Katie Beswick, "Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture" (Routledge, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Welcome to New Books and Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Katie Beswick about slags on stage, class, sex, art and desire in British culture. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

As well as having an absolutely cracking title, which I assume instantly is going to sell the book. This is a kind of fascinating combination, really, of, I guess, like theatre studies, kind of like cultural studies. There's a bit of sociology in there. Yeah, it's this really kind of interesting mix, really, of different academic perspectives. And I'm fascinated, I guess, about...

about where your kind of interest in writing the book came from? What sort of inspired the book? Yes. So, I mean, the book, the name of the book, Slags on Stage, it just literally entered my head. I tell this story actually in the introduction to the book, but I was at an academic conference and I was wearing probably a little bit of a, I was a bit younger than I am now, a bit of a revealing outfit. I had like a low cut dress with a slit in the skirt and

And while I was talking to a colleague, the colleague kind of looked me up and down in this way that had this charge to it. And I immediately, the word that entered my head was slag. And then I went away and it was a theatre studies conference. And I was thinking about this word and I thought slags on stage. I thought that's a really good title for a book. Maybe I'll write that book. And then that kind of, you know, that project, you know, became this project, became thinking about slags.

the kind of cult, you know, the cultural charge of this word and its meanings. What does it mean? Because one thing, like it's sort of slightly a strange question for, you know, the kind of like, can I have a dictionary definition? And obviously like as academic teachers, we're like never open with, you know,

the Oxford Dictionary defines as a way of starting a book. But I think actually partially, you know, for maybe listeners outside of the UK that might not have heard the term, but also I think defining the term gives us a clue actually to that intersection of class, sex, art and desire too. So yeah, what actually is the definition of slack? Right. So

The meaning I'm interested in exploring, the meaning I explore in the book is the meaning which applies to the sexual reputation of women. So in that sense, the definition of slag would be, you know, something like a woman who is sexually excessive and also gross. So I've got a bit to say about this, right? So the term slag

is bound up with this kind of pervasive idea that a woman in control of her sexual desire is gross or somehow shameful. You know, it was at one point in time applied to prostitutes. But, you know, the word slag, right, has many insult words, also has a lot of other meanings. So it's a verb, you know, that means to insult generally. You know, you slag someone off. It's a noun, it's an insult, but that can also

can also be applied in a joking way. So you can sort of call someone a slag jokingly in the gendered, you know, excessive sense. Um, but you can also, you know, call anybody a slag to mean like kind of a rough person or a scoundrel. That's a kind of a meaning not so dominant, but you know, you can still use it that way. Um,

But I would say that the sexist meaning of the insult is its prevalent meaning in England specifically and Britain more generally. The word slag actually comes from industrial processes. So the product left over after metal is separated from its ore is called slag.

Slag is also associated with mining, right? So we call slag heaps. So in Britain, there are these kind of hillocks in former industrial towns that are made up of the worthless, economically worthless refuse from mining, slag heaps. But what is in them is not actually slag. So slag is, when it comes off of the ore, that does have some economic value. The stuff in slag heaps is known as spoil heaps.

Anyway, I thought that was really interesting because this term slag then comes to denote a woman's spoiled reputation. So in the book, the case I make, the case I make is that in the late 20th century, the

Slaggers and insult towards women became kind of solidified as a key word in the culture. So Raymond Williams uses this term keywords to talk about words that become really kind of important in the culture at a certain point in time and help us kind of locate ourselves within the discourse of a particular cultural moment. So in Britain, in the late 20th century, this kind of slaggers and insults towards women became

Becomes this kind of key word right around the same time that the British working class are being devalued as part of the wider ideological project of neoliberalism. And also at the same time that the women's movements making headway in proving rights for female people.

