Social Class

The Downton Abbey poster is clearly meant to look a lot more sophisticated than the Shameless one. The characters in this poster are obviously meant to be a lot higher class too, you get this from their attire and the fact Buckingham palace in the background. You'd usually associate anyone who lives in or around the palace to be of a high class.
Shameless on the other hand is meant to look a lot rougher, everyone in this poster looks A LOT lower class than the people on the Downton Abbey. This is due to the fact that everyone in the photo either looks like or is doing something unruly, a mixed race guy choking a white guy who's swearing back at him, two skanky looking girls arguing, what looks like everyones dad (someone who's meant to set an example) sitting in the middle of them all just smoking, need I say more.





Richard Butsch (1992) who says working class males in the media are presented as; "Incompetent and ineffectual, often a buffoon, well-intentioned but dumb. In almost all working-class series, the male is flawed, some more than others

Keith Gandal's, in 2007 he said that target audiences are drawn in by the; "Sentimental rags-to-riches story," 

classes B/C1 are represented as the; "Social norm" (Gandal, 2007)

Medhurst's 1998 theory; "They are awful because they are not like us,"


The first voice you hear in the extract is a a voice with a clear regional accent, so before he says anything of worth you already know that the video is going to have something to do with lower class citizens. This is due to the fact that regional accents are generally thought of as lower than someone wita received pronunciation accent and therefore you can instantly depict that this extract is not going to be to do with Kings, Queens and castles. It's not just the accent that gives this away but in terms of the mice-en-scene, the first few images you see are of huge, skanky apartment blocks and terraced houses which are generally owned by lower working class people who either earn minimum wage or live off of benefits. The camera angle for the terraced houses with the park in the middle is a birds eye, which gives us the opportunity to see a lot of the area, I believe it is to let us see how awful some of these places are, to feed us what the mainstream media see's as lower class.

When Frank (the man doing the voice over) is introducing each of his kids, it gives you an eye level close-up of the character he's introducing whilst he says it and it is clear from each child that this is a lower class family. This is due to the fact that the children don't look like a lawyer, doctor or anyone of a high class's children, they look like the kind of kids that you would in fact find roaming around grotty estates and this is solidified by the fact that at the end of the opening scene you find the entire community drinking, hanging around a burning car with two like a huge council apartments in the background. Even when the police turn up everyone seems unfazed, they find it funny which tells me that they do things like this quite often hence why this show is representing people like this in a negative light, like every lower class citizen is a trouble maker who sets cars on fire and runs away from police.