I HAVE never understood where I fit into the class system of the country.

My family was working class. Has been for generations. Did it follow that I was the same?

Or did your class change according to education, wealth and social life? Mind you, use those as a yardstick and I’m still stuck in clogs. Could you be working class one day and middle class the next because you won the Lottery?

For years I stoutly defended my right to be working class – after all, John Lennon was my working class hero – only for others to point out that I had never actually worked a day in my life. Well, writing isn’t work. Is it?

Now the BBC has produced a new survey and a way of measuring class to confuse me even more. Forget the three classifications of upper, middle and working, so perfectly portrayed in the 1966 television programme The Frost Report by John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.

“I am upper class and look down on him.”

“I am middle class and look up to him and look down on him.”

“I know my place.”

The Beeb has now come up with seven classes that are dependent on economic, cultural and social resources – in other words how much money you have, lifestyle and the people you know. They call them Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Emergent Service Workers, Traditional Working Class and the Precariat, a rather pretentious word that means the daily lives of these people are precarious.

The research was carried out by Mike Savage from the London School of Economics and Fiona Devine from the University of Manchester with the help of BBC Lab UK.

Professor Devine said: “It shows us there is still a top and a bottom – at the top we still have an elite of very wealthy people and at the bottom the poor, with very little social and cultural engagement.”

Only 6% are in the Elite, top earners, often from private schools, with contacts in the highest echelons of society and savings of at least £140,000. The Precariat claim 15%. The biggest group are the Established Middle Class with a household income of £47,000 and highbrow tastes. Or, as the survey relies on people filling in an online form, perhaps a lot of aspiring folk told fibs.

Find out what class you are by Googling BBC Great British Class calculator and taking the test. It’s a laugh, if nothing else.

Personally, I think trying to fit people into a class system is a worthless game of interest only to academics with nothing better to do. You either have class or you don’t – you can't acquire it with a public school education. Look at Parliament, for crying out loud.

I shall continue to take the Ronnie Corbett line.

After Cleese looks down and says: “I get a feeling of superiority over them.”

And middle class Barker looks down and says: “I get a feeling of superiority over him.”

Corbett looks up at the pair of them and says: “I get a pain in the back of my neck.”

Me too, Ron.