And I think that's quite an interesting moment for this word to have all this particular charge and kind of cultural prominence. So my argument that I make is that slag is a key word in 20th century culture and that it reflects both the change in class dynamics and the change in sex-based rights that are happening at a particular moment in history. And yeah, so this is word issues to kind of control and coerce women, particularly

particularly working class women, but really importantly, it's also a word that women use themselves. They use it towards other women as a joke or an insult towards themselves, but also it's a way of kind of, it's a way of, I guess, with language, using language,

with language to describe these new roles that are emerging through these kind of shifts that are happening in culture in the late 20th century. I mean, the other thing in the title is the onstage bit and I

I guess as much as you've outlined, I suppose, the kind of social history of the keyword, there's also an element of the book as theatre studies, as a study of visual arts, a study of poetry. And I wonder if you could say a bit about, I guess, it's kind of the cultural analysis elements of the book.

Yeah, so the onstage bit of the title, the onstage bit of the title, you know, as I say, it came, you know, it all came as a package to me in my mind, this idea of onstage. And I guess I imagined it would literally be about a certain point in time. I thought this is literally going to be a book about depictions of characters who are kind of slag archetypes, right, in traditional plays on stage. But then as I worked on the project, you know, that was not the direction the work took.

you know, I became a lot more interested in the origins of the word, in its cultural power, in, you know, how women artists have themselves taken up the term slag, used it as a kind of stimulus for artworks. So I do look at...

at performance works as i do analyze performance works as a point of cultural analysis you know i also analyze kind of other cultural objects at different points in the book as well television and visual artworks but that's only part of the project you know because in the end this on stage for me became a metaphor for the way that slag comes becomes like an interpolation so

What I mean by that is, you know, if you're called a slag, you become visible in a particular way in an exchange. You know, you call a woman a slag as an insult and you're placing her in a wider public sphere, I think, for consumption, for judgment. So, yeah, that sort of became the way I thought about on stage, you know, as the book progressed as a kind of metaphor for what the word is doing. I guess the other elements of...

On stage is the way the text kind of blends, not just, you know, the visual arts, theatre, telly, social history, but actually there's kind of, you know, elements of poetry, creative writing. And I guess that's another element of the idea of on stage. And I'm kind of intrigued to know a bit about, you know, you said the book evolved in a variety of different directions and where I guess that kind of elements of your own performance kind of came into the book.

Yeah, okay. So the book isn't very long yet. It's about 70,000 words, maybe not even that long. Right. Took me years to write, really long time to write it. And I found as I was working on the project, I was, you know, I was reading about the history of 20th century. I was reading about feminism through this period. I was reflecting on my own experience of being called a slag. I was reading critical theory. I was engaging with other women's stories through different methods that I might talk about in a bit. But yeah, I was watching books.

you know, theatre and television that uses this word. And I found, right, that I had this really personal, very emotional response to the material I was working with and studying. Really kind of found a lot of what I was looking at quite upsetting.

Yeah. And at the same time, I became really frustrated, you know, with academic writing in general. And as I say on a book about critical theory, right. But but particularly critical theoretical writing about art and performance in particular became to me really frustrating. And I.

Felt that like I was engaging with these artworks that were so deeply feeling for that were kind of speaking to me on this embodied level. And yet, you know, I've been trained in this tradition where writing has to be at this critical distance for reasons of objectivity, of rigor. And I just couldn't find my way into the project through those like academic methods. And I started to feel like that this imperative we have to hang out like intellectual exploration and,

on this body of really narrow theory in some ways, this body of, you know, very specific, you know, we could all name them critical theorists and thinkers from a white European philosophical school. Yet to evidence, the rigor of my work was really suffocating me. And I was responding, you know, in this really emotional way to these artworks I engage with.

Having memories, you know, I had all these memories of my adolescence and the knowledge I had about things that happened to me that didn't exist on the level of theory. They were in my body. And so I was working on the book or not really working on it because I had lots of times I wasn't working on the book when I was supposed to be. And what I was doing, I was writing a lot of poetry, you know, not as part of the project, but poetry just to kind of grapple with the emotions and experiences that the research was bringing up. And as I was doing, like I was doing all this creative writing and

I've always written creatively anyway, but at this point, I thought I'm going to take this creative writing really seriously. It felt really important. And I wanted the poems I was working on to be good poems. So I wrote a lot of poems while I was, hundreds of poems while I was doing this project. And I started wanting the poems I felt had potential to be good. So I began to take classes with professional poets, like masterclasses. I did poetry.

