Before Pokémon, before Furbys, before Buzz Lightyear even, in 1970’s Britain there was only one toy worth having: the space hopper. The hopper was a bright orange ball with long ears for handles. It was made from industrial-strength rubber and designed to look like a cartoon kangaroo. You sat on it and bounced around. We didn’t own a hopper but I remember one wonderful afternoon when my brother borrowed his friend’s hopper and I got to try it out, bouncing around the apple tree in our Kilburn back garden, trying to bounce high enough to pull an apple from one of the lower boughs. Space hoppers were unstable and erratic; bounce too fast or too high and you would face-plant on the floor. Stop bouncing, for even a second, and it would tilt you over and send you sprawling. You needed a strong core, good balance, and little care for scratched knees or scraped chins.
Some years ago, I heard a story about legendary actress Faye Dunaway. A young actor was making his Broadway debut, spending winter in New York. Somehow, he found himself having lunch with Dunaway on Christmas Day. I know, only in NYC, right? This was four or five years before the actor would become a household name in the UK and a decade before he became an international one. It was one of those moments that, looking back, you identify as the moment he was on the precipice of stardom. I think Dunaway recognised that moment. After lunch, they walked back to her hotel through the snowy streets of New York. Outside her hotel, she pulled him into an embrace, enfolding him in her opulent fur coat, and whe whispered in his ear, “What they don’t tell you is that you never, ever make it,” and then she vanished into the lobby.
Acting is storytelling. It makes sense that we mythologise the journey, that we frame the career path. We move from rags to riches, we overcome obstacles, we fight for our survival. We choose from any number of fairytales, follow any hero’s journey. We believe in overnight success. “You came into this profession ‘a kid’ but you’re going out there a star!”
Once, perhaps, in a different era, the path seemed clear, the idea of ‘making it’ was structured, fixed. There was a ladder: you worked hard, you built your credits, you climbed the rungs. You got your happy ending. Congratulations, you made it.
What if that isn’t the case anymore?
What if the ladder is structurally outdated and psychologically untrue?
We cling to the idea that making it is a destination because it used to seem like one. It may not have been an easy path to climb but it was, at least, legible and, quite simply, there were fewer paths to take.
Where we are now requires context, a little history. Actor training in the UK has its origins in London in 1840 when Miss Kelly’s Theatre and Dramatic School opened at 73 Dean Street.
LAMDA, established as The London Academy of Music in 1861, added dramatic art and elocution training in 1884. This was followed by the opening of RADA in 1904 and Central in 1906. The late-Victorian/early-Edwardian era saw a boom in elocution lessons likely driven by Victorian legislation making education compulsory for children and the subsequent opening of opportunities for a newly visible lower-middle class to become clerks, teachers, civil servants, and administrators. Accent functioned as identity, a social passport, and granted respectability. As an example, Eliza Doolittle and Pygmalion are from 1913.
This boom was happening alongside the growth of the repertory theatre movement, which emerged at the point where the lower middle class became culturally assertive. It was local, civic-minded, and the main training ground for actors. You did your time, you worked your way up, you became a local name, aided by the local community and the local press. If so inclined, you came to London to do commercial theatre or to make films at one of the early UK film studios like Elstree, Cricklewood or Hepworth. All this took place alongside the explosion of the press and the rise of the critic. The theatre became more respectable; favourable press turned actors into objects of admiration and an eco-system was built in which the role of the press as amplifier and accelerator of a career was born. There was a path, a ladder.
After the BBC was formed in the 1920s, broadcasting its first radio play in 1924, you could take your elocution training to radio and do the same there: work your way up, become a star.
ITV became the nation’s second broadcaster in 1955 and BBC2 launched in 1964. With the advent of television and a post-war boom in actor training, you had another pathway: you could make your name in television on one of the three channels.
An interlocking system was forged between stage, film, radio, TV and the national press. If you wanted to be an actor, the most obvious route was drama school. If you didn’t get in, you assumed you weren’t good enough and, in most cases, you put aside that dream and did something else.
Until the late 1980s acting, as a profession, was a closed shop. You couldn’t work professionally without an Equity card and the routes to getting a card were limited. When Margaret Thatcher destabilised trade unions her government made closed-shop unions untenable. Now, producers could hire non-Equity members and, in many ways, the industry became more open and accessible but while the routes into the profession may have opened up considerably, the ladder remained the same. You put in your time, you worked your way up through theatre, radio, tv, film, or a combination of all four and, aided by the press, you climbed the ladder, rung by rung. And, of course, you could see the rungs.
Crucially, that ladder was solid, held together by an economic system that worked. Rep theatre was often repeatable, sustainable work; early British film studios provided continuity within concentrated production hubs; radio contracts offered reliable employment; a commercial theatre hit meant long contracts and financial security. There were fewer drama school graduates, less competition for jobs, and careers moved at a more accumulative pace. Importantly, the post-war welfare state provided a buffer between contracts, while a lower cost-of-living and better salary-to-rent ratio meant the ladder held your weight instead of collapsing beneath you.
Where once the industry was contained and manageable, today it is expansive and unruly. The pathways, once quantifiable, are now myriad. Three TV channels grew to four, four to five. Satellite TV introduced television from all over the world. Today there are over 500 channels and dozens of streaming platforms. We have progressed from a handful of film studios distributing through scores of channels to hundreds of studios worldwide operating via a multitude of mechanisms. The mainstream press has crumbled, the role of the critic diminished. We have redefined fame.
And the ladder has fractured.
Today we are managing short contracts, increased competition, fragmented audiences, algorithmic attention, and unpredictable economics. When the ascent is no longer stable, making it is no longer a destination.
We’re no longer climbing a ladder, we’re bouncing around on a space hopper. It looks stable until you climb on and it starts to tilt. From the moment you get on you have to keep bouncing or risk falling off, scraping your elbows and hurting yourself. It’s almost impossible to accurately guide its trajectory. It demands balance, requires constant motion and, in order to stay on you must develop a strong, resilient core. It looks like its going to be a fun ride but, actually, it’s exhausting.
But hold on for a second, and you begin to notice how it actually works.
On the hopper, momentum is self-generated. We may have a goal, like me reaching for the low-hanging apple, but progress is lateral as much as it is vertical. We fall off frequently, and our falls are public and painful. Yet you rise higher the more you push down because the hopper responds directly to how much energy you put in. The speed with which you recover matters more than the height to which you ascend. On a ladder you make your debut once and from then you can only go up, down or step off altogether. On a hopper energy does not accumulate, It dissipates the moment you stop pushing. Not everyone begins with the same reserves of energy, not everyone can afford to fall off, and not everyone can borrow a hopper to try it out.
The ladder was a positional system, it was built to climb. To achieve success on the ladder is to attain altitude. A space hopper is a kinetic system. On the hopper, success is stability, balance. This is why careers now feel like a perpetual debut. We ascend not once, but repeatedly. The structure itself has changed. You never, ever make it - not because ambition is pointless, not because the summit is fake, but because in the new, kinetic system, there is no fixed summit. The longer you ride the hopper the more you learn about how to control it, the stronger your core becomes, the more agency you have over its trajectory. Success is no longer climbing to the top of the ladder and sitting there. Success is staying on the hopper and, occasionally, bouncing high enough to grab an apple.