In 1954 Professor Ross, a latter-day Henry Higgins, published a lengthy essay called “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English” in the Finnish philological periodical, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. His argument was that aside from “minor points of life” — such as “the games of real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea” and “having one’s cards engraved (not printed)” — the only remaining class distinction in post-war Britain was spoken language. Today, he argued, a member of the upper classes was “not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class”, he simply spoke differently. And thus to guide those keen to distinguish between the language spoken by “gentlemen” from those “persons who, though not gentlemen, might at first sight appear, or would wish to appear, as such”, Ross created the terms “U” (for upper class) and “non-U”.

The first part of his essay, “The Written Language”, is effectively a style sheet: how to correctly address an envelope and begin and end a letter; what to call, in correspondence, a Duke or a Lieutenant Commander; the correct use of “Esq”. “Knowledge of at least one initial of the recipient’s name is, of course, a prerequisite for addressing him with Esq.” The writer “will be in a quandary” if he does not have this information: “in these circumstances I myself use the Greek letter ø (as ø. Smith, Esq), but this is probably idiosyncratic.”  

Ross gets into his stride in the second part, “The Spoken Language”, which starts with pronunciation: U-speakers say “temprilly” rather than “temporarily”, “goff” rather than “golf”, and “tar” rather than “tire”.

Next comes an alphabetically ordered vocabulary list in which the middle classes are shamed. Here we find non-U “serviette” versus U “table napkin”, “toilet” versus “lavatory”, and “mirror” versus “looking glass”. While a U house must have a name rather than a number, the names of many houses are non-U: “Fairmeads”, for example, or “El Nido”. “U-children” and “U-dogs” eat their “dinner” in the middle of the day when their U-parents and owners are having “lunch”; “pardon” is non-U: the U response after belching should be silence. A non-U speaker cannot, Professor Ross argued, become a U-speaker, because the misuse of “one word or phrase” will give him away (“for U-speakers never make mistakes”).

Alan Ross was a U-speaker in a non-U university. Born in Brecon in 1907 and educated at Malvern College and Balliol, he worked during the war at the government code and cipher school in Bletchley Park. It was as an undergraduate that he lay the foundations of his study of English linguistic class signifiers, working on it for his own amusement while developing his lifelong interest in Finno-Ugric languages. Like Nancy Mitford, whom he met at a luncheon (“old-fashioned U”) in 1955, Ross was famously witty. He had employed in his article, he revealed to Mitford, the class distinctions made in her autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love (1945). Fanny Logan, Uncle Matthew complains, is picking up “dreadful expressions” at school such as “note paper”: “What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother”. Uncle Matthew is famously unreasonable, but on this occasion even the conciliatory Aunt Sadie agrees with him. “Fanny darling. It is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.” The case of the Mitfords proved Ross’s point. Far from being “better educated, cleaner, or richer” than their non-U neighbors, the single proof of their social superiority lay in their peculiar use of language: the Mitfords employed a vocabulary understood by no one outside the family circle, while the “Mitford voice”, even they admitted, was ridiculously posh.

Nancy Mitford responded to Ross’s essay with an essay of her own called “The English Aristocracy”, published in Stephen Spender’s Encounter (September 1955). The upper classes, she explained, did not use fish knives or put the milk in first when pouring tea. Silence, she agreed, was the U response to belching, as well as being “the only possible U response” to other “embarrassing modern situations”, such as being told “it was so nice seeing you” after saying goodbye. She would tear up any letter beginning “Dear Nancy Mitford”, rather than “Dear Miss Mitford” or “Dear Nancy”. To Ross’s vocab list, Mitford added “sweet” as the non-U version of “pudding”, “sofa” as opposed to “settee”, “glasses” and “dentures” as the non-U equivalents of “spectacles” and “false teeth” (U-speakers dislike euphemisms).

The September 1955 edition of Encounter sold out instantly. “U” and “non-U” became the buzz words of the day, and newspaper letters pages were filled with the responses of readers. “It is sad to find”, Graham Greene wrote to The Observer, “that by Miss Mitford’s exacting standard Henry James was often non-U in his correspondence. Frequently he allowed the “unspeakable usage” of writing to someone as “Dear XX”. Henry James, Mitford explained, “was an American”. Another letter to The Observer pointed out that Shakespeare had made clear, in Richard II, that in fact “mirror” was U and “looking glass” non-U:

King Richard: An if my word for sterling yet in England
Let it command a mirror hither straight…
Bollingbroke: Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.

To this, Mitford replied: “It is probable that Richard II, like many monarchs, was non-U”.

It was Mitford’s idea to republish in book form a shortened version of Ross’s essay together with “The English Aristocracy” as Noblesse Oblige. “It seems like a natural for the Xmas market”, she wrote to Heywood Hill. Illustrated by O. Lancaster and entitled ‘‘Are You U?”, the volume also included a letter by Evelyn’s Waugh and other satirical delights such as John Betjeman’s “How to Get on in Society” (“Phone for the fish-knives, Norman”). Malcolm Muggeridge, editor of Punch, devoted almost an entire issue to the book. The magazine’s cover bore a mock coat of arms with the device “Snoblesse Oblige” and a coronet was printed at the top of each page.

