On other shows, people (and celebrities) have a job to do and require expert help—like house hunting in Location, Location, Location and A Place in the Sun—and on yet more shows, people (and celebrities) have a specific task to perform that they’re actually quite good at, until everything comes apart under the pressure of the cameras and there’s a lot of crying—Come Dine with Me, Masterchef, The Apprentice, The Great British Sewing Bee. Currently the Brits are in the midst of an annual love affair with The Great British Bake Off, because it turns out that while making a cake isn’t necessarily all that hard, baking a better cake than the person next to you, to a stopwatch and sometimes without a recipe, is. That the silly Brits find such delight in other people’s baking disasters may come as some comfort to the heck-in-a-handcart contingent.
Then there are the augmented reality TV shows, in which young people who already live in a place (and who eventually attain the status of celebrities if the show’s a hit) interact with one another in a way that is both scripted and also very much unscripted. There’s the well-to-do set in Made in Chelsea, the perpetual party people in Geordie Shore, and the decent, but slightly odd young folk from The Only Way Is Essex. In each case we get a snapshot of a young community starting to figure out what they want from life, amid a lot of drinking and partying and snogging the wrong people.
And the really fun part of all this is that the people (and celebrities) who appear on these shows then get to appear on other shows as celebrity guests. It started when contestants from Popstars and Pop Idol began to show up in the I’m a Celebrity jungle, prompting some wags to suggest that the show would be better titled I’m Out of Here. . . Get Me a Celebrity and that the cross-pollination of TV talent is reaching hay fever levels.
Oh, but that’s not the end of the tale, not quite. In 2013 Channel 4 developed a stunning reality TV idea that was entirely devoid of jeopardy or skill on the part of the contestants and turned the concept of a show with a panel of judges facing the public completely on its head. The premise of Gogglebox is simple: a series of families from a wealth of different backgrounds and circumstances watch TV and pass comments among themselves, and they’re filmed doing so. Their reactions to the shows of the week are frequently extreme, hilarious, judgmental, wrong, right and all points between. And yet it’s a TV show about watching TV, one that puts you, the viewer, in the homes of them, the viewers, except you haven’t won a TV BAFTA. They have, and guess what? Some reality TV show presenters—like Kirstie All-sopp from Location, Location, Location—really don’t like it.
I’m not sure where that leaves us in regard to that handcart, mind you. On the road to Hull, perhaps.
WHAT TO SAY: “Pass the Bovril; you’re about to see a British Man v. Food.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I mean, Who are these people? Who are they?” etc.
Drawing Willies on Things
While the street art of Banksy may fetch millions of dollars and provoke discussion and debate among art buffs the world over, another form of urban beautification predates his earliest stencillings and those of his graffiti forebears; one that is far more influential, more vibrant, more provocative, and a lot more fun.
No one knows who decided to draw the first set of male genitals in the most public space he could find. Possibly it was something that happened shortly after the early adoption of tools, maybe it was shortly after the cognitive breakthrough that allowed humans to understand graphical representations of things, but whatever the moment was, you can bet the descendants of this early enfant terrible of caveman art ended up moving to the British Isles at some point.
What else could explain the volume of penis-related wall art in communities across Britain? There’s tons of it, if you know where to look, although if you’re expecting brightly colored frescoes depicting, say, a wriggling chorus line of male appendages (maybe on the wall outside a members-only club), or a single huge one just hanging there, all tumescent and glowing with rude health, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
What you need to keep an eye out for is a quiet corner, just a blank bit of wall slightly to one side of a main thoroughfare; or possibly the interior doors of a lift in a timeworn shopping centre or the cubicle doors of a gents’ toilet next to a beach; or even a relatively fresh patch of concrete. Visit enough of these places, and you’ll find a crudely drawn cartoon of an erect penis, possibly with attendant testicles and, for the connoisseur, some attempt at depicting pubic hair and maybe a teardrop of something unmentionable coming out of the end.
This may be lovingly rendered in permanent marker or spray paint, or even crudely etched into the paint using a metal stick or some keys—the giant chalk figure carved into the hills of Cerne Abbas in Dorset has an enormous great knobbly club (and an impressive penis too)—but all the details will be there. And I’ll wager there isn’t a community in the country that doesn’t have at least one, somewhere.
Note: Not an actual Banksy.