I did quite a long advanced course with Faber Academy. I've done lots of courses with the poetry school. I started publishing my poems. I published a book of poems. I've got editorial feedback, you know, all of that. So at a certain point, you know, the poems took over and then I kind of thought, oh, like the poems are part of the project, you know, and,

And the book became, you know, in part, as well as a lot of other things, it became about an experiment of like, how can we hang on to the aspects of academic writing that I think are really important? You know, the analysis, the

of artworks the cultural history the commitment to new knowledge production um the commitment to accuracy you know all of that how can we hang on to that but also what are the creative methods i could use to get some of these aspects of the material that cannot be reduced to critical theory into the book which i think it needs to happen so i just you know before i finish i'm going to say you know i'm not the first person to do that you know there's pretty famous examples of

Creative critical writing, Maggie Nelson, Adrian Rich, and Val Hooks, Karen Steeman, you know, there's, I haven't invented this, right. But for me, there was something quite fresh as a writer who's been schooled in a particular way around academic writing and dissemination. It was something really refreshing for me in like finding this method for myself for presenting the embodied lived aspects of the work alongside the critical work. It felt like really essential for me to do that.

The kind of, as you talked about, the sort of personal embodied elements and then that sort of social history of both the concept of slag, but also kind of more generally the kind of social political context can sound, I guess, like sort of a tiny bit abstract, right?

But one way to kind of bring this all to life is probably to think about this question of what are some of the kind of popular cultural representations. And kind of in the middle of the book, you get into examples from like television. I don't know what you call a viz, like a kind of popular comic or an adult comic. It's a satirical, parodic adult magazine, isn't it? That's the lovely set of euphemisms for the viz. Yeah.

But yeah, I think bringing the idea to life would be great, actually. And obviously EastEnders, for people that don't know it, is a soap opera set in... I mean, it's less of a fantasy version of East London than it used to be. It's kind of slightly more...

sort of accurate for East London, but even now it's a pretty kind of loose version of real life East London. And kind of particular characters in that show stand out as kind of the archetypes lags, I guess. And how are they sort of represented and what are the battles over their representation to?

Yeah, okay. So, yeah. So one of the examples I use in the book, you know, when I talk about soap opera slags is Cat Slater. So Cat Slater is a popular character in this long running BBC soap opera, EastEnders. Yeah, there's this widely, so there's a widely circulated meme where Cat Slater refers to herself as a slag.

Now that meme comes from an episode, which is part of a very long running storyline, a storyline that ran over 15 years, I think, about the child sexual abuse of Kat Slater by her uncle and the kind of long-term consequences of that for this character. So although Kat Slater is a caricature, there is some nuance there. I think some acknowledgement of the wider cultural meaning of this term slag and all its complexity is,

So Cat Slater is one example of this soap opera archetype. You know, I think I name others from EastEnders, like Bianca from EastEnders, I would say, is probably another example. Points in the representation, Stacey Slater, who is Cat Slater's cousin, I think. Anyway, but what's interesting is that the slag archetype is the most, among the most popular of the female characters in soap operas are ones I would say fall under this slag archetype.

They are excessive, brash, confrontational, leery, excessive. They have affairs. You know, they're all so vulnerable, tough. They're all these contradictions. And soap opera viewers are right. They're overwhelmingly women.

And women, therefore, you know, seem to find pleasure in and identification, I guess, to some extent, whether that is like real identification or just like a sense of pleasure in the excess of these female characters. And I think that that's kind of really interesting in thinking about slag as a site of pleasure rather than one of own and desire rather than one of only denigration or oppression. Yeah.

