In England, you can replace them with Walkers and Walls and whatever, and it’ll still work.
However, there is no substitution for the line: ‘You must miss the Tayto something terrible.’
This line dies in England, kills in Ireland. In Ireland, it has them roaring. And to understand why, you’d have to know about generations of emigration, and Irish communities all over the world, and care packages being sent from home and people smuggling rashers and crisps through US customs when they go to visit their brother in New York. And it isn’t enough for me just to tell you that. You have to get that as fast as the joke is being told, and with me that’s pretty fast. You just have to know that. You just have to be Irish.
And without getting that line, the story is just about some man in a tux looking embarrassed with a box of crisps under his arm. Which is fine, but as the man from The Times correctly pointed out, it’s not finale material.
I’ll give you the ending of the story now, as only ever told to the Irish:
… But that’s not what they were thinking.
As I walked out of that room, the box of Tayto under my arm, past the Barry’s Tea table, past the Odlum’s Flour table, past the Chef sauce table, they all watched me go past and then, when I had gone, they turned to each other and furiously went, ‘Why the fuck didn’t we think of that?’
In England this is the story of a man being embarrassed in a tux with a box of crisps. In Ireland, it’s the story of the victory of Mick from Tayto over the Irish grocery industry.
(massive applause)
Take it from me, in Dublin, that’s finale material. The only thing that’ll top that is if you kick a football into the lighting rig.
Sometimes, that’s all national identity is: a shared collection of references. I’m from here, I get that joke; you’re not, so you don’t.
That might explain people who get incensed by immigrant populations who don’t assimilate. ‘Our identity is under threat!’ just means ‘I don’t get what they’re talking about!’ I have zero sympathy for anyone who bleats that their ‘identity is being attacked’. You have sole responsibility for defining your identity. If you’re having a crisis, the presence of a Halal butcher isn’t the cause.
That cultural exclusion has certainly been behind all the bad press young people have been getting, each generation in turn, ever since the Scuttlers in Victorian times. ‘This culture is alien to me,’ scream the middle-aged. ‘Young people are out of control!’ They’re not, of course. They just don’t want you joining in their reindeer games. Get over it.
That inter-generational tension is a given in this country, along with the sudden loss of memory when the baton of outrage is passed on to the next batch of reformed, middle-aged good citizens.
It’s as much a constant as the fact that, while Britain is a country that gets a lot done, the national debate will always be dominated by that minority of the population who are Romantic, and perennially disappointed, rather than the majority, who are Pragmatic and therefore off actually doing stuff. And that smaller group has made up its mind on certain things and will not be shifted. The NHS is a disaster, Terminal Five doesn’t work, all MPs are corrupt, the Olympics will make the place a laughing stock. The BBC, the school system, public order, the multicultural experiment, country life. Everything is in terminal decline, and it doesn’t matter how much contradictory evidence you present. Even if a global survey places the country in the top ten places to live worldwide, you’re not having any of it.
That might be the great national trait of the English: you will not be told.
Here’s a great example of this. There was a report on the Daily Mail website once about the health dangers of processed meat, in particular of the kind found in sausages. Researchers had found that more than a certain amount in the diet could lead to a greater risk of certain cancers. It was something like, more than two sausages a week would lead to a 5 per cent rise, I can’t recall the exact figures. Now, this being the Mail, the headline was ‘Sausages Cause Cancer’, but the piece certainly had an air of authority to it, as if it had been taken from a peer-reviewed journal after an extensive piece of research. It seemed like a worthwhile piece of dietary advice.
However, underneath the piece was an online poll. It simply said, ‘Do you think that sausages cause cancer?’, and you could tick yes or no.
I clicked on the results. Eighty per cent had ticked No.
So, directly underneath an article, about an academic study by trained and learned professionals, giving sound evidence-based advice, the readership of the Daily Mail had simply disagreed.
Doctors had said sausages cause cancer. The English said no. You simply will not be told.
And I’ve found a nice, positive reason for this.
You pride yourselves on your sense of humour. Of course, everyone prides themselves on their national sense of humour; same as nobody writes BSOH on a personal ad. But at least you have the theatres and audiences and a massive comedy industry, live and televised, to back this claim up. So, as a country, you like jokes.
And jokes don’t really work in a utopia. Jokes need to be about incompetence, or weakness, or misfortune. A nation that likes to laugh can’t really be sitting round at the same time patting itself on the back for the provision of universal healthcare, or their near-comprehensive rail system, or the imminent arrival of a global pageant like the Olympics.
