Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  Or, to give such behaviours their technical name, free assembly.

  I’m not saying that all of England’s teenagers are saints. In 2006, the Institute for Public Policy Research pulled together the results from a wide range of European research surveys, which suggested that English teens were either top or near the top on all of the main indicators of ‘bad’ behaviour – sexual activity, drug-taking, drinking and violence (although Ireland was ahead of the UK on binge drinking and use of some drugs). However, they didn’t invent bad behaviour.

  In November 2008, Frank Field MP gave a speech at the University of Leicester on the threat of a new generation of teenage monsters. Mr Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, suggested that the basic cause of this downward trend in British society was ‘the growing collapse in the art of good parenting’. It was a far cry from the golden age of the 1950s, which, he claimed, ‘were the peak years for Britain being a peaceful and self-governing kingdom’.

  Here we go again: the fifties as popular touchstone for the nostalgia peddlers. Unsurprisingly, this is nonsense.

  In the 1950s, far from patting themselves on the back for how great everything was and how polite young people were, the British media and establishment were convinced that young people, especially teddy boys, were out of control and were being led by dangerous new trends and foreign music down the path to juvenile delinquency. The newspapers went from referring to the group as ‘Edwardians’ to ‘teddy boys’, then ‘spivs’ and ‘hooligans’, before moving to ‘gang members’ and ‘gangsters’, although there was no evidence of gang-type organization within the Teds, barring occasional random mob violence. There was even a whole series of exploitation films depicting the threat posed by rampant Teds to society, with titles such as Violent Playground and Cosh.

  The sociologist Stanley Cohen, who popularized the term ‘moral panic’, has suggested that the teddy-boy hysteria was the first real British moral panic over youth culture, with Britain repeating this wild overreaction to every new manifestation of youth culture that has come along since. After that, we had the mods and rockers rioting on Brighton Beach in the 1960s, and then innumerable instances of football violence in town centres up and down the country throughout the seventies and eighties. Scary young people didn’t arrive in the UK along with happy slapping.

  But, given what we know about the English character, it shouldn’t be that surprising to find out that they may have arrived much earlier. In his recent book, The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies finds that the English capacity to misunderstand juvenile bad behaviour is at least 120 years old. His book deals with the late Victorian ‘Scuttlers’ – youth gangs that caused a media storm in Manchester from 1860 onwards. MPs called for the reintroduction of flogging in 1890 to deal with the problem. The chief expert on the problem, Alexander Devine, wrote in his 1890 work, Scuttlers and Scuttling: Their Prevention and Cure, that Scuttling seemed to be caused by poor parenting, lax discipline in schools, scarce facilities and entertainment for young people in Manchester’s slums and the ‘malign influence of sensationalist novels’. One hundred and twenty years have passed and, while bad parenting, school indiscipline and poor facilities are still very much present, England can feel proud that they triumphed over the menace to their children represented by sensationalist novels.

  What seems to be the big problem here is that, as far as I can see, England has chosen to ethnicize its young. In this country, they are treated as a tribe apart and described in harsh general terms that drag them all down. Young people commit crime, young people are violent and out of control, old people are frightened of young people. Replace the word ‘young’ with the word ‘black’, or indeed ‘Irish’, and see how ludicrous and damaging these generalizations are.

  By contrast, the Irish attitude to its youth is extraordinarily positive. They are regarded as well-educated, ambitious and confident. They are told at an early age that it is great to be Irish, that Ireland is a young country (whatever that means) and that the world is grateful to have them around.

  They can’t handle their drink, of course (sorry, young people of Ireland, but you’re generally terrible drunks, shouty and uncoordinated; I’ve been watching you stumble round festivals for years now, roaring, ‘How’s it goin’!’ and ‘Legend!’ at each other and falling over. You’d think with the practice you’ve had…). Ireland isn’t a particularly violent society either, and people are more readily seen as the victims of societal ills, be it drugs or unemployment or immigration, rather than the instigators of crime.

  I blame the Pope. John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979 and famously said, ‘Young people of Ireland, I love you!’ What could the very Catholic older generation do but agree? They couldn’t contradict the Pope. And the young people have been basking in that glow ever since.

  Barnardo’s learned one important lesson. The feral nature of young people is just one of those things – like the failure of Terminal Five and the uselessness of the NHS – which the English people Cannot Be Talked Out Of.

  In thirty years’ time, a new generation of parents will be bemoaning the youth of the day, shaking their heads and wondering how society has declined so far. Among them will be my own children, cursing their lot as they struggle to eke out an existence, little suspecting that it’s their father’s fault. If I’d just brought them to that toddler group all those years ago. That was where I went wrong.

