British TV presenter Lorraine Kelly warns it has become 'almost impossible' for young people from working-class backgrounds to make it into TV like she did

This feels as prevalent as ever across the board. I’ve worked in telecom, healthcare and finance and it’s just a reality that family connections will always give you a leg up in life. I think for a while when companies started to claim to value ethics, this was frowned upon but there was a shift in recent years it feels (as evident by all the recent faces in Hollywood), that this was no longer something valued. As long as humans are human, I just don’t see it changing.

Tina Fey recently half-jokingly ribbed Bowen Yang for this on the latter’s podcast. Said that for people in the industry, opinions on other people in the industry and their work must be “quiet luxuries.”

You don’t get a pay raise but you get more opportunities to be corrupt.

Famous?

Love Jon Stewart, his interview with Andrew Sullivan on that show was pretty awful. The worst hosting he has ever done, and I generally considered him one of the better hosts as he would listen to people even if they didnt see eye to eye.

Resorting to personal attacks because you disagree with someone? Get that shit out of here.

Yeah, Rooney Mara always talks about intentionally tanking auditions when she didn't feel the material was up to her level. She said she was disappointed that she got a part in the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot because she really didn't want to do it.

She's said it often enough that you can tell she thinks it makes her come across as a true artist. The fact that she comes from a family of billionaires who own two NFL teams never seems to puncture her bubble of self-awareness.

Rich kids can try to become an actor, and if they fail they still have their fancy schooling, connections, and parents money to let them restart in a different career.

Yep, and it's this way for everything. It's how Spike Jonze got his start, and many (talented) people in many different fields. Versus most people who have to grab whatever 60-hour-a-week job they can find once they graduate from college, to start paying of their student loans and the insane rent.

That's true in academia as well. There's no money to be made in my humanities field, which is why I have a full-time job in engineering and can only dabble in my humanities field of interest. It's also why I won't likely bother with doctoral studies until I retire (or get laid off).

For those who come from old money—families of means with a financial backstop—pursuing education to the point of receiving a terminal degree isn't nearly as fraught with the worries of daily living. Quite often through their networks and connections they can have a charmed life as a full-time professor, attend academic conferences, and write books and journal articles to their heart's content.

At this point, my wife and I are hoping to get our adult children set up to live somewhat comfortably by ensuring they'll have paid-off homes to live in and some funds to maintain them after we croak.

The safety net is definitely there, but also just being able to mooch off your parents to work on yourself.

A rich kid aspiring actor can take time to work on their appearance or even get plastic surgery, they can take time to take classes to work on their craft, and since they have more time can focus on an audition much more then a kid from a working class family.

Not to mention less stress since they don't have to worry about making a living.

They can try over and over again too, without needing to worry about rent or bills or anything in the meantime. Some actor from a rich background who has a breakthrough role in say their early 30s has probably only worked sporadically up to that point - at a time of life when most people their age at that point have been working a full-time regular job for a decade.

There was an interview I read recently by an author being, for once, honest about this kind of situation and her advantages - excerpt:

I attended a packed reading (I’m talking 300+ people) about a year and a half ago. The author was very well-known, a magnificent nonfictionist who has, deservedly, won several big awards. He also happens to be the heir to a mammoth fortune. Mega-millions. In other words he’s a man who has never had to work one job, much less two. Yet, when an audience member — young, wide-eyed, clearly not clued in — rose to ask him how he’d managed to spend 10 years writing his current masterpiece — What had he done to sustain himself and his family during that time? — he told her in a serious tone that it had been tough but he’d written a number of magazine articles to get by. I heard a titter pass through the half of the audience that knew the truth. But the author, impassive, moved on and left this woman thinking he’d supported his Manhattan life for a decade with a handful of pieces in the Nation and Salon.

Example two. A reading in a different city, featuring a 30-ish woman whose debut novel had just appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The author had herself attended one of the big, East Coast prep schools, while her parents were busy growing their careers on the New York literary scene. These were people — her parents — who traded Christmas cards with William Maxwell and had the Styrons over for dinner. She, the author, was their only beloved child. After prep school, she’d earned two creative writing degrees (Iowa plus an Ivy). Her first book was being heralded by editors and reviewers all over the country, many of whom had watched her grow up. It was a phenomenon even before it hit bookshelves. She was an immediate star. When (again) an audience member, clearly an undergrad, rose to ask this glamorous writer to what she attributed her success, the woman paused, then said that she had worked very, very hard and she’d had some good training, but she thought in looking back it was her decision never to have children that had allowed her to become a true artist. If you have kids, she explained to the group of desperate nubile writers, you have to choose between them and your writing. Keep it pure. Don’t let yourself be distracted by a baby’s cry. I was dumbfounded. I wanted to leap to my feet and shout. “Hello? Alice Munro! Doris Lessing! Joan Didion!” Of course, there are thousands of other extraordinary writers who managed to produce art despite motherhood. But the essential point was that, the quality of her book notwithstanding, this author’s chief advantage had nothing to do with her reproductive decisions. It was about connections. Straight up. She’d had them since birth.