Why does Noblesse Oblige continue to sell and make us laugh? One reason is that the English have always enjoyed the comedy of our intricate class distinctions, particularly those within what George Orwell called in 1920, “the lower-upper-middle classes”. Another is that Ross gave us a snapshot of the end of an era, after two wars had dramatically altered our social structures. England in the Fifties had a Labour government, and the Angry Young Men, disaffected offspring of the Bright Young Things, were documenting the new equality, which included the democratization of language. Four years after Noblesse Oblige appeared, academics were called to the witness stand at the Lady Chatterley trial to explain that the word “fuck” was not, in the right context, obscene, while the judge, Mervyn Griffith-Jones (U), caused nationwide hilarity when he instructed the jury to consider whether D.H. Lawrence’s novel was the kind of book you would “wish your wife or servants to read”.

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Noblesse Oblige has dated in the 70 years since its publication, but surprisingly not that much. Middle-class men are now less likely to play tennis in their braces, and we no longer have either (the U-pronunciation is “eye-ther”) jerries (U) or chamber pots (non-U) to contend with. But status anxiety is still with us. I wince at the word “toilets”, for example, and “serviette”, despite not coming from the top-drawer myself, and am always, like society decorator Nicky Haslam, on the look-out for things that are “common”. Haslam’s special-edition Christmas tea towel, “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common”, include social crimes such as “side plates”, “Confidence”, “type-2 diabetes”, “Bach”, “Loving your parents”, and “Primrose Hill”. Remember the tabloid furore (the “e” in “furore”, according to Haslam, should not be pronounced) when Carole Middleton, mother of the Princess of Wales, said “pleased to meet you” to the Queen, rather than “How do you do”?  

Linguists today talk about standard Southern British English (SSBE), Estuary English (EE) and Multicultural London English (MLE) rather than U and non-U, but there is still a U way of speaking. The Queen’s English is now the King’s cockney, with public school boys saying “wanna”, “gonna”, and “wa’er”, while a 2025 update of Noblesse Oblige would include the U pronunciation “twenny-twenny five”. The copious use of the word “fuck” is now very much U. 

Mary S. Lovell writes in The Mitford Girls that Alan Ross, who died in 1980, “resented” Miford for “making fun of his serious academic thesis”. This is surely not the case, and Lovell offers no source for her statement. The whole notion of writing what Ross ironically called a “scientific” disquisition on upper-class lingo was parodic (“U-dogs”, for example). Trading on his celebrity, Ross produced three further books on the theme: What Are U? (1969), How to Pronounce It (1970), and Don’t Say It (1973). His grandson, Carne Ross, who resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret evidence to an official inquiry into the use of intelligence before the 2003 Iraq invasion, has since become an advocate for anarchism. “His accent”, writes Anthony Andrews in an interview with Carne Ross for The Observer, “is now faultlessly demotic, but he says it wasn’t always like that.” One-downmanship is the new one-upmanship.

A decade on, some of MIC’s most esteemed alumni — Binky Felstead, Lucy Watson and Rosie Fortescue — have reunited for Beyond Chelsea, a where-are-they-now series which The Guardian uncharacteristically declared “needs some backstabbing”. Unlike the intoxicating original, this spin-off, defanged by welfare concerns, is “bland”.

For many teenage girls in the 2010s, reality TV was everything. We cut our Gen Z teeth on a particularly nasty era of “scripted reality”. Producers feeding lines, stirring up behind-the-scenes beef and having cast members replay breakups in front of the cameras became the standard — a format that proved to be gold dust for production companies at ITV (TOWIE, Ibiza Weekender), E4 (Made in Chelsea) and MTV (Geordie Shore, The Hills, Ex on the Beach). Since then, streaming has blown the scripted-reality format out of the water. But it’s worth remembering how the shows we watched forged our ideas about celebrity and class.

Everyone’s favourite Made in Chelsea “character”, a true agent of chaos, was Spencer Matthews. In a pre-MeToo world he was just about acceptable — a medium-ugly Jack the Lad who meted out schadenfreude to every woman who was too nice and too pretty to go unscathed. The most memorable of which has to be his spectacular 2013 break-up with Louise Thompson, staged on Putney Bridge. Years later, Matthews revealed that the two had broken up off-camera the night before — only to be told to recreate the moment by producers. “It’s hard to respect you when you allow me to cheat on you,” he immortally told the sobbing 22-year-old. Having lately rebranded as a recovering alcoholic and fitness influencer, Matthews said of the scene, “I feel embarrassed about it.” So he should, but from what I recall of the time, he was only burnished by his misbehaviour.

What distinguished MiC from other scripted-reality shows of its day was a vibe of aspirational refinement. Unlike the fake-tanned, fake-breasted northerners chunning in local the Popworld on Geordie Shore, its bright young things attended shooting parties on rented estates, hosted flapper-themed “soirées” and, in fits of pique, swilled not pints but Bolly. At least, that was what we saw. The reality, I suspect, must have been quite different — one hears whispers about the dysfunctional lives of the programmes’ young cast members, their days-long benders and, through the thick fog of privilege and addiction, being riled up by producers to lash out at one another like snakes milked for venom.

