Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  ‘Oh, no, wait,’ interrupts the voice. ‘He’s here beside me.’

  Long, long laughter.

  They have a pretty dark sense of humour in Belfast anyway, as Damon discovered. Spotting the nervous visiting Englishman, the stage crew would tease him by pointing at random passing strangers and, in a hushed tone, whispering, ‘Do you see him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And then they’d look both ways, lean in and slowly spell out, ‘I.R.A.’

  Damon would be left sneaking a glance at the perfectly innocent primary-school teacher wandering past with his shopping.

  Ipswich Regent Theatre

  1 organic farmer

  1 database manager from Norwich (‘Boo!’ go the crowd)

  1 man who worked in flood-danger protection:

  ‘Any tips?’

  ‘Yeah. Live on a hill.’

  Just when we’re almost finished with this ridiculous week, the nightmare journey. Returning from Belfast into Stansted, we started out for East Anglia. We got word from the sound crew a couple of hours ahead of us, however, that the A14 was impassable, just as similar news was coming through on Five Live travel. We pulled off the motorway at what, it later transpired, was the last possible moment, and found ourselves in countryside. Then the scramble started to find alternative routes, veering down from M to A to B on our road designations, while the sat-nav kept loudly correcting us. She couldn’t see the sense in routing the trip round eighteenth-century farmhouses and duck ponds when there was a perfectly good piece of four-lane tarmacadam just to the left of us. We’re supposed to get to the theatre with a couple of hours to spare. When the screen gave us an ETA which was fifteen minutes later than the time the show was supposed to start, the sat-nav got ditched, and it was just me with a map.

  As the roads got narrower, and the time of the gig grew closer, my directions were getting more and more staccato. What had started as ‘Why not try here?’ became ‘Fifty yards right turn. Now sharp left. Stop admiring the farmhouse! Make a left here!’

  All this time, we’re making frantic calls to the theatre to arrange another sound system and to get them to do their own soundcheck. ‘Just mumble in an Irish accent, and we’ll use those settings.’

  Some months later, I was on Five Live and had the pleasure of sharing the experience with Nick, the travel guy. ‘You know all that banter and bonhomie you have in here? Well, we were stuck in traffic, waiting for news, and it sounded like you were having cocktails.’ God bless him, it wasn’t his fault, but we wanted to blame somebody.

  We got to the theatre with five minutes to spare. The crowd were already in, the new microphone was on stage, and nobody would ever have known the shitty, panicky day we’d had. All that crowd will remember was that I walked out with my flies undone.

  Norwich Theatre Royal

  It was a much shorter hop across to Norwich the following day, enlivened mainly by passing my absolute favourite road-sign in the country. It’s for the nearby town of Wymondham.

  It’s a brown sign, meant to entice passing travellers by listing in graphic form the many delights of the town. You’ve seen these before, thumbnails of leisure by the side of the road. A little boat, a crossed knife and fork, a carousel.

  The Wymondham sign has a picture of a church and, next to it, a duck. And the duck is the same size as the church. This is a promise that cannot possibly be fulfilled. There is no way that this small Norfolk town can be harbouring a duck the size of a cathedral. Surely the authorities would have been called in by now. How can they bake enough bread to keep the duck happy?

  This piece of whimsy kept me happy all the way through the show. Then I went home, took a couple of weeks off and became a father.

  Chapter 12:

  I Will Always Love My English Child

  There are very few times that I have used stand-up as a form of therapy, but this is definitely one of them.

  In 2004, I performed a show in Edinburgh and later on tour called Dara O Briain: Migrant Worker. It was partly about the difficult beginnings of multiculturalism in Ireland and how, despite denying themselves the credit for this, the English had very successfully dealt with the issue. The show touched on how little experience the Irish had with different cultures at all.