Now, the important thing to state is that very few Brits actually go out drawing willies on things. It is not a national obsession in the way that talking about the weather (see: Talking about the Weather), queueing (see: Queuing) or complaining about late buses could be called a national obsession. There are no phallic graffiti clubs, no knob scribblers’ society; no one ever talks about the penises or how they got there. But someone clearly must be doing it. And they get about too. Given the sheer area covered and the speed with which new surfaces are attacked, either it’s one very strange individual with a helicopter or enough people are doing it to allow one to say, with some confidence, that it is a thing that Brits do. That’s statistics for you.
Having said that, Rod Stewart did devote several paragraphs in his autobiography to his habit of drawing penises on things, including the passports of the boy band McFly. His advice for them, should they become concerned about facing a stern customs official, was to “turn it into a tree and say your three-year-old did it,” so maybe it’s all him. Or San Francisco’s Claire Wyckoff, who has taken to using Nike+ to draw willies on the maps in her phone when she’s out for a run. Or maybe it’s the town planners who designed Edinburgh’s Bellenden Gardens (the name is enough of a giveaway, surely) so that it looks suspiciously penisy from above. It might even be the social commentator who spray-painted one onto the bonnet of a brand-new Bugatti Veyron in Seattle in 2014. Whoever it is, they get about.
To round off with an illustration (only not the one you’re thinking of): A new cycle path was recently opened near my home. It’s a beautiful thing, running through a patch of woodland and encouraging commuters to take their morning and evening journeys away from the potholes and traffic of the main road and along a silky smooth path, enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of the natural world as they do so.
For a ceremony when the path was opened, local dignitaries came, a ribbon was cut and the radio station mentioned it in a news bulletin. It was considered a big deal, because it was expensive to build and had not arrived without some problems, but finally this glorious asset to the local community was finished and ready for use.
Within twenty-four hours of that cycle path opening, someone had etched an enormous thirty-foot penis into the tarmac with a muddy stone. The message was clear: this thing is finished when we say it is, not before.
WHAT TO SAY: “Look, Marjorie! Some bright spark has defaced the ‘Welcome to Ipswich’ sign with a . . . well, bless my soul!”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Of course, they’ve got the shading all wrong on the scrotum.”
Accents
The island of Great Britain, though relatively small, has played gracious host to many immigrant populations over the last ten thousand years or so. Some were welcomed voluntarily; others had to use weapons to make everyone remember their manners. But each successive wave of funny-talking foreigners has left a mark on the dominant accent of the local area, and each of these marks has had centuries to percolate, develop and solidify.
The opposite is also true. The various We
lsh, Scottish and Cornish accents sound the way they do because they are the result of non-English speakers in those areas having to learn and speak English through the filter of their own indigenous language. This then goes on to affect the way people speak in border areas, with vowels being stretched and consonants sharpened and twisted left and right, depending on which hill or valley one happens to be in at the time.
Other factors are at play too. Accents in rural areas tend to be slower and more ruminative, like the long belch of a thoughtful cow, whereas the postindustrial urban accents are faster, sharper, harder, and full of teeth. People with middle-class or upper-class backgrounds have different accents from people with working-class backgrounds, and this holds true from the Orkneys to the Channel Islands. There are accents derived from music, from fashion, from watching too many cowboy movies, and from being privately educated by Professor Henry Higgins.
The British are very proud of their regional accents and exceptionally defensive if anyone ever gets them wrong, to the extent that they will leap with evident glee upon any actor foolish enough to attempt one and fail. The most notorious examples of this are probably Dick Van Dyke’s rubbery Cockney in Mary Poppins, and whatever it was Russell Crowe thought he was doing in Robin Hood. But if an actor gets it right—as Renée Zellweger does in the Bridget Jones movies, Gwyneth Paltrow does in Shakespeare in Love, and the cast of This Is Spinal Tap do—it is as if they have been given an actual superpower, or become an honorary Brit. You have never seen any puppy roll over to have his tummy tickled as fast as the Brits welcome a Hollywood star that can do a decent local accent.
That’s not to say all Brits can do all British accents; far from it. As with all forms of regionalism, it’s fine to mock people from even farther away who just don’t get it, but that doesn’t mean people in Ipswich can do a perfect Swansea dialect or that the Inverness brogue is easy to replicate if you’re from Derry. So when the Scottish David Tennant appeared playing the Doctor in Doctor Who as an Englishman, it was as if he were an entirely different person from the guy with the same face and the Renfrewshire burr.
Conversely—and for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent—British actors who can do a decent American accent aren’t really considered to be that impressive and may even appear to be pandering to a Hollywood hiring system. This is true even if the movie is set in an American location and the character could not possibly be British. Somehow there’s an air of disappointment, as if they have been somewhat sullied.
