Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  As for the crisps, well, they were Tayto. The minute I got to Ireland, that killer routine was resurrected, put in pride of place, and it worked every time. Fuck you, Damon. Fuck you, Dominic Maxwell of The Times of London. And every time it absolutely stormed, I would go, ‘Jesus, I wish I could do this in the UK too.’ But it just doesn’t work outside of Ireland.

  One night, there was a girl in who happened to have a packet of Tayto on her, and she weaved her way through the crowd after the routine and presented me with it. I had to do the encore spitting out fragments of crisp.

  The crime stories were also a treat.

  Dublin Vicar Street

  1 estate agent who found squatters in the house he was showing

  1 woman who confronted two armed robbers in a shop because they were laughing at her sister

  1 man who was attacked by a syringe:

  ‘I know what you mean. Lab equipment is out of control these days. I was assaulted by a Bunsen burner last week.’

  1 woman who caught someone stealing her tomatoes

  1 man who heard a ‘ruffling’ noise while he was in bed one night:

  ‘Ruffling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were they in Edwardian dress?’

  ‘Rustling.’

  ‘Do you own cattle?’

  1 police officer

  ‘Cardboard squad cars!’ screamed the crowd.

  The estate agent lost the sale, unsurprisingly.

  The armed robbers got away, but not before the young woman ran after their car, while dressed in her pyjamas, and hung on to the door handle as it drove away.

  The tomatoes might seem less important, but the woman was quite upset:

  ‘How did you notice that they were stealing your tomatoes?’

  I said.

  ‘The alarm went off.’

  This is a woman who takes her vegetables seriously.

  I wasn’t expecting ‘Cardboard squad cars!’ either, and had to quiz the crowd. It turned out that the news during the week had been dominated by the story of how the Irish police force had placed dummy police cars by the roadside as a deterrent to speeding. Seen from a distance, they would be indistinguishable from the real thing; only when you had slammed on the brakes and passed them at the legal velocity would it be obvious. Thus, not only were you slowing up your journey, you got to feel like a fool as well.

  This tickled me enormously, so I ran around backstage trying to find some cardboard. Vicar Street has an excellent sound and lighting team and, with the technical demands of a comedy show extending only as far as a microphone and some walk-on music, they’re left idling all night. To their credit, they took the task off me. When the encore came, I was able to walk back out behind a full-sized cardboard car door, with a window cut out and the word ‘Garda’ written in massive letters along the side. Then I presented it to the police officer. And he presumably drove away in it, calming traffic all the way home.

  These are highlights, of course. The average night in Vicar Street was usually pretty interesting just as a snapshot of how Irish society had changed during the last decade. This was the usual breakdown of the front row:

  Dublin Vicar Street

  2 mobile-phone salespeople

  7 IT professionals

  4 financial consultants

  13 marketing managers

  Ireland hasn’t had to recover from the slow deterioration of its manufacturing base: we never had one. We jumped straight from farming to tertiary workers. This means that we don’t have England’s bizarre false nostalgia for an agricultural past. The way that people idealize country living and agrarianism in the UK; you’re worse than the Khmer Rouge sometimes. Irish people know farms. You’re either from one, or you had to spend your holidays on one. They aren’t just something redbrick and twee that you drive past in the Cotswolds.

  Nostalgia doesn’t do a great deal of business generally in Ireland, at least not with my generation. Things were just too grim and for too long. I wouldn’t be exaggerating things to say that my memories of my teenage years are in black and white. The Celtic Tiger, Ireland’s economic boom, was years away, and the general presumption was that you would all end up in London, Boston or Melbourne. Even our school and college holidays were commonly spent abroad: working in hotels in London, building cars in the BMW factory in Munich or working in bars in America. Irish young people were trained to emigrate. I never thought twice about this either. They were brilliant summers. Then I moved to England, where young people have six weeks off school for the summer holidays instead of three months. Six weeks! You’d hardly find a flat for the nineteen of you in that time, let alone make any money.

  I remember meeting some friends for lunch in Dublin and, unconsciously, the conversation demonstrated just how natural the idea of emigration is to the Irish.

  We were discussing the economic downturn, and one of them casually mentioned to me that the papers in Ireland were recommending Saskatchewan in Canada as a good place to move to. Neither of us saw anything strange in this at all; it took my wife, who’s English, to point out how strange it is for a national paper to run recommendations of destinations for the population to emigrate to. You certainly wouldn’t open the Telegraph and see ‘Canada! A great place to visit your grandchildren!’

  Of course, we had thought that the Celtic Tiger had brought those days to an end. For ten years, the only people emigrating from Ireland were comedians. The Celtic Tiger has since departed and, at the time of writing, it’s way too early to start gauging the effect this bust will have on a country which loved the boom so much.

  A friend of mine who works in the nightclub industry had an interesting take on it. Having run venues in both England and Ireland, he says that a recession will always progress more smoothly in England because, while the Irish bemoan and deny the downturn, the English respond, and this is crucial and telling, as if they deserve it. In the same way that the English find success difficult to enjoy, and have a tendency to see the worst in everything, when the bad times come, they’re ready for it. They decrease spending, tighten their belts, invoke the Blitz spirit and, eighteen months later, they’re out the other end of it. We, on the other hand, are still out each night, cursing the recession and dragging it out at the same time.

