Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  For example, High Wycombe has an extraordinary tradition of weighing its mayor at the start of their year-long term and then again at the end to see if they have put on weight by living it large at the ratepayers’ expense. The weigh-in is done in public and, if the mayor has filled out a little, the town crier announces it by shouting, ‘And some more!’ to the crowd. Then they take the mayor round the back and beat the shit out of him.

  I had my own little run-in with taste and decency in High Wycombe once, but from an unlikely source. My first tour of the UK was as support to legendary American comic Emo Phillips. Emo had been a bit of a hero to me, and I eagerly accepted the invite to travel the country with him for a couple of months. Almost instantly though, it transpired that, as a hard-drinking, single, twentysomething Irish comic, I had little in common with the clean-living, married, fiftysomething Californian that I had been paired up with. It was like a bad buddy movie. We struggled to find anything to talk about in transit and wherever we overnighted I bolted out the door in search of the local nightlife as soon as I decently could. By the end of the tour, I felt guilty about my contribution to this personality clash and, just before the final show, in High Wycombe, I presented Emo with a gift, an anthology of work from the Irish humorous writer Flann O’Brien. Emo looked quite taken aback.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, examining the volume, ‘I didn’t get you anything.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said I. ‘It was your tour and I really appreciated the chance to work on it. It’s just a small thank-you.’

  I left him in his dressing room and was heading to the stage when Emo ran out to catch me.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, and there was a pregnant pause, ‘you should curse less onstage.’ And then he smiled and turned back to his dressing room.

  Would this be a better story if I said that, From that moment on, etc., etc.?

  Well, sorry. I went on stage that night and ripped the skies a new one, such was my generosity with the f-bomb, the c-word and, just for the night, the newly coined g-word, q-word and x-word.

  After that performance, I’m surprised the good people of High Wycombe let me back in again.

  St Albans Arena

  1 man from the Foreign Office

  1 investment salesman

  1 carpenter and joiner

  1 man who runs a cleaning company

  Even though the Americans still tend to think of the suburbs as their invention, modern suburbia really began in London at the end of the eighteenth century, when increased wealth allowed a new class of wealthy Londoners to consider moving out to the pleasant rural areas to the south of the city.

  Nowadays, even though the suburbs are scorned for their meticulously pruned hedges and tense, petty neighbourly disputes, they are the heart of the nation. England is a suburban nation. By any reckoning, more than half the population lives in some kind of suburb, and this figure goes as high as 70 per cent in some experts’ estimation. Roughly a third of English households live in semi-detached houses, according to the 2001 census, making it the most popular type of home.

  There is also a subtle difference between dormitory or satellite suburbs in the UK and those in the USA. Because England is so much older, and so much smaller, many of these places weren’t green-field sites. The towns I visit are more ‘Expanded Towns’ rather than ‘New Towns’ in the conventional sense, and many of them had distinct identities and histories before they became swallowed up.

  St Albans, for example, is a fairly posh dormitory town of about 120,000 people about twenty miles north of London. Most of the interesting things about St Albans happened a long time ago, and the town doesn’t seem that likely to repeat them any time soon. The first British saint – the eponymous St Alban – was martyred here by beheading in the third century; the St Albans School includes Adrian IV, the only British Pope, among its past pupils.

  The first version of the most English of all documents – the Magna Carta – was drafted in St Albans Abbey. Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, just down the road from the abbey, has a strong claim to be the oldest pub in Britain.

  Currently, though, about one in five of the population commutes to London each day. The property agency, Savills, describes it as the ‘über-commuter town’ and, in April 2009, the Guardian reported that residents of St Albans pay the most tax per capita of any town or city in the UK – about £10,000 each, more than double the national average (Hull was the lowest town on the list).

  You can also tell a lot about St Albans by the fact that the council ran a massive campaign to get St Albans selected as the most expensive Monopoly property on the new version of the board game launched in 2007. The top squares were decided by a national internet vote and, following the campaign, in which the town’s mayor appeared on radio to battle with rival mayors, St Albans replaced Mayfair as the top square, having taken 10 per cent of the million plus votes in the competition. A spokesperson for Liverpool, which ended up as the cheapest square, said, ‘I suppose you can spend a lot of time on this sort of thing in a place where nothing much else is going on.’ That is what we in the comedy industry call a zinger.

  My gig in St Albans was one of two halves. In the first, I struggled to lift the energy at all. The man from the Foreign Office was certainly able to confirm that his job was a lot less interesting when the only bit of empire remaining was Gibraltar, which is basically a monkey safari off Spain.

  The man selling investment products took the time after each question to confer with all of his friends, as if all his public pronouncements had to be cleared with a committee.

  The man who ran a cleaning company just stared at me like I was filthy.

  ‘I’m fucking hating this gig,’ I said to Damon at the interval. ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’

  ‘Yeah… well, the thing is…’ Damon started, awkwardly, ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, but The Times is in.’

