Kate Winslet’s parents did something a bit odd at the weekend. Keen to support their daughter’s recent claim that she rilly, rilly is working class they invited a Sunday Mirror reporter into their large, detached home, let it be known that there’s no central heating, confirmed that, yes, Kate did indeed only get 10p pocket money when she was a child, then served up “workman’s tea” in mismatched mugs.

Oh honestly, is that the best they could do? No packet of Wagon Wheels lying casually atop a pine-effect coffee table? No kitchen cupboard doors left ajar to reveal tins of Prince’s Fruit Cocktail in syrup? Mr Winslet could have at least worn a 9ct gold signet ring spelling out DAD bought from the Elizabeth Duke range at Argos. But no. Evidently there weren’t even the faint tones of Agadoo-doo-doo/ Push pineapple shake the tree coming from the stereo. Poor effort that; very disappointing.

There are two amusing things about Kate Winslet’s attempts to convince us that she’s as working class as Gala bingo. “People literally think I’m lying because I speak nice,” she complained to Marie Claire magazine. “We had these dreadful second-hand cars that would always die a death, or we’d go on holiday to Cornwall, come back and it would have been nicked.” One, does she imagine that anybody gives a stuff? And, two, the “deprived” picture she paints is, ironically, pure middle class.

Because as anyone who was raised in a real working-class family in the Seventies and early Eighties knows, it was the middle-class kids who had the more frugal lifestyles.

In my experience, middle-class parents were “sensible”, fretted about mortgages and were a bit stingy with the biscuit tin, so their kids got hilariously meagre pocket money and educational toys for Christmas. Working-class parents, meanwhile, adopted a “sod it, we might all be dead tomorrow” attitude and felt that there was status gained in seeing their kids get the trendiest of everything. They might live in council houses and their parents work in factories but they would be the children in the latest Kickers boots, paid off at 75p a week from Freemans catalogue, while the well-to-do “squares” went to school each day in the same “practical” navy blue gabardine.

I generalise, but it’s true. Working-class kids got to go to Butlins and see redcoats being pushed in to the swimming pool, while middle-class children were carted off on hellish, hearty nuts-in-May type camping trips in the Lake District, the highlight of which was defecating in a field and having to bury it with a shovel.

No triple-decker burgers at the Wimpy bar for them: they’d sit listening to the rain in the family car while mother passed round meat paste sandwiches from a Tupperware box and a flask of stewed tea, and talked about their next stop at the glass-blowing museum. No doubt they were ticking off the days until they could run away to university and start taking class A drugs.

Obviously, some working-class families were very poor, but the concept has become romanticised to the point of caricature — like the Comic Strip’s Strike! — depicting all working-class life as a noble struggle when mostly it was perfectly OK. If anyone was disadvantaged it was the middle-class kids in their embarrassing Clarks’s shoes, who were banned from watching Tiswas because it was on ITV. They had been dealt the bad hand. They weren’t even allowed new-fangled convenience foods because they were “not nutritional and a waste of money” so they never knew the joy of Vesta Chow Mein with Crispy Noodles.

For what it’s worth, I think that Kate Winslet is a fantastic actress from a patently lovely family who has done so well that she needn’t dress it up. I don’t doubt that with a frequently out-of-work actor as a father, she and her siblings lived hand-to-mouth, sometimes wearing hand-me-down clothes. But none of this makes her working class; it just makes her faintly boho. The private education and the grandparents setting up a repertory theatre in Reading put the mockers on any claim to working class “credibility”. But what stymied it once and for all was her first wedding to Jim Threapleton in 1998.

If you recall Winslet held her wedding reception in a pub where guests ate bangers and mash, Bakewell tart with custard, and the media went all misty-eyed over her refreshing unstarriness. Fair enough. But let’s not kid ourselves — what happened there was the exact opposite of a typical working-class wedding. At every working-class wedding that I’ve been to — and there’ve been plenty — ostentation is played up, not down, with top hat and tails, stretch limos, napkins folded into swans and the bride and groom drinking champagne from glasses shaped like wedding shoes, while the bride’s mother whispers proudly to the guests: “It’s not Pomagne you know.”

Their big day is their chance to feel “posh”. They’d never have the confidence to pull off a bangers and mash wedding. It would reek of poverty. It’s the well-off who can afford to see the irony, the kudos in unpretentiousness.

Not long ago when aspiring thespians arrived in London they would drop their provincial accents faster than a shoplifter drops a tin of salmon down the front of her bra. Now the opposite applies and posh actors fall over themselves to become a Guy Richie “geezer” or, worse, feel that they must apologise if they didn’t grow up on a sink estate eating a diet of lard.

Yawn . . . If I was an actor I’d be tempted to talk up my middle-classness, not hide it. After all it can’t have been easy being forced to enter all those Blue Peter competitions and wear home-knitted jumpers when your mates were shopping at Chelsea Girl. You landed on beige in the Dulux chart of life and yet you turned out to be quite colourful. Well done!

So put away the pint of snakebite, the 20 Lambert & Butler and drop the mockney accent, eh, pet? Because no matter how good an actor you might be, you’re fooling no one.

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