And then when we look at something like Viz, okay, so Viz magazine, so Viz magazine, the predominant readership is probably important to say is men. A large proportion of the readership, certainly in the late 20th century was men. So Viz magazine is this kind of, it's a satirical magazine, but it's kind of satire without politics. So it satirizes popular culture really. And the fat slags,

are a regular feature in Viz magazine. The fat slags, I look at this in the book, they've been very popular. So they've kind of spilled out of the magazine. There was a stopmation animation made about them. There were lots of like annuals. There were calendars. There was a cover, a hit single cover of, I think it was Summer Holiday. They did a Lucas Aid advert. You know, there was a point in the late 90s, early 2000s when fat slags were

in Britain were kind of part of the kind of popular cultural landscape. But when you look at the fat slags, I think the difference between that and the soap opera slag is that the fat slags are constructed within what I would say is the male gaze. So the only way that you can really understand them is kind of as to be laughed at. They're kind of these vile working class, clarsh, ass, laddish, shameless women who,

And, you know, part of that is them being fat as well. So that's part of the excess. So, you know, fat culturally is excessive. It's disgusting. It's out of control body and all that. So, you know, it's not really a surprise to me. I don't think that what I call like the male gaze slag emerges from, you know, a magazine aimed at men. And there's quite a long example in theatre particularly. There's quite a lot of examples as well that I look at in the book of men

There's a trope in popular, what I would call mainstream theatre, so plays staged at fairly reputable, well-known London theatres or regional theatres in the last 30 years or so where male playwrights use the figure of the slag either explicitly. So David Hare's got a play called Slag. Jim Cartwright had one called I Licked a Slag's Deodorant or implicitly.

Gary Irwin's got a play called, I think you pronounce it, Ephigenia in Splot, a play on the Greek myth anyway, that has this kind of character that I would say has slaggish qualities. And I would say that these are kind of really quite reductive representations of working-class women. They take the idea of the slag and they run with it quite uncritically. But then you have also people like Andrea Dunbar, who is a working-class British playwright,

who died very young, sadly, but she had a play called Rita Sue and Bob Too, which was made into a film that was a big hit. And in fact, that film is an example, right, of how the female perspective gets distorted by the male gaze. So the film was directed by a man. In fact, the play was also directed by a man, but Andrea Dunbar was a lot more involved in the play staging process.

The film was directed by a man and the final scene of the film is the two teenagers, Rita and Sue. Throughout the film, they've been sexually exploited. They've been having a relationship with the man whose children they're babysitting, Bob. And at the end of the film, they end up back in bed with him and it's all a big laugh.

um and apparently you know according to Adele Stripe who's written about Andrea Dunbar quite a lot you know Andrea was quite upset about that um ending because in the ending of her play you know it's much more sad and you know one of the girls is shacked up with Bob as a teenage mother the other isn't um you know Sue isn't it Sue bumps into um her mother and um

Bob's ex-wife in the pub and they kind of talk about like, like the effect that masculinity has on them. And they reflect on, you know, Bob's kind of power as a man in that exchange. And it's, you know, much more complex. And I would say that that, that complexity, you know, is born of an experience, which, you know, men tend not to see, or they tend not to anyway, delivering in their kind of cultural representations of what's going on, um,

Yeah. So those are some of the examples I use. I don't know if that brings this to life enough for you.

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The land has been thrown into disorder. Are you feeling a touch lost right now? Like global institutions don't work and politicians aren't collaborating to solve the world's most pressing issues? There is this big space of disorder and we're just kind of holding up our hands and going, well, don't know what we could do. Then the Disorder Podcast is the right place for you. My name is Jason Pack.

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I mean, you've set up loads of questions that come really in the kind of second half of the book where you do these kind of deep dives into some key artists, Tracey Emin, Kelly Green, Cash Carraway, Nicola Cole and Irini Kotz. Thank you. I can't read my own writing there.