  The centrepiece was a long story about attending a Catholic/Protestant wedding and the shocking discovery that, despite years of hype, the two faiths seemed to have little or nothing to distinguish them. In fact, they actually used the same words, in the same order, all through the service. Sample joke:

  ‘That’s not a mixed marriage. A mixed marriage is one side of the room saying “Mazel Tov!” and the other side firing guns in the air. A mixed marriage is one side parading a giant paper dragon through the room while, on the other side, men with spears are leaping up and down, trying to win a mate. That’s a mixed marriage.’

  In the middle of that show, though, there was a smaller routine, less of a showpiece, but one that has probably had more profound echoes in my life.

  It was the ‘I Will Always Love My English Child’ routine.

  There is very little written about one aspect of multicultural societies. While there is so much discussion about how different the newcomers are to the indigenous population, I’ve rarely heard any talk about how much of a contrast the children of immigrants are to their parents.

  That might not sound like a big deal to you, but imagine you’re from Salisbury, say. Now imagine your little Salisbury children. Imagine calling to them. And now imagine them answering in a strong Nigerian accent. That’s how weird it is for the immigrants. You just don’t presume that your children will sound different to you.

  (I pick Salisbury, because I once tried to explain there how strange it would be to have an English child, and they just looked at me, genuinely puzzled, as if to say, ‘But… all children are English.’)

  It doesn’t help if you’re familiar with the many accents here, by the way. Being able to tell different English accents apart doesn’t make them less foreign. I mentioned the idea of this routine to a friend of mine, an Irishwoman living in London, while we were all out in a bar once.

  ‘I’m doing a bit about how weird it would be to have a child with an English accent,’ I said.

  ‘I know EXACTLY what you mean!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’m more afraid of, if my child goes, “Ello, Mummy, awright, yeah!” or “Mummy, Mummy, Natasha has a pony, why can’t I have a pony?”’

  And we fell about laughing, to the bemusement of our partners, both of whom are English.

  The accent is only the most superficial manifestation of this alien culture I’m bringing a child into. Not alien to the child, of course. But most people have some element of patriotism and a sense that they and their family are all from the same somewhere. It feels unnatural to carve a schism through a family on nationality. But that’s the only way to do it if you’re an immigrant. I am Irish, my children will not be. That was my country, they are from somewhere else. They won’t be raised Irish, in a ludicrous, artificial holding pattern, until they get the chance to go ‘home’. They are home. I hope they’ll be interested in my heritage, but I won’t be demanding that they go to Irish-dancing classes. I hope they won’t want to go to Morris-dancing classes, but at least it’s their own.

  Incidentally, none of this is informed by any fears that an Irish child would be at a disadvantage in England. Quite the opposite in fact.

  The Irish do appear to receive unequal treatment within English society, but this unequal treatment is almost universally in our favour. The simple fact is that, as a group, the Irish in England have done really well. Irish people, along with the Chinese and Indians, are more likely than British people to have high GCSE marks. They are also more likely to have a degree – one in four Irish people versus one in six white British people. More than one in three Irish workers is employed in a managerial or professional job, compared to one in four British workers. It’s hard not to think that, if the English are
biased against the Irish, they’re not very good at it.

  (Some of the stereotypes do appear to be true, by the way: Six out of ten men and four out of ten women with an Irish ethnic background living in England drank in excess of the recommended daily levels on at least one day a week, according to a major survey in 1999. This was by far the highest of any ethnic group and far above the norm for the UK. And one in five Irish men was involved in the construction industry, much higher than the national average of one in eight. I’ll just steer the kid away from concrete mixers. And whiskey. That’s generally good parenting, though, isn’t it?)

  Despite these clear advantages to being a Paddy, I think the child should get to have its own nationality, rather than mine. Obviously, that’s the healthy attitude to take, but the notions of passing on nationality are adhesive, and I was glad of an entire month of gigs in Edinburgh to do the routine and shake off these old ideas; to free myself to stand up in front of a crowd and say, ‘I will love my English child.’ And when that felt comfortable, I took the show to Ireland, where I could have some proper fun with it.