That’s why a nation which continues to achieve on a global level can never admit to it. You have to talk yourselves down. You have to demean your achievements. It’s the only way you can keep these jokes coming.
There’s nothing funny in being about fifth.
As the deadline for this book approached, it was pretty clear that I was going to be desperately late unless I sequestered myself away from family and home comforts. So I booked myself into a serviced apartment in a hotel complex in the Cotswolds. In the Cotswolds Water Park, to be specific, a series of lakes near Cirencester, which attract water skiers and canoeists and people who want to buy New England-style holiday homes on the water. This lakeside idyll is slightly tempered by the fact that these aren’t ‘real’ lakes; they’re gravel quarries, mined to build the nearby M4 motorway, but the ground water has risen to fill in the holes, followed by flora and fauna.
A perfect place to sit and write about England’s contrived nostalgia for a rural idyll, then.
Each day I would rise late, ruminate, have some lunch, do some writing, make dinner, do more writing and then, by about midnight, start to go mad for some human contact. I would then walk down to the bar in the hotel lobby and have a couple of pints with delegates of the National Association of Funeral Directors, who were having their annual conference in the same hotel at the same time.
There they would tell me about the hot topics in the funeral-direction industry. It was all quite topical stuff: responses to the credit crunch (‘Yes, people are still dying, I know what you’re saying, but these days, well… their families now want the smaller limo…’); attracting young staff to a traditionally family-run business; and the most sensitive way to deal with a swine flu death.
When I could have been drawing inspiration from the landscape and reflecting on my profound conclusions on the question of identity, I was rolling around in the daily minutiae of these people’s lives.
There is so much more laughter in the quirky and distinct details of one person’s real life than the prosaic averaging out across the whole population. It’s why trading in national stereotypes gets so very dull for a comedian. It’s clumsy and inaccurate and, worst of all, predictable. And it will never compare to simply turning to an individual and saying, ‘You. Who are you? And what do you do?’
So that’s what I’m going to start doing again. After all, I can’t stay hiding in the world of books for ever. It’s time for me to write a new show and start this whole journey again. It’s back to the blank page and bottle of wine; back to the little clubs for the preview nights; and back t
o nervously trying out glimmers of ideas and turning them into routines.
And in some random order, it’s back to the suburbs, back to the seaside resorts and back to the cities. It’ll be town after town after town again, to meet the locals, exchange stories.
I will go to London and Liverpool, Hull and St Helier; to Bristol and Manchester and Yeovil and York, and, in each of them, if I’m in luck, I’ll meet another ambassador for England, another happy emissary for my adopted home, and yet another tiny sliver of evidence that actually, you know, you might not be doing that badly here.
Not that you’ll believe it.
Acknowledgements
Are you still reading this? Then there’s every chance that you were at one of the gigs I haven’t even mentioned and you’re now wondering why you didn’t make the cut. Let me get to that in just a moment. I have a couple of other thanks to do first. For the tour itself, enormous gratitude goes to Joe Norris, Addison Creswell and all the team at Off the Kerb in London, and to Richard Cooke and Eavan Kenny and all the team at the Lisa Richards Agency in Dublin. In particular, humble thanks to Damon, both for his excellent nanny work during the year but also for raising no objections to being included here. This was despite me reducing a year’s worth of excellent company down to him buying drinks and telling me to fuck off occasionally. I haven’t done him justice.
My thanks also to my editor at Penguin, Katy Follain, who had the difficult task of turning a career-long presentation style based on cursing and saying ‘ehhh’ a lot into actually, y’know, writing. It’s surprising how much waving your arms around on stage replaces the proper use of pronouns, for example.
Thanks as well to Paul Rouse and Sean Kearns, friends of mine in Dublin, who became interested in this project when I mentioned it in a pub after a hurling match we attended and who then, being proper grown-up historians, pointed me towards lots of the most interesting stuff you’ve just read. They also suggested at least two of the better jokes.
As for those audience members I never got to mention, please rest assured, it was only due to a lack of space. If I had gone into details about wonderful nights in Halifax, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Castlebar, Cork, Peterborough, Bexhill-on-Sea, Derry, Southend, Hull, Reading, Bristol, Plymouth, Chatham and the Isle of Man, well, we’d be here all night. My thanks to all the people who became the heroes in each of those nights, as well as all of those whose inspired contributions are in the book. You made a year on the road pass very quickly.
Tickling the English Page 26