I'm wondering if we talk about Cash Carraway, partially because we've been talking like literally about, you know, stage productions. But also that chapter was one of the most interesting because there's a real sort of like

I detect around how you sort of analyze and think about Cash Carraway's work, both in terms of this kind of question about authenticity, who is writing, you know, what are kind of, you know, positive or nuanced or reclaimed depictions

depictions of slags but also i just found kind of that story of is any of this true really kind of interesting um so who is she what is her work why is it important okay so cash carroway is um a londoner a white i think she's got some irish heritage but white english londoner um

about my age, I think. And I know that because she, we have some mutual colleagues, mutual friends. I don't know her, but she's now a very successful screenwriter. She had a show, a HBO show called Rain Dogs. It's done really well. And I think she's commissioned to do lots of great work. So in that chapter, I don't look at Rain Dogs, actually her show, but I look at two things. I look at her book,

Skint Estate, which is a memoir. So a memoir, you know, it's true to some degree. And her play Refuge Woman. So Refuge Woman covers a lot of the same material as Skint Estate, but it complicates the idea of truth. And in fact, you know, she says that it's not true. At a certain point, she calls it, you know, a fucking fictional show.

So is what she's presenting the truth or is she lying? This is like a question I've had about her work a lot of the time. And I think if we think about Carraway as a cultural figure and as an artist, that becomes interesting because she is deliberately, to me, she is deliberately playing with these questions of like, is she telling the truth or not?

And it's kind of difficult to say that because I've also seen interviews with with Carraway where she is very upset about having been accused of lying in her memoir and having been accused of making that up.

But some of her early short stories, right, which have since been deleted from the internet, really play with this idea. So she has this one short story where she sets up, there's a song playing, I think it's Ghetto Gospel. And she says the year is like 2003. And then she goes and tells this story. And then at the end, she kind of says, but you were stupid to even believe any of this story was real because, you know, Ghetto Gospel wasn't released until 2005 or 2006 or whatever it was. So she kind of upends this idea.

you know, she kind of has played with truth all the way through. And then she says, but couldn't you tell I was lying from the start, you know, in refuge woman, the play, she talks about being a really good liar. Um, but yet, you know, yet she's appeared in public kind of defending the truth of her memoir. She's also asked, you know, why as a working class woman, she has to tell the gritty grotty truth. You know, she's, there was a magazine article where she came to have a personality disorder. Um,

She's played with this idea of poverty porn. So this idea, I think it was subtitled to Refuge Woman, was poverty porn. That working class truth is kind of exposed for the titillation of the middle class viewer. And for me, all of this uses ideas of the slag. She does use the word explicitly as well in Skin Estate.

You know, and I think that there's a conscious blurring here of the boundaries between truth and fiction as an artistic choice, as a provocation. And also there's a statement within that right about what are women allowed to do? Because when any woman writes something which has some aspects of what we know to be her lived experience in there, we are told like it must be true. And I'm sure to like get your first great big.

publishing book deal the idea that you're telling the truth that this is a truth helps helps that um you know helps helps the PR of it helps the agents and the the publishers decide to commission your work you know I think that all that is part of it and all that is part of what is being critiqued I think through this body of her work

And, you know, that for me is like interesting in the culture, right? Because we look at some of the things that have happened to working class women in this country. And, you know, I would like to talk a little bit about race maybe because I want to talk about white working class women now. And that's not an uncomplicated thing to talk about.

But, you know, we have these scandals that have happened with white working class women being sexually exploited by often Asian men and that being kind of covered up. And, you know, a lot of that is about the fact that working class women are not believed in the culture. They're lying. They're sexually excessive. Their stories aren't true. So, you know,

you know women and girls become these tricksters these shape shifters and I'm not saying that Cash Carraway is lying okay I'm not saying that but I am interested in how as an artist she uses ideas of truth misdirection deceit and so on in her work and I think that that is kind of fascinating and clever so yeah that's where I am with that really