  You can make an Irish crowd boo by saying something like that. Not a proper ‘Boo!’, like a ‘Get off the stage, we hate you, boo!’ But still, it taps into our sense of England being (at the very least) our panto villains. You were a lot worse than that, and for a long time, not that you realized it. G. K. Chesterton once remarked that ‘the tragedy of the English conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century is that the Irish can never forget it and the English can never remember it.’

  England’s role as historical nemesis has reduced down now to the moustachio-twirling vaudeville villain. If you mention England on an Irish stage, you should have a piano player trilling, ‘Dant-dant-daaaahh.’

  I used to tell a joke about how you could eliminate binge drinking in Ireland by simply running a poster that said, ‘Binge drinking! It’s very English, isn’t it?’

  And, in that spirit, the words ‘I will love my English child’ always felt faintly transgressive and empowering onstage – like shouting, ‘I’m here and I’m queer!’ It is the love that dare not speak its name.

  ‘I will look at my English child,’ I told them, ‘without there being an asterisk above their head that leads to a footnote saying, “But you shouldn’t have invaded the country for eight hundred years.”’

  Of course, only a monster would ever boo a parent’s love for his child, so I piled it on.

  ‘I will love my English child, even if’ – the audience looks wary – ‘he scores the winning goal’ – building unrest in the crowd – ‘for England against Ireland’ – a chorus of boos – ‘in Croke Park’ – the addition of the sacred home of Irish sport raising the boos to a thunderclap crescendo. I’m onstage pointing at a blameless, imaginary child while an Irish crowd roar, ‘Hang him!’

  Panto villains are so much fun.

  With the decision made, then, my child will be raised here and draped in the flag of St George. However, it might be worth seeing what challenges come with being a young person in England.

  The school system alone is a proper head-wrecker. Now, the choice you make for your child’s education is always going to feel like an experiment. The problem, of course, is that each of us has only had one childhood. None of us has much evidence to go on, other than how happy we are with how we turned out, and how much we’d like to replicate that for our little ones.

  Personally, I went through an all-Irish-language education, which left me bilingual and argumentative. These are both traits I would love to pass on, but there are sadly very few all-Irish-language schools in London. Therefore, with no option of trying to foist a re-creation of my upbringing, I am free to judge the English system without baggage. You have three options: The Gamble (on the state system), The Lie (about your newfound religion or your newfound address) or The Enclave (of middle-class, fee-paying parents). Wonderful.

  (I’m not going to join in the game of presuming that English schools are rubbish. Irish people love to convince themselves of the unparalleled excellence of their school system, and that all England has is Grange Hill with more knives. This is despite the fact that we have a national language, taught to us compulsorily for fourteen years, and almost no one can speak it. Every day! For fourteen years! Plus, somebody pointed out to me exactly why I shouldn’t be so smug about the Irish system: ‘Dara, you’re a professional clown; your wife, who’s English, is a surgeon. Which education system did you say was better?’)

  The entire language of parenting in England, especially among the middle classes, tries to imply that every single decision you make for your children is vital, utterly vital, to their later success in life. My own recollection of childhood is that it was primarily containment until I was about fourteen, and then I started to get a little more focused and stuff began to sink in. Not so in England, where every choice made from the age of three is at a junction where the path to a decent university and personal fulfilment can be missed and never picked up again.

  The Irish school system is more focused on a general education than England’s, meaning that students are doing seven subjects when they finish rather than three. The Irish university entrance is centralized as well, meaning that the pressure occurs right at the end of the student’s education, in a national set of exams at eighteen, rather than at the start, when parents desperately push to get their beloved into the right school at four.

  It can be earlier than that even. There is a noticeboard near my home which carries an ad for a local toddler group. This is essentially a soft-play area, a place for parents or nannies to get a breather while their little ones run around. Nonetheless, the ad contains the words ‘Give your child the best head start in life!’ Don’t mess this up, parents; there’s a place at Cambridge at stake.

  Paradoxically, all this worrying about schooling takes place in a bizarre and negative wider context.

  If there is one part of English culture which looks truly inexplicable to an Irish person, it is your attitude to your own young. For some reason, you think they’re scum.