  It’s only a theory but, when I put it to my friends at lunch in Dublin, they said, ‘Actually, we’ve decided to embrace the recession.’

  This was a year in. The English had been embracing the recession before it even started.

  People sometimes ask me: What is the greatest difference between England and Ireland? England’s natural pessimism is a contender, certainly. Another good candidate is that the Irish find each other endlessly fascinating, in a way that the English don’t. If I hear another Irish accent abroad, for example, a conversation will inevitably start. We regard our mutual Irishness as sufficient excuse to start talking to each other. I don’t think the English do that at all.

  The Irish would like to think that they take the laurels for charm; but the English are just much more professional. From grand engineering projects, to the media, to the world’s most beloved national sporting league, there’s a polish to the work that comes out of England that a smaller country like Ireland can only admire.

  There is another fun distinction, though, that I’ve rarely seen mentioned. Irish people like to think they’re feisty and anti-authoritarian; English people like to think of themselves as conservative and respectful of tradition. In reality, though, Irish people are conservative and traditional and English people are riotous and unruly. Compared to the Irish, English people are much more suspicious of their politicians, much more likely to throw out governments they’re unhappy with and, crucially, much, much more likely to take to the streets when they’re angry.

  Let’s deal with the legitimate means of political expression first. The two countries run their elections in completely different ways. Ireland’s electoral system is called PRSTV. That’s proportional represent
ation, single transferable vote. For the English here, and many of the Irish, this might need explaining, but one book may not give me enough space. You pick your first choice, then your second, then your third, and so on down the ballot paper. Then there are quotas and multiple seats and bundles and eliminations and distributions of surpluses, and it all goes on for days. The system delivers a roughly approximate ratio of elected representatives to percentage of national vote.

  England operates a first-past-the-post system. Tick one box, pile them all out on to the table and, by 11 p.m. on the same day, the results start to come in. Results have only a vague bearing on national polls, elections reducing down to a number of marginal constituencies and Peter Snow waving a giant computer-generated swing-o-meter around the studio.

  The Irish system correctly reflects the wishes of the population. It is conservative and vague and regularly leads to hung parliaments and awkward and unstable governments. Elections are followed by a period of closed-door meetings, while opposing parties see which of their cherished beliefs can be most easily compromised for power. Eventually, a ‘rainbow coalition’ is announced, as if nature could produce a rainbow with a large block of grey, a tiny streak of green and a couple of independent colours bought off with planning permission for a new local hospital. The most telling post-election quote in Ireland is: ‘The Irish people have spoken; now we have to work out what they said.’

  The English system is fickle, violent and punitive. Every decade or so, it amplifies a few percentage points of swing into the appearance of a once-in-a-generation political revolution. New governments are swept into power on an apparent wave of public acclaim, and whole new eras are declared. English elections are a moody teenage girl, throwing herself on her bed and screaming, ‘I hate him!’

  Here’s another example of how the English, contrary to appearances, are excitingly anti-establishment. There is a notion of us Irish being big fighters. We’ve had some top boxers certainly; our native sports are certainly ‘robust’, but when it comes to taking on the ruling powers, well, we don’t even come close to the English. For all the talk about England being a nation built on fair play, tolerance and obeying the rules, you love a bit of a scrap. Particularly in the name of political change.

  At the Hay Literary Festival in 2006, Andrew Marr, discussing his television series The History of Modern Britain, said that every single episode could have featured footage of a policeman, on horseback, wading into a rioting crowd. Not the same policeman, of course, and hopefully not the same horse, but the point was clear. The English love a good riot. And despite outraged newspaper columnists trying to pretend that violence in England was invented by happy-slapping teenagers, there’s been rioting in England for centuries, and it was usually about money.

  Take the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, for example. It erupted in Brentwood in Essex, due to anger about a poll tax and conditions for agricultural workers. The peasantry marched on London and killed a number of King Richard II’s administration, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The king originally agreed to meet most of the rebels’ demands but, when Wat Tyler arrived for negotiations, he was stabbed in the throat by the Lord Mayor of London.

  It is difficult to imagine how mind-blowing that chain of events would be if it read: ‘G8 protestors attacked Buckingham Palace, killing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The attacks were only repelled when the leader of the protests was stabbed in the throat by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson… who then held a press conference, where he made it sound like a charming mistake.’

  Rioting as a response to loss of livelihood is a common occurrence throughout English history. Let’s fast-track to 1811, when the textile workers of Nottingham decided they’d had enough of industrial development and destroyed the offending machinery and mills. The revolt spread to Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1812. The social historian Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out that, at one point in the Luddite disturbances, there were more troops defending machines in England than there were fighting Napoleon in Spain.

  In 1830, there were the Swing Riots, in which agricultural labourers in Kent rose up and wrecked the threshing machines that were putting them out of work. There were ‘The Days of May’ in 1832, when rioting swept across the country in support of the Great Reform Act.

