It's often in August that the most interesting programmes are shown on TV: that series commissioned by people willing to take a risk, only for their managers to get cold feet and reschedule for the graveyard shift over the holiday season, when viewers are fewer and ratings attended to less slavishly. A perfect time, then, to broadcast a series about working-class life, which made the outgoing BBC One controller so nervous that he insisted it couldn't have the word "class" in the title.

Paul O'Grady's Working Britain, to be screened on Thursday, presented by the man still occasionally known as Lily Savage, was first called Paul O'Grady's Working Class – pithier, more accurate and worthy of discussion in itself (can a millionaire who works long hours out of choice describe himself as working class?).

The programmes were made with the Open University, using the expertise of its academics to develop what promised to be a lively account of working-class history, values and identities grounded in solid factual context. You can't fault the choice of presenter, whose trilogy of books on his Birkenhead upbringing – cleaning nightclubs with his mum, eulogising his clippie auntie's bus corporation uniform – bear comparison with the best testimonies of postwar British life. O'Grady, at once appalled by the economic decline of his home town and fiercely proud of the place and values that shaped him, planned a tour of Britain largely undocumented on TV.

But what has transpired is something so different that the two academics concerned have asked for their names to be removed from the credits. The series has been cut from three episodes to two, partly through the removal of a section on the role played by council housing both in liberating millions from horrendous living conditions and in cementing a certain perception of what it means to be working class in Britain. (I was involved in advising and a small amount of filming on this section)

The result leaves the impression that, in the words of the OU's Jason Toynbee, "the working class doesn't exist any more", adding: "When it comes to social issues I'm just not satisfied that the corporation is capable of taking an informed and critical line any longer. The urge to rely on celebrities and a tabloid narrative seems irresistible." Acknowledging that most people in Britain work is one thing; to state that there is such a thing as a class structure affecting the lives of those people who work is, apparently, quite another – and a topic that cannot be broached.

The central problem is that broadcasting is effectively a blue-chip occupation, with openings and traineeships so competitive that only a blue-chip education will get you in. I've no doubt that many TV companies, where they can, try actively to recruit outside the narrow box of Oxbridge firsts. But working in the media, even more than other professions, is skewed towards those with an existing fund of cultural capital, social networks (meaning friends in high places, not on Facebook) and secret knowledge that turns ambition into vocation.

What results is an institutional blind spot that prohibits the discussion of class in any meaningful way, even though there's never been a more urgent time to discuss the nature and effects of social class. When the last episode of Shameless was broadcast earlier in the year there was a brief acknowledgment that the comedy, at least at the beginning, had presented a view of rough, working-class life that neither romanticised nor castigated its characters. Now that's gone, what remains?

Class is discussed – rarely by name – within the Trojan horse of family ancestry or historical re-enactment, Channel 4's The Mill being a current example. And last year's The Secret History of Our Streets, a wonderful BBC Two series (and OU co-production) about gentrification and urban change, examined the nature of privilege and its absence in a direct, yet sensitive, manner. But that was BBC Two.

The whole point of mainstream TV, surely, is that it needs to be varied in order to keep its default audience – those without the desire or wherewithal to channel-hop – interested. The primary channels, at least for now, are settled on a conviction that viewers are fixated on consumer issues and parochial trifles. In such a context, for the O'Grady series to take a view of class that doesn't rely, at least in part, on caricatures and celebrity interviews is tantamount to him dressing as Rosa Luxemburg and advocating revolution on prime time.

• This article was amended on 14 August 2013. It originally stated that one of the Open University academics had asked for his name to be removed from the credits of Paul O'Grady's Working Britain. In fact, both academics had done so. This has now been corrected.