In my opinion, we do an enormous “let them eat cake” disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish and in some way succeed. I have a huge advantage over the writer who is living paycheck to paycheck, or lonely and isolated, or dealing with a medical condition, or working a full-time job. How can I be so sure? Because I used to be poor, overworked and overwhelmed. And I produced zero books during that time. Throughout my 20s, I was married to an addict who tried valiantly (but failed, over and over) to stay straight. We had three children, one with autism, and lived in poverty for a long, wretched time. In my 30s I divorced the man because it was the only way out of constant crisis. For the next 10 years, I worked two jobs and raised my three kids alone, without child support or the involvement of their dad. I published my first novel at 39, but only after a teaching stint where I met some influential writers and three months living with my parents while I completed the first draft. After turning in that manuscript, I landed a pretty cushy magazine editor’s job. A year later, I met my second husband. For the first time I had a true partner, someone I could rely on who was there in every way for me and our kids. Life got easier. I produced a nonfiction book, a second novel and about 30 essays within a relatively short time. Today, I am essentially “sponsored” by this very loving man who shows up at the end of the day, asks me how the writing went, pours me a glass of wine, then takes me out to eat. He accompanies me when I travel 500 miles to do a 75-minute reading, manages my finances, and never complains that my dark, heady little books have resulted in low advances and rather modest sales. I completed my third novel in eight months flat.

I am in that position now, just not with acting. Became an entrepreneur. Man, I've been so unhappy for so long. After working a bunch of shitty retail jobs after a lot of hardship - I worked hard, got a good job in IT and had coding experience. I was definitely on a good path. Fucking hated my life. I hate code, I hate offices, I hate the politics surrounding them, I hate being on call, I hate waking up and going to bed at the same fucking time, I hate not being able to wear whatever the fuck I want, I hate that I can't say fuck and shit and suck a cock to my coworkers when I want. I just can't be myself. I felt like a blue collar guy with white collar hobbies and skills.

I'm risking everything, I don't really give a shit. Doing manual labor working on these mobile homes I'm about to rent out has been satisfying as fuck. I'm broke as shit, going into serious debt. I have a mentor and a family/friends that are supportive even though they think I'm insane, which i probably am, but goddamn is the world depressing. I thought after going through so much with being near poverty, heroin addiction, no dad, shit mother etc that I'd just want a normal life. I do not in the slightest. I want to feel like I did something that made a difference, or that I can be proud of.

Yeah, and many artists from working class backgrounds have spoken about how they were able to come up through community theatre or music programmes, which have been pared back to almost nothing by 15ish years of austerity. Every child (every person) should have the opportunity to pursue creative outlets, but right now it’s only the playground of the rich, especially in the UK.

Harrow is advertising for a professional theatre director to spend a year working with their drama students and the production shots of their school plays are insane. Their school theatre is a fully-equipped black box studio with six permanent technical staff. That's more than a lot of actual theatres have.

Fees for headline shows can vary enormously for bands, even on the same tour. Playing a 200-capacity club in Newcastle may land you £600, while a 1,500 cap in London may net you £3,000.

Getting paid £2 per head is a fucking joke when you consider modern ticket prices (admittedly definitely smaller for lesser known bands). I was definitely aware that even moderately popular bands started with years of touring at a loss, but seeing the actual figures is kind of sobering for how crap the pay is.

They don't get them because of the education. They get them because of the connections. They get them cause they meet people in the school who work in the industry.

I would assume they do considering how many of their alumni are in the industry. This isn’t all that different from other industries either.

If a parent is paying a portion of rent

Some do a lot more than that. A pal of mine from drama school got a house as a graduation present. A two-storey house in a very nice bit of Zone 2, with three bedrooms so they could have their own room, a study, and a spare room to let out to cover the cost of utilities so that they'd never have to worry about earning money the way the rest of us do.

Not only that, high cost of living is the death of culture.

If you want good art, music, theater, etc. society needs Bohemians. People need to be able to choose to live cheap with low paying jobs to scrape by while perfecting their craft.

But when a crappy studio apartment costs $1600 a month (or $2800 in NYC, LA or SF), the next great playwright or songwriter or painter is stuck hustling all day just to make ends meet.

There was also the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which paid more than regular unemployment benefits and allowed people to continue to work (by the 1980's saying that you weren't looking for work whilst claiming unemployment benefits was a quick way to lose those benefits). Alan Davies (QI, Jonathan Creek) has talked about this in the past where he and a lot of other up and coming comedians at the time were essentially given a universal basic income for a year that allowed them to start their careers.

There was also much cheaper housing available. Whilst there wasn't a cap on rents, there was a cap on the money that housing benefits would pay which basically amounted to the same thing as landlords knew that if they wanted to rent to lower income people they couldn't charge more than the maximum that housing benefits would pay out.

In the UK they'd cut the benefits if you started to make it, this was a lot of reasons you had people calling themselves Captain Sensible, or Slade the Leveller, in order that their real names were not well known, allowing them to still sign on the dole... I remember Justin Sullivan (aka Slade the Leveller) talking about it years later...

Starving artist in NYC weren’t subsidized.

That Dean Koontz money is no joke!

Seems like a good time to get into music!