You mentioned race and race kind of comes up throughout the book in several different ways. And the obvious kind of person to go to for a kind of sense of this in the deep dives, the kind of case studies is Mikkel Kohl, who is like younger, I guess a kind of like sort of, I mean, I think of her as like a newer generation, but actually that's, you know,

I mean, it's chewing gum like 10 years ago now, like slightly longer possibly. You know, so she's really kind of established now, I guess. And one of the things you kind of flag is the way that she's exploring, you know, these themes of vulnerability, exploitation, but she's not using the kind of specific language. And I'm fascinated both by how come she gets to be a sort of counterproductive

case study and then also where this I guess kind of question of her as a black woman comes in either in compliments or contrast to someone like Cash Kerouac. Okay great but all right yeah so before we deal with Michaela Cole I think I just want to say something about about this idea of race is that okay? Yeah go for it yeah. So right okay so

So part of the insult slag is also racist. OK, so the insult slag relies to an extent on the association of white working class women with people of colour, particularly black men, to portray them as disgusting. So the white slag is kind of this archetypal figure of working class disgust.

Yeah, and it's a powerful figure. So the working class, yeah, in this country globally, they've never only been white. You know, certainly the British working class through the period I'm talking about, you know, the decline of empire, the decline of the manufacturing industry were not only white. Yeah, they're not only white today.

So, you know, but the archetypal figure of the slag is white, yeah. And Jane Mills, who is somebody who wrote a book called Woman Words, where she traces the etymology of kind of words about women, one of which is slag. She says that there's this specific use of the term slag in New Zealand, I think in the 1950s, where slag means, like literally means a white woman who associates with people of colour, yeah. The implication is sexually. Yeah.

So slag isn't only used against white women. You can call anyone a slag. It's a generalised insult, but it does have a very specific racialised history, which is about the way in which association with other races becomes a way of both dividing the working class from each other and

Positioning the white working class as racist. And so our language and discourses kind of circulate around multicultural in these really contradictory kind of hypocritical ways where it becomes easy to dismiss or like, you know, write off white women and girls on the basis that, you know, they're too close to racism.

black and brown men but then it also becomes possible to to call them racist because they're working class and therefore they must be so and so there's this hypocrisy yeah in our cultural attitude towards the working class in the uk this is a multi-ethnic population often you know in our big towns and cities people live in side by side yeah and yet the white members of that population are blamed for racism which actually i would say is a feature of the class system

Racism is part of our class society. Racialized people of all ethnicities are subject to appalling symbolic and actual violence delivered by the middle and upper classes on the working class.

And we have a really deep problem, I think, in our critical theory in this country. Without class in the equation in the UK, at least, you can't understand how racism operates. And I would say vice versa, actually. You can't understand classism without also understanding racism. So I think it's kind of important to preface what I said about Michaela Cole with that. Because that, for me, is like an important part of the overarching argument. Yeah.

So yeah, Michaela Cole, another Londoner. I don't think she's that much. I don't think she's that young. I think she's in her late 30s now. Her work deals with this kind of milieu, is that the right term, of multicultural working class Londoners. Yeah, she is black. And it's important to say that because her work deals with these complexities of race and class that I talked about just now. And in the book, I look at her television series, I May Destroy You.

And her play, Chewing Gum Dreams. There was also a TV series called Chewing Gum, which was kind of a spin-off of that play, shown at the National in, I think, their Shed Theatre, which was a smaller venue. Anyway, in about 2013. So, Bow Fire May Destroy You and Chewing Gum Dreams, they take kind of adolescent working-class women...

as they're kind of part of, of what they're doing, you know, as part of the story that they're telling. And this idea of working class women's sexual excesses, their trustworthiness, their vulnerability and so on. And these, these works, they circulate around, yeah, around women's sexual excess, working class women's sexual excess, questions of like how race positions that, how, you know, there's one character in I May Destroy You, a white character who,

has a sexual encounter with a black boy and like, is she to be trusted or not? You know, that's all part of the narrative. I mean, that's the part of the whole narrative of I May Destroy You. Who can we trust within this story? So she never directly uses the term slag, but, you know, for me as somebody who, you know, is very kind of familiar with the landscape that she's representing,

having grown up in a similar area of London to her, you know, probably 10 years difference in our ages. But I recognise that working in the sort of schools, you know, a lot of her work takes place in schools, the representations in those pieces. So I'm familiar with that and

And what I say in the book about her work is that I strongly feel she's representing her characters. You know, in her characters, there is a deep, what I would call a class solidarity that cuts across race, but is, of course, racialized.

