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Snobbery always leaves people unhappy.
When the director Richard Lester was labelled as the father of MTV, however, he responded by asking for a paternity test.
In 1968, the novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi was a thirteen-year-old student at an all-male comprehensive school on the border between London and Kent. It was here that he was told by his music teacher Mr Hogg that John Lennon and Paul McCartney did not write the Beatles’ songs. The whole set-up, apparently, was a con. All that wonderful music had to have been written by others, most likely the more cultured Brian Epstein and George Martin.
If it was the case that talent, imagination, commitment and even genius were evenly spread throughout the population, and that the only thing which was localised in the children of the wealthy was opportunity, then the implications were too shocking to contemplate. It would imply that rather than being run by the brightest and the best, as many in positions of power claimed, the country was run by a small gang who were statistically likely to be mediocre.
Even today a third of the UK is still owned by just 1,200 aristocrats and their families.