  In August 1919, about a thousand police officers in Liverpool, Birkenhead and Bootle went on strike for improved pay and conditions. The strikers marched on the police stations manned by their non-striking colleagues and, while the two opposing groups faced off, the city descended into widespread looting and street violence. After several days of chaos, the army, some tanks and – my favourite detail – three warships restored order. When you start wheeling out the warships to deal with failed contract negotiation, well, that’s when you’ve got to have a long look at your Human Resources department. Interestingly, General Macready – the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police – suggested this particular strike was probably caused by ‘the presence of many Irishmen in the force, a class of men who are always apt to be carried away by any wave of enthusiasm’.

  This is a little harsh, given, by contrast, the absence of rioting in Ireland. We don’t have a history without violence, of course, but much of it was directed into uprising against the English themselves and, since our own civil war at the start of the 1920s, the taste for that kind of public violence seems to have disappeared. There has hardly been a riot worth talking about. For all our reputation, the Irish are the conservative ones, with hardly a paving stone torn up in anger. That hasn’t been the case in England in the last ninety years.

  The 1984–5 miners’ strike, for example, was famously violent. At the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in June 1984, around five thousand police in full riot gear and with large numbers of police horses fought a pitched battle with an even larger number of striking miners, with hundreds of injuries sustained on both sides. More than eleven thousand arrests were made during the period of the strike.

  As well as industrial disputes, there have been racial ones too.

  In August 1958, the Notting Hill Race Riots erupted when young white men began victimizing Caribbean immigrants in the Notting Hill area. The violence started when a group of youths attacked a white woman who was part of a mixed-race couple, but quickly degenerated into more serious mob violence with hundreds of young men – many dressed in distinctive teddy-boy clothes – attacking houses and shops they believed to be owned by immigrants. There had been an even bigger race riot in Nottingham a few days earlier, with more than a thousand rioters on the streets.

  Then there are the riots that seem to have taken place for no good reason at all. In May 1964, rival groups of mods and rockers met at the popular seaside towns of Bourne-mouth, Brighton and Margate to beat the lard out of each other. In Brighton that Whit weekend, about a thousand youths fought each other on the prom and beach. It probably says a lot about the English attitude to this kind of thing that, when the fighting started up for a second day, thousands of spectators jockeyed for a good viewing position on Brighton’s Marine Parade and Aquarium Sun Terrace.

  So yes, the English are willing to take to the streets – as they also did for the Sacheverell riots, the Bristol Bridge riots, the Scuttlers, the Tonypandy riot, the Brixton, Toxteth and Broadwater Farm riots, the Wapping print strike, the Bradford Race riots, the Poll Tax riot, the G20 riots and so on.

  And we haven’t even mentioned football yet.

  Dublin Vicar Street

  1 journalist from the Irish Sun

  1 electrician

  1 man who makes ‘mezzanine’ floors

  1 accountant

  Nothing special about that line-up. I only mention it because it was the day of the All-Ireland Hurling Final, which I attended and enjoyed, and I had to do the show despite being sun-kissed and slightly woozy from drinking. It was never going to be the best show I’ve ever done. I can recall a moment midway through the second half where I felt as though what little energy I had woul
d have been far better spent in a pub somewhere, continuing a debate about whether the Kilkenny team we had just watched win a three in a row were the best in history. I shook it off.

  Sport and comedy shows tend not to mix very well. I was onstage in Vicar Street the night of the Liverpool v. Milan Champions League final in 2005. Me and the stage crew were watching it backstage and, when the show started at eight thirty, I made an announcement from the stage that Milan were already 3–0 up. There was a palpable wave of relief from the crowd that all they’d missed was a one-sided walk-over. But when I came out for the second half and announced Liverpool’s historic comeback and that we were in the last few minutes of extra time and heading to penalties, the mood changed sharply.

  Every man in the room stared bitterly at me. ‘I have missed a classic,’ they were all thinking, ‘for this.’ Now, that is a tough crowd to impress.

  Even though I am very happily settled in England, the one time that I sorely miss Ireland is on the day of the All-Ireland Hurling Final. This year, I was lucky enough to have a show in Dublin that day, and blagged a ticket for the match in the afternoon.

  There is a mysterious art to obtaining a seat at the All-Ireland final. There is no booth, or box office, or phone line that sells All-Ireland final tickets. I think the GAA, which organizes the sport, just releases all 82,000 into the wild as a yearly test of cunning and contacts. This means that the supporters are mixed and mingled and multi-generational in a manner that would be unthinkable for the equivalent fixture in the Premier League. And, despite the passion of the supporters, and even with drink taken, there is no history of crowd violence at GAA matches. The fact that there are as many pensioners and kids attending as there are young men does tend to take the ire out of the occasion, for a start. It’s difficult to ‘kick off’ if you’ve got your Uncle Seamus and Aunty Nora on one side of you and a group of eleven-year-olds on the other. Even if they are all screaming blue murder at the ref.