  Now, obviously, I don’t think that you, the reader, as an individual, loathes your own children. In all likelihood, you’re probably quite fond of them. But English society, and the media in particular, absolutely fucking loathes them. On the one hand, they’re violent – perennially happy-slapping ASBO magnets, skulking round estates, waggling knives around and putting the word ‘innit’ at the end of every sentence. On the other hand, if you can get them to go to school, the only way they can be taught is if every subject is made ‘relevant’, so that they’re never three minutes away from a reference to Big Brother and Skins, even when they’re studying physics; and the exams they do are remedial and they all get A’s, which just goes to show (somehow) how stupid they are.

  The public perception of young people is so bad in this country that, if I meet a teenager who isn’t feral, I immediately run to the parent and grab them and go, ‘How do you do it? How?’

  On one of the last days of this tour, in fact, me and Damon spent a long drive north listening to a story breaking about this very phenomenon.

  A survey conducted for the children’s charity Barnardo’s had found that more than half of British adults (54 per cent) think that children in Britain are beginning to behave like animals. Almost half of those surveyed (49 per cent) also thought that children represented a danger to adults and each other. Roughly one in three adults agreed with the sentiment that it feels like the streets are currently infested with children and, most insanely, more than four out of ten British adults now feel that something needs to be done to protect society from children.

  Barnardo’s had commissioned the poll as part of a campaign to combat the increasingly negative picture the British public has of its own children, but said that even they were shocked by how negative the views expressed were.

  The strangest thing was that, all day long, we were sitting in the car listening to people calling radio stations to reac
t to this survey when it was released; and the people who phoned in didn’t seem to respond with surprise at the ridiculous levels of overreaction. No, the general response was to treat the survey as proof that, yes, children are behaving like animals. They didn’t recognize the survey as a rebuke; they took it as evidence: everyone thinks young people are out of control, so it must be true.

  The Barnardo’s survey is only the latest to point out this unhealthy prejudice. For example, for one week in August 2005, the research company Ipsos MORI examined the national and local newspapers for references to children and young people. They found that 57 per cent of the stories published portrayed young people in a negative light, compared to just 12 per cent of the stories which painted a positive picture.

  Of course, the perception in matters such as crime is always skewed towards fear. A study called ‘Youth Crime and Youth Justice’ from 2004 found that three-quarters of British people thought that the number of young offenders had gone up in recent years, despite the fact that the number had actually fallen.

  This survey also found that 64 per cent of the people who had negative views on youth crime were basing their answer on media reports rather than personal experience of youth crime in their area. Barnardo’s has also pointed to findings from the official British Crime Survey which suggest that the general public feels that young people commit about half of all crime, when the reality is that they’re responsible for about one-eighth. Ipsos MORI reported in 2006 that British adults believed that about half of all crime committed by young people involved violence, while the real figure is around 20 per cent.

  This bizarre misrepresentation is beginning to get international attention as well. In October 2008, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child published a report on the status of the rights of children in the UK which expressed concern ‘at the general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children, especially adolescents, which appears to exist in the UK, including in the media’. The Committee also had 120 separate recommendations on how Britain could treat its kids better, which Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home Editor, accurately described as ‘almost as if the social services have arrived and informed us that we aren’t suitable parents’. The report’s recommendations included ending the ASBO system, protecting children who appear on reality TV, and stopping the use of so-called ‘mosquito sprays’. You couldn’t find a more fitting metaphor for the way in which Britain views teenagers, by the way. The mosquito spray is a high-frequency sonic device which emits an annoying noise that only younger ears can hear. It’s used to prevent teens from loitering in public places and was, naturally enough, invented in Britain. More than three thousand of these devices have been sold in the UK, despite claims by human-rights campaigners that they infringe on young people’s civil rights. One person quoted in the media as being in favour of the use of the devices was one Chrissy Barclay, a Crime Prevention Officer for Hertsmere, who summed up a good deal of Britain’s attitude to kids by saying: ‘Young people have to learn that certain behaviours are not acceptable, like standing in groups and being intimidating, or gathering outside shops and off-licences.’