-alone act on a bill that also encompassed minstrelry.

It is hard to reconcile the two aspects to Twain. How can a man who so consciously manipulated the minstrel tradition in order to show how racial categories defied simple stereotypes have delighted in a show designed precisely to reinforce racial differences? 

In trying to come up with an answer to a question I envisage being asked by a bright student, I alight upon the X Factor by way of analogy. It seems to me that this "light entertainment" occupies a similar position to minstrelry in nineteenth-century culture. Both are formulaic and rely on our recognition of "actors" temporarily inhabiting stereotypes. 

In the case of the minstrel show, it was the stupid black man who unselfconsciously fails to get the point of a common joke, thereby making him the butt of another one; rather than laughing at the joke itself, minstrel viewers laughed at the stupid black man who could not understand it. In the case of the talent contest, we watch the early auditions with a sense of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the failure of singers to live up to the talent they believe they possess. Rather than entertaining us with their singing per se, it is their lack of ability that is amusing; the contestants' failure to recognise their own lack is the source of the entertainment here. 

Yet just as the minstrel audience ignored the complex racial issues behind their shows, we fail to reflect on the class politics that underlie such a performance. Most of the contestants on talent shows like X Factor are working class. It says something starkly depressing about modern society that for many working class kids it is celebrity rather than education or graft that is perceived as the way to raise their social and economic status. According to surveys, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, most children today say "sportsman," "pop star" or "actor." Celebrity has become a means to an end, rather than the end itself, in a society where hard, professional work may not be fairly rewarded with good pay or broad respect.

When we watch X Factor, then, we are really watching people with often low aspirations and underemployment, prospects from which five seconds of television fame seems to offer an escape. When we mockingly commiserate their failure to perform with any real talent, we also celebrate our apparently superior status as viewers who do not need to reduce ourselves to playing their role. Through rapid cuts and editing, each contestant has a limited space to demonstrate their talent - or lack of it - and this imposes a sense of transience that allows the viewer to feel superior to those on display. The ad break is to X Factor what make-up was to the minstrel. By seeing those performances of lower class or inferior races as being temporary, we are reasserting the permanence of our superiority.

My point here, then, is partly to show just how effectively light entertainment by definition does not encourage us to reflect on the complex conditions (racial or class hierarchies) on which it often depends; even an author like Twain, so conscious of race in his writing, celebrated the populist minstrel show. We only ever see the stereotypes light entertainment presents as being conventions of the stage, without reflecting what in reality those stereotypes reflect. In both cases, the crucial aspect is the temporary nature of the performance. In the case of minstrelry, once we think carefully about it, the use of blackface make-up seems ultimately to reinforce racial differences, because it implies that the true black man could not pass for white in the reverse direction; however, in the moment of performance, even for a sympathetic viewer like Twain it may also seem paradoxically less racist, because the actor is white not genuinely black, and it is a white clown, not a genuinely black individual, who is the target of laughter. Similarly, the editing style of a TV talent show aims to give contestants five minutes of fame, and no more. Being de-individuated, as just one contestant among a constantly changing stream of them, we can safely laugh at them without worrying about the class values that ultimately unite them. Because the actor in the minstrel show is white, not genuinely black, whilst the performer on the talent show is never allowed to reveal too much about their actual background and (lack of) aspirations, we see only the show as a role-play of stereotypes, not as presenting the actual people (black, lower class) who are being stereotyped.