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The facade of untouchable poshness, unique among reality programmes of this era, sweetened the satisfaction of tiffs and spats: this show was at once a moving Pinterest board (at my school, predictably, many girls dreamt of slinking down the King’s Road in a freshly waxed Barbour with K-Middleton chestnut curls) and deliciously sadistic. Every episode stages a fall from grace for a girl who is too envied to last, answering the blend of awe and disdain which such upper-crust women tend to inspire. Nobody wants to see Downton’s Mary Crawley end up with boring old Matthew in sickening harmony — we want to see him paralysed below the waist during the First World War then bumped off in a car crash after welcoming the couple’s first child, leaving her wracked by grief and hardship.

The truth is, we like our posh women to be victims. The privilege and vulnerability they embody places them at a tantalising sweet spot for contempt; comeuppance for prized “brats” like Lucy Watson always came with a whispered threat: nobody is too posh to be called a bitch. Even the nice ones are prodded into teary scenes wherever possible — pain purifies, and neutralises viewers’ envy. Their grandness also made them fair game for misogyny, an impulse which was otherwise beginning to be restrained on mainstream TV by the mid-2010s.

Besides, in the broader villain dynamics of scripted reality, men and women have prescribed roles. It’s far easier to swallow roguery in a chummy group of Harrovians than in their catty girlfriends; the format ensures that scenes of dark goings-on in members’ clubs evaporate in the sepia sunlight of a friendly Clapham Common rugby throwabout. The girls, by contrast, are never afforded this cleansing camaraderie — they are doomed to sit, pouting, in coffee shops, mooning over cheaters and slinging bitchy remarks about bags. The upshot of this dynamic is that the men of Made in Chelsea were able to tear their way through 10-plus series with little reputational damage, bar the odd well-deserved slap. Many, Sam Thompson and Jamie Laing included, are heading for national-treasure status at breakneck speed.

The women, conversely, had much shorter shelf-lives; many of them, Louise Thompson included, clearly underwent massive emotional trauma which has echoed in later life. Others, such as “fat fucking turkey” Francesca Hull, are haunted by their time on the show. The unforgettable line was hurled by arch-villainess Victoria Baker-Harber during a festive dinner party in 2013. After an exchange of fire from various girls as slack-jawed boyfriends looked on — “this cheese smells as bad as Lucy’s breath”; “I don’t ever see you eat, ever — you’re an anorexic” — Baker-Harber tells an emollient Hull, in a clip which she has said followed her around forever: “Stop opening your fucking fat mouth you fucking fat turkey!”

Hull has since revealed that, in a room “full of cameramen, producers, sound men”, she had tried to leave, but “there was a producer under the table holding my legs down, and she was saying, ‘No, fight back’”. At other times, the crew “spoke to us on the phone for hours every week. They’d come on nights out with us. They put us in situations that created drama”, Hull told Grazia.

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When scripted reality was first a thing, I sense that we all knew this — it was all slightly rougher, with drama inexpertly cut in. Now, though, as boundaries between celebrities and “real people” collapse on social media, producers’ wiles have caught up: it’s harder and harder to detect narrative artifice, and so, for young viewers in particular, to challenge the garish visions of sex and class in which these programmes trade.

We are no longer in a world in which bullied girls are held under tables by goading executives. Light-entertainment TV has had a heavy reckoning — from the Jeremy Kyle Show to This Morning. The trajectories of former Made in Chelsea cast members are depressingly predictable: many of the show’s biggest hellraisers are now wellness influencers — nobody hawks essential oils like a former cocaine addict — or, judging by OG gentle oddball Francis Boulle’s Twitter, alt-Right crypto traders. Present iterations such as Married at First Sight and Love is Blind attempt to whip up the same villainy, the winking caricatures, the ritualistic savagery of that era. But the unctuous brutality of 2010s TV production has been sapped away by years of Love Island suicides and interventions by Women’s Aid.

That time has left a strange legacy for my generation. Such shows service an emotional need to process thorny class elements of British culture. In Made in Chelsea’s case, it was a way of understanding breezy privilege, poking fun at it and indulging in our most Victorian fantasies about what goes on behind the shutters of Cadogan Square, in a country recently rocked by the 2008 financial crash, and which had just elected its first Tory government in 13 years. Now, after a comparable changing of the political guard, pop culture is having another dalliance with the upper classes: Saltburn, The Gentlemen and a new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals are, depending on how you look at it, last-days-of-Rome takes on the end stages of Conservative collapse or much-desired correctives to the bleakness of Starmerism.

Nowadays, producers are much more careful — mindful, they would say — about dealing in baroque and, sometimes, offensive visions of class that abounded in 2010s reality TV. The exception for lampooning remains, for good reason, posh people. And it just so happens that they are also, for the time being, a lasting fixation, perfect aspirational hate-watch material. The brutality of the sets which produced these stereotypes may be gone — but can we ever banish our infatuation with the Sloane?