In a week with those Camdenites the Milibands stealing away with the Labour leadership race, Andy Burnham's plaint about "metropolitan elites" seems particularly poignant. But then poignancy is the northern tone these days. Mancunians, I found recently, still adduce the Happy Mondays when pressed to say what is distinctive about their home. That the works of this fairly ropey outfit should be taken as a cultural landmark shows what a bleak half century it's been for the north.
I grew up thinking there was a real cachet in being northern. It's 50 years since Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the 1960 film of Alan Sillitoe's novel, with Albert Finney as a hedonistic machinist in Nottingham. Any youngsters watching him don his suit on the eponymous night must have wished they too were from Pendleton near Salford, birthplace of Finney. His co-star was Shirley Anne Field, whose character works in a hairnet factory, and whose first line is something like, "Go on then, I will have a fag" – yet Field (raised just outside Bolton) was, and is, more beautiful and watchable than Sophia Loren.
That same year Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey was on Broadway. In the film version Rita Tushingham effects meetings with her gay best friend or black lover, always favouring the gloomiest (or do I mean the most beautiful?) bits of Salford, yet unselfconsciously declaring herself "a quite extraordinary person!". In 1960 Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse, was on the West End stage. In the film version Julie Christie is luminous in her first scene: the only woman with liberated hair on the streets. Here was the start of the 60s happening in Bradford – in front of the town hall. That year also saw the dynamic, socially penetrating start of Coronation Street, with aspirational Ken Barlow chafing at the bit. (He won't stick a dead-end place like this for five minutes, the viewers must have thought.)
This cultural insurgency was fuelled by full employment and rapidly rising industrial wages, yet the northern iconoclasts depicted on screen would not be bought off with a few extra bob. They were the angry young men (an essentially northern movement). They wouldn't be suburbanised, or tranquilised by TV, and Harold Macmillan's assertion that they had "never had it so good!" was denounced as patronising. Why, the sheer ridiculousness of having an Old Etonian southerner in No 10!
Hold on a minute. What went wrong? The Beatles kept the north in fashion a few more years, but it was London they set swinging, not Liverpool. For Sillitoe, Waterhouse and Delaney, 1960 would prove a career high. Yes, Lee Hall is on Broadway, and David Peace is everywhere, but they are nostalgists, hankering after a more defined north – and about the only young names that come up when northern writing is mentioned.
In that first Coronation Street, Albert Tatlock – already ancient – is seen polishing some little balls with a felt cloth. I can't see quite what he's doing, but it's in pursuit of some sort of northern hobby. Meanwhile, Ena Sharples, his chapel-going contemporary, is given to asking, within seconds of making a new acquaintance: "Where are you going to be buried then?" But northern pastimes, religion and idiosyncrasies would give way to a processed culture of mass entertainment – a development anticipated by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy, a work much discussed in 1960.
The homogenisation, Americanisation (William Hague in his baseball cap) and globalisation that have undermined northern identity exceed Hoggart's worst fears. If I teleported you to a shopping street in Middlesbrough, you might think you were in Luton, unless you walked towards the banks of the Tees, where you might begin to get your bearings, if only from the expanse of nothingness where the industry once stood.
Born in 1962, I once thought it an advantage to have a northern accent. Today ... I suppose I could become one of those northern Uncle Toms of the voiceover world, paid to sound down to earth and unthreatening (ie thick): "We can offer yer some of t' best mortgage deals around." Granted, we've still got Parky and Boycott, though the latter cuts a sort of colonial figure these days, always pontificating about, and frequenting, places like South Africa, India and Pakistan while wearing a panama hat. Both are going the way of Last of the Summer Wine. And who can show me a single up-and-coming Professional Yorkshireman worthy of the name?
I suppose it's moderate prosperity that's to blame. The northerners of my generation might have "had it rough" in comparison with their southern cousins, but not quite rough enough.
• The Year of the North is on BBC4, Tuesday 14 September, at 9pm