  Chapter 13:

  The Backbone of the Nation

  With summer looming, we head out for one last week on the road before taking a break. In a triumph of organization, or thanks to a rare burst of good luck, this handful of gigs falls in a straight line, directly up the spine of the country. First up is Derby and, for one night only, a proper healthy meal.

  This wasn’t my idea, it was the idea of some producer on Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word. As an item on the show, they wanted Gordon to join me backstage at one of my gigs, and we would prepare a light, nutritious dinner, of the type, the story demanded, that was impossible to eat when you’re a stand-up comedian touring the country.

  It’s not impossible to eat healthily on tour, it just requires a lot of motivation. The schedule tends to work against it. You arrive for a soundcheck at six thirty, the show starts at eight and you finish close to ten forty-five. In order to have a decent meal, I’d have to eat at 5 p.m. Or 11 p.m. Not many quality restaurants base their business plan around these timings. So it’s highstreet chains and nervous pizza boys for early-bird Dara and curryhouses for the after-show wind-down.

  This means that I am also not the best placed to discuss England in terms of food. Is it getting better out there? I hope so. One of the old reliable canards about the English was that they were fundamentally uninterested in food. It was never very clear whether this was because English food was terrible, or whether English food was terrible because the English weren’t interested in it.

  Traditionally, the food here could generally be reduced to the formula ‘X and Y’: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, bangers and mash, or fish and chips. Cooking wasn’t about carefully combining separate ingredients but, rather, an incredibly literal style of cooking the ingredients and then placing them on a plate side by side. It’s no coincidence that England’s main contribution to world cuisine has been the sandwich – a food that allows you to eat with one hand while continuing your card game with the other. At least in Ireland we made stew.

  The English, as a nation, are also relatively new to dining out. As John Burnett points out in England Eats Out: 1830 to the Present, going out to eat for leisure purposes was largely restricted to the rich in England until after the Second World War. Poorer people did eat outside the home, but it was generally because they had to for work, and they tended to eat very basic meals from food stalls, pubs or, later, in ‘caffs’. It wasn’t until the arrival of post-Second World War affluence that eating out in a proper restaurant became a regular activity for ordinary people. A certain nervousness caused by this late arrival may be t
he reason why there are so many English jokes and sketches about table manners. The Hungarian author George Mikes remarked in 1946 that ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.’

  Given this late start, though, the English have taken to eating out with great enthusiasm. UK households now spend around £77 billion on food and non-alcoholic drink for consumption at home, but they spend £78 billion on eating outside the home. This means you now eat out more than the Americans or, surprisingly, the French.

  The English insecurity about food has in many cases morphed into open-faced snobbery. (Have you seen Come Dine With Me? It would be better titled Come Judge My Soup, You Pricks.) This superiority could be easily applied to the country’s favourite dishes. After all, no one in Bologna would recognize Spaghetti Bolognese, and Indian food in the UK is all made by Bangladeshis. Chicken tikka masala, once described as Britain’s real national dish by former foreign secretary Robin Cook, was apparently invented by a Bangladeshi chef in Glasgow sometime in the 1950s – but this snobbery is missing the point. What makes the English a great nation is their pragmatism, and food is, after all, a practical consideration. They accepted that their own food wasn’t that great and enthusiastically embraced the offerings of their new arrivals. The Bangladeshi, Indian, Italian and Chinese immigrants who served up this food adapted it to the tastes of their new customers as best they could. In turn, the Brits mixed together the things they liked. We like curry and we like chips, so we’ll love curry chips. We like Mars bars and we like deep-frying, and so on.

  Today, there are close to ten thousand Indian restaurants in the United Kingdom, serving around 2.5 million customers a week and, if they are largely run by Bangladeshi owners, who serve adapted versions of food from the sub-continent with chips, then so what? The curry industry is worth about £1 billion annually, and British manufacturers export chicken tikka masala to India. Any other nation would just call it fusion cuisine and move on.

  Tonight, in Derby, I had a celebrity chef all to myself, and all I needed to enjoy it was to get the producer to stop banging on about healthy eating. I’m a big man and, in the eyes of telly people, that reduces me down to ‘Problem eater! Let’s send in an expert!’ I didn’t want a diet expert, I wanted something nice to eat, for once. Gordon was my fast-track to a decent steak. Then the fucker turned up with prawns and rice.

  For the record, Ramsay was charming and friendly and buzzed around in that way ‘alpha males’ characteristically do: dictating the pace, talking non-stop and telling you stuff you already knew about your own job. The more obviously driven amongst us often do that. I call it the ‘Let me tell you about that’ opening.