You know, and I kind of discussed this and I also look at this idea of girlhood that I think exists in both these works and sexual awakening, which is about, you know, this moment of vulnerability where the idea of the slag or of the ruined sexual reputation gets implanted in women as an instrument of control.

So, yes, so in the periods of time that Michaela Cole is depicting, and I don't say this in the book, but it's slightly later than the 20th century, you know, she's looking her...

Her work is set in the early 2000s, so just past the period where I think the idea of the slag and the word slag was really strong in the culture. But what comes through her work is like the residue of that, you know, what Raymond Williams would call the residual. You know, you see through her work how these ideas about slag and what it means and its cultural charge permeates through this like working class youth culture at a moment where the actual term itself is.

is maybe becoming like anachronistic or, you know, certainly is not part of the like vernacular in the kind of multicultural London English language that her characters are speaking and the context that they're working within. But I think the ideas that she's working with very much can be traced back through the like whole history that I've like mapped out in the first half of the book.

I mean, there's loads and loads just from that actually that comes through in things like

discussion of emin and some of the other uh case studies um but i'm kind of wondering in terms of i suppose the sort of um agenda that the book sets where do you go go next with it um i'm sort of fascinated by you could kind of expand this out to um i guess a kind of broader set of case studies but at the same time the nature of the way you've written the text and that kind of um

multi-art form or you know multi-linguistic um kind of approach you you've taken means that it could be seen as like you know this is the kind of uh definitive slags on stage text that you've done and you're going to do kind of something something else so what um i guess kind of comes next in terms of your your research

Yeah, I mean, for me, this project's finished. Like in the, for me, it's finished. But I do say in the book that I, you know, I increasingly think that, you know, text exists as a conversation. And I would love somebody to pick up the threads of this conversation and speak back to it in whatever way they want to. And whether that's extending the case studies or disagreeing with some of the history and the concepts and the arguments that I make, you know, great. Like I would love this book to have a cultural life. And I think,

I think that there's parts of an untold history there that I have told and they're told in a way that I do say in the book. There's parts of it that are memoir. There's parts of it that are very personal, creative responses. It's very London-centric. I grew up in London and that's my knowledge of this term and its operation. So hopefully the book will have a life.

But I don't think it will have a life with me extending that project. At the moment, I'm working on a short monograph called Class in British Musical Theatre, which obviously there's some crossover with Slags on Stage and it's working theoretically with ideas of class.

And then, yeah, and then I've got a couple of newer projects that I want to get off the ground, one of which is about arts curriculum, arts education, actually, and thinking about actually what is the history of arts education in Britain and

in terms of what was actually being taught on curriculums and how have people who have had an arts education, we know from your work right, Dave, that those people, large number of people working in the professional arts in this country went to university. What is it, 80%, something like that? Yeah, depending on how you cut it off, it can be higher than that. Yeah, but to me, I'm like, okay,

That's interesting. What are they learning at university? How are they taking that forward? What is important in those curricula? Because I speak to a lot of working class artists who have and haven't been to university and the ones that have say, you don't change my life and I wouldn't be able to do what I do now if I hadn't been. So there does seem something important happening there. And I think that that's uncaptured.

And I think that that should be part of the discussion about, you know, inequality and like what, you know, what it means to enter a profession. So I would like to do a project on that. And I'm also interested in a completely different direction in the cultural history of fire as a symbol and as like an actual element. So I don't know what I'll do with that. But yeah, so those are the two projects I'm thinking about.