  I have a rule about not knowing when we have reviewers in. It dates back from the small rooms in Edinburgh, where you’d scan the forty people in attendance furiously, looking for the one with a notepad. And then you’d spend the rest of the hour directing the entire show at that one person in a desperate attempt to bump yourself up a star on the ratings. It was a route to madness.

  In the larger theatres, there’s no danger of seeing the man with a notepad, so this embargo is a bit pointless and Damon was right to spill the beans. I absolutely tore up the second half, thus proving that those three laws I wrote about earlier should really only be viewed as a guideline, and that I should put some more effort in.

  When the review was printed a couple of days later, I scoured it to see if the Times comedy reviewer Dominic Maxwell had spotted this sudden upsurge in energy. And even though it wasn’t mentioned explicitly, he did note that I could sometimes be a little more ‘inclusive’, including this exchange:

  ‘Have I come out with the wrong face?’ [O Briain] asks, as audience members are slow to answer his questions. ‘Am I like a bear sniffing you f***ers for fresh meat?’ Well, quite: sometimes it does look like he’s out to mock the weak.

  And if I thought I had dodged that bullet, well, there was a sting in the tail.

  The show tails off when O Briain oversells a story about crisps, palpably trying to force finale-levels of funniness out of an amusing anecdote. Following which, his usually endearing habit of providing footnotes for his own material – the crisps routine goes down very differently in Ireland, he tells us – just clogs up the ending.

  It was only telling me what I already knew – that Tayto story had to go.

  Croydon Fairfield Halls

  1 coffee-machine-repair engineer

  1 father of a twelve-, fourteen- and seventeen-year-old

  1 student of television and journalism

  1 quite hostile teacher

  Historically, of course, people lived where they worked – rural people lived near their land and urban people lived close to their workplace, often in a flat over their shop or bu
siness. Until large-scale mass transport, the suburbs were only there for the very, very rich, who had large estates outside of the town, or the very poor, who couldn’t afford to live within the walls. One of the definitions of ‘suburb’ in the 1668 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was ‘a place of inferior, debased and especially licentious habits of life’.

  Is it unfair to bring this up when talking about Croydon? Maybe. But the town doesn’t really sit in this company in many ways. It’s a lot closer to the centre of London, and it certainly doesn’t strike you as quite as settled and middle class as the others. It also looks like Frankfurt, for some reason. Every other town along the South Circular looks like every London village: houses, houses, houses, then suddenly a broadway of banks, pubs, fried-chicken shops and a Boots, then houses, houses, houses until the next village. That’s the way London is. Until you hit Croydon, and suddenly it’s a boulevard with tower blocks on either side. It looks like one of these cities built so that the people could travel underground to avoid terrible weather; like the summers in Atlanta or those harsh Montreal winters. Croydon, of course, gets the same drizzly nothing as the rest of the country. A visionary architect must have kept saying, ‘Just give me one town and I will change the way you view urban planning for ever!’ So they gave him Croydon and he didn’t. He’s probably working in a bakery now.

  It was a different kind of tough crowd that night. One man sat side on to the stage with a scowl on his face.

  ‘Are you enjoying the show, sir?’

  ‘Not really. My wife wanted to come.’

  Any attempts to draw him into some happy banter fell on deaf ears, lending the night a tense air.

  After the show, I was due to have a drink with the builder who was working on my house, who lived locally and had asked to come along. While we chatted, Damon noticed an event taking place in the room next door.

  ‘You should come see this, this is great!’ he reported back.

  In the conference room of the Croydon Fairfield Halls, uniquely among theatres in the UK, there was a boxing ring. Before the show, I had noted how many shaven-headed men had turned up for my show with gym bags. ‘This is not my usual crowd,’ I had said to Damon. It turned out they weren’t my crowd at all. We sneaked in just in time for the top of the bill, and I stood with Damon, my builder and his wife, watching two heavyweights slug it out.

  More theatres should offer this service. Two large men, pounding each other round the ring, while a comedian looks on, bobbing and weaving in sympathy, a pint in his hand. And, in his mind’s eye, the difficult audience member keeps failing to connect, no matter how many haymakers he throws, until with one left hook from the funnyman, bam! and he’s being counted out: 1, 2, 3…

  … and all the time the comic just keeps dancing.

  Basingstoke Anvil Theatre

  1 man who sells telephone systems

  1 karate teacher

  1 cargo manager

  To end this week among a typical slice of England, we reach Basingstoke on 23 April, St George’s Day.

  Basingstoke was once a prosperous market town, which developed into an industrial centre when the railway arrived in 1839. However, being almost fifty miles south-west of London, it avoided initial growth as a commuter town. After the Second World War, it was then used as a destination for the development of public housing in the ‘London Overspill’ plan and also took off as a dormitory town for the wealthier class of commuters. It’s a generally wealthy place, with some big local employers, high per capita living standards and low unemployment. It’s 97 per cent white and has very high levels of owner-occupiers compared to England as a whole. Unsurprisingly, Basingstoke has been a solidly Conservative area since the 1920s. This, then, would seem like the perfect place to enjoy such an important day.