  You meet an alpha male and they’ll say hello and ask what you do. You’ll say ‘Nurse’ or ‘Air-traffic controller’ or ‘Pope’. And then the alpha male will immediately go, ‘Let me tell you about nursing/aeroplanes/delivering Mass in the Vatican…’

  Gordon had a little of that about him (at one stage he started telling me how to handle a crowd at a live cookery demonstration), but he carried it well. Besides, I’m a solo operator, he’s the one with the four thousand staff to keep geeing up. I only have to keep myself motivated, and that’s enough of a struggle sometimes.

  ‘We’re going to make something with chervil,’ said Ramsay enthusiastically, to blank looks from me. Then he dragged me into Derby’s local market and pointed at vegetables for ten minutes, while I failed to identify them:

  ‘Cale?’

  ‘It’s a marrow.’

  Then we were rushed back to the kitchen in Derby Assembly Rooms, and I watched him cook. The dish he was preparing was a Spicy Tiger Prawn Pilaf, and I heartily recommend you Google the recipe and give it a crack; I had to Google it later myself, partly because Gordon was cooking so quickly but mainly because I was constantly trying to fend off questions he’d been told to ask about my poor eating habits and lectures he wanted to give about the importance of a healthy, balanced diet. I had no interest in getting health advice from Gordon Ramsay. I just wanted something tasty for my tummy.

  Despite this educational undercurrent, we had a pleasant afternoon out-cursing each other, and I parted company with the celebrity chef on good terms. He left me the best single meal I’ve ever had before a show and, as a bonus, confused a good-sized chunk of the audience, who’d spotted him on the way out and spent the whole gig wondering when he was going to make an appearance.

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ I could hear them muttering. ‘He must be coming out for the encore.’ Sadly for them, by the time I’d delivered my first gag, Gordon was long gone.

  Derby Assembly Rooms

  1 man who works in business continuity

  1 teacher, whose wife is also a teacher

  1 man who works for the Nottingham police force as a ‘performance tester’

  1 lorry driver

  The Assembly Rooms in Derby is a great comedy room, easily in the top five in the country. There is no architectural reason for this. It’s a pretty ugly modern build, and it lacks the intimacy of the Victorian theatres. The town centre outside is no help either: one big concrete plaza, and you can almost see tumbleweed rolling around. I have no relationship with the place either, other than turning up every couple of years and cracking some jokes.

  So it remains a riddle as to why the gigs always go so beautifully there.

  Admittedly, all I remember about my previous visit was a woman shouting, ‘My husband wants a penguin!’ from the crowd. I think I was talking to her husband at the time; I think he sold mobile phones. I have no idea how we took the leap from that to his crazy-pet dreams. Luckily, the husband was happy to confirm that he had often expressed the desire to own a penguin, and we all agreed that having a tiny maître d’ round the house would be a good thing.

  This year things began more prosaically:

  ‘I work in business continuity.’

  A dull silence from the rest of the crowd. ‘Business continuity’ sounds like arranging bridging loans for expanding call centres. It isn’t, of course. It is, actually, the coolest job in the world. Business continuity is the sector of industry which promises to keep your offices and shops functioning after a flood, a terror attack or a meteor shower. Or anything else that happens in a disaster movie that they could threaten your shareholders with.

  It’s an industry entirely made up of ex-army guys scaring the hell out of accountants:

  ‘Have you made contingency plans for an assault on your offices by suicide bombers/bears/an army of the undead?’ barks a man with a scar.

  ‘Well,’ the accountant says, looking nervously round to the other accountants, ‘we never thought…’

  ‘You never thought! Well think about this!’ says the army guy as he slides photographs from war-zones across the table, all blood and guts and machetes sticking out of heads.

  ‘Eeeek!’ cry the accountants, and they start writing cheques.

  A friend of mine works in PR for a large Oxford Street department store and, when I was enthusing about this very subject once, she revealed that she had been given a pass to the organization’s secret bunker. It’s good to know that, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, she’ll still be around to get the word out about the sales in bedding. Her husband was less thrilled, as the invite didn’t extend to him or the kids. That’s business continuity!

  Business continuity is who you call when your CEO is kidnapped by militiamen, and they come in and tell you the odds of getting him back.

  Of course, business continuity is also people handing out flash-card memory key-chains and telling you to back up your emails. That was what my friend here in Derby did for a living.

  We moved on to the teacher:

  ‘What do you teach?’

  ‘Technology.’

  ‘Wow, very flash. What’s involved in that?’

  ‘It’s plastics, metal and woodwork.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What was that last one?’

  ‘Woodwork
.’

  ‘When is the last time anyone made technology out of wood? No, in fact, I’ll tell you. It was… Look at this big, free horse! What’s that scuffling noise from the middle? Never mind. No one is advanced enough to build a hollow horse…’

  The performance analyst for the Nottingham police force was unwilling to explain which of the performing arts the lads were doing well in. We guessed tap, but that jazz and contemporary weren’t far behind.