  St George is the patron saint of England. He is also the patron saint of Portugal, Greece, Georgia, Lithuania, Ethiopia, Palestine and the Spanish region of Catalonia, so he must have a terribly conflicted time during the European Championships. There is some debate about his identity, however there probably was a real St George – an officer in the Roman army who lived in what is now modern-day Turkey and was beheaded because he refused to renounce his Christianity. He was martyred, supposedly, on 23 April AD303. His body was buried in Palestine, where his mother is thought to have come from originally. As a Christian martyr, George was revered in the Eastern Church, which explains why he’s the patron of Georgia, Greece and Palestine.

  Just to confuse things, he’s also retrospectively considered by Muslims as having died ‘in a state of Islam’, just as Jesus and the Jewish prophets are considered holy men. He’s seen as a martyr to monotheism and, in parts of the Middle East, he has become entwined with the Islamic figure El Khidr, to whom mosques are dedicated in Jerusalem and Beirut.

  Even the Christian church where St George’s remains are supposedly buried is venerated by Muslims. In 1995, travel writer William Dalrymple asked the local priest if he received many Muslim visitors, to which he replied, ‘We get hundreds! Almost as many as the Christian pilgrims. Often, when I come in here, I find Muslims all over the floor, in the aisles, up and down.’

  Why St George is the patron of England takes a little more explaining. It wasn’t until the Crusades that George became a major figure in the English imagination. The St George’s Cross – a red cross on a white background – was actually the flag of the City of Genoa, but was flown by English ships in the Mediterranean from 1190 onwards as England enjoyed the protection of the Genoese fleet. This means that the Muslims like George, but are a little less taken with the flag and, given its role in a major religious war, I’m not sure I blame them.

  The crusaders tended to wear the design, and returning crusaders also brought the whole dragon myth with them to England. Edward III made St George the official patron of England and, in the Middle Ages, St George’s Day was a popular holiday like Christmas or Easter.

  As England expanded and became the United Kingdom and then the British Empire, the Union Jack replaced the St George’s Cross in most places and celebrating the feast day also became less common. In the early 1960s, St George’s Day was actually demoted to being a minor memorial in the Catholic Church.

  In the last few years, there has been a campaign to re-launch St George’s Day, in an effort to find a few non-sporting occasions for self-celebration. It was part of the Romantic, nostalgic side of the English personality, and also an expression of that bizarre section of England I mentioned at the beginning of the book that likes to perceive itself the victim of a terrible injustice. How can the Celts have their day? Why has everyone heard of Paddy’s Day and not of Brave St George? Where are our parades?

  There are a couple of simple reasons why St Patrick’s Day is a massive global success story and St George’s Day is not. Obviously, there’s the drinking, the parades and the enormous Irish diaspora, which clung to the festival as a celebration of home and, as they became more successful in their new lands, developed it into the cavalcade of Guinness and green that it is today. To a huge extent, it was the foreign Irish that made Paddy’s Day into the brand you recognize today. In the last decade or so, we’ve had to expand it unrecognizably in Dublin from a parade on the day, into an entire weekend of festivities, and all of this just to keep up with the Americans. They would come over and wonder why it was a smaller party in Dublin than it was in New York.

  England can have none of this. You drink as much as we do, but we’ve already seen you don’t really approve of it, and you certainly would never sell yourselves internationally on a reputation for drinking. You have a diaspora, of sorts, in the sense that you have ex-pats all over the world. This is fundamentally different to Ireland, however, in that your diaspora is mainly in Provence, where they moved to of their own accord. In the tragic tale of Irish emigration, very rarely was anyone overheard on the coffin ships saying, ‘Well, we’ve just always wanted to run a small hotel in the Dordogne. The kids have reached that age, so we
said, what the hell, let’s go for it.’

  It also doesn’t help that St George never even set foot in England. There are no historical sites to venerate, because he was never here. This is similar to the never-ending English devotion to the hymn ‘Jerusalem’, despite it being a long feedline to a very curt and obvious punchline:

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green? No.

  And was the holy Lamb of God

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen? Nope.

  And did the Countenance Divine

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills? Still a big nooo, I’m afraid.

  And was Jerusalem builded here

  Among those dark Satanic mills? No. It wasn’t. Sorry about that.

  And it’s ‘built’, by the way.

  There is a far, far more fundamental reason as to why it is ludicrous to compare the two festivals. A far more obvious reason, and one which always makes St George look like a small boy trying to play a man’s game.

  St Patrick’s Day is a religious festival. It is a very important religious festival. It is a very important religious festival in a country that basically has had only one religion for hundreds of years and a religion that is taken very seriously. It is a Holy Day of Obligation, so if you’re a Catholic, you have to go to Mass. And since everyone in Ireland (give or take; up until recently) was a Catholic, that means that the entire country came to a halt. Are we beginning to see where St George might be looking like a fairly half-arsed competitor yet? Ah, but there’s more.