This may be simply a result of overardent admiration, in a sense. I mean, we’ve all had a go at it, whether trying to be Elvis, Aretha or Eminem at karaoke or reciting gags from Ghostbusters. The American palette of accents, the logic suggests, are uniform and easy, whereas the British palette of accents are enormously varied and hard to master. It’s part of a particular form of British arrogance that says I can do what you do—anyone can do what you do, because it’s in my face all the time—but you can’t do what I do. I’m special.
And yes, it’s every bit as reductive and arrogant a stance to take as that of Johnny Shouts-Too-Much from outside the British Isles yelling “Alroiught, mayte?” with too many vowels and claiming it as a British accent, whatever that is.
But then, it doesn’t really matter where you are, or where you’re from, so long as there’s an “over there” to be in competition with, always a reason to bunch together with immediate neighbours and poke fun outwards.
That’s probably a legacy of all those invasions too.
WHAT TO SAY: “How do you say bath: ba-th or bar-th?”
WHAT NOT TO SING: “Eets ah joily oilyday wiv Meeeery.”
The Great British Guitar Band
In March 1961, just a year before the Beatles released their first single, the English conductor and impresario Sir Thomas Beecham was quoted in the New York Herald Tribune saying: “The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.”
It’s a prissy sentiment, drily delivered and suggestive of a flawed truth, that a true Englishman (or woman) would never stoop to the level of the Neanderthal by allowing music to inhabit his deepest personal recesses. Tapping a foot, nodding a head, that’s as far as he’d take it.
And it’s the kind of provocative statement that an entire wave of postwar youth were already in the process of rejecting in the strongest possible terms. In fact, they would go so far in the opposite direction—absorbing American blues, folk, country and rhythm ’n’ blues with the passionate fervour of true believers—that they started to create their own musical myths and legends. Never mind dry quips about noise: who needs to worry about giving in to animal urges when there’s the entire lineage of the Great British Guitar Band to create, maintain and devour?
The myth of the Great British Guitar Band hopes to diminish the idea of the reserved Brit entirely, by proving that the British not only enjoyed the most vibrant musical art form of the twentieth century—rock ’n’ roll—and took part in its development, but were the best at it, because they felt it deep down in their souls.
As with everything to do with Britain and popular music, it all started with the Beatles. Their brains hotwired by that mixture of American roots music—recast as skiffle by the enterprising Lonnie Donegan—and early rock ’n’ roll, the Beatles actually began their recording career as curators of a particular truth about this new musical form. Namely, the best stuff is hidden, the popular stuff is a pale imitation of the real thing, and we know this because we’re the sonic explorers who have heard it.
That’s the common thread among all of the Great British Guitar Bands in British musical history. They exist in a rarefied pantheon (people literally refer to it as a pantheon too) of lofty superiority, codified by the style-obsessed mod movement and given fresh energy and the occasional makeover by successive waves of glam rock, punk rock, indie and Britpop.
The Great British Guitar Bands have excessive regard for soul. Not just soul music (which is delightful, why wouldn’t they love it?), but the qualities of gritty reality and reckless abandon within black American music that were largely absent from white British music of the same era. Every cocky frontman of every British band of the past fifty years has, at some point, made some crack about how much soul they have, compared to some pasty-faced rival. Soul, in this context, just means the opposite of performance, of showbiz fakery, and the further along the pantheon you travel in time, the less humour there is to be found. They mean it, maan.
Oddly, while soul is a highly prized element, the two other primary African-American musical forms of the twentieth century—jazz and blues—are not. Both are considered symptomatic of a kind of over-proficiency, a desire to be so good at playing your instrument that your technique impedes the all-important soul. That’s not too say there aren’t great British guitar bands that play blues, but none of them is in the pantheon of Great British Guitar Bands.
This is a reasonable approximation version of the full list. Pay your respects, musical mortals, for this is the Lineage; the Great Tradition; the Good Mod Club:
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, the Small Faces, T. Rex, Slade, the Faces, Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, Buzzcocks, Joy Division, the Specials, Dexys Midnight Runners, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the La’s, Suede, Manic Street Preachers, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, the Verve, the Libertines, Kasabian, the Arctic Monkeys.
Then there are the artists who are not technically a guitar band, but have to be considered a part of the pantheon because it’s nonsensical to leave them out: David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Paul Weller.
Which just leaves us with, what? Well, a template that gives new bands very little space in which to express their own personalities. Oh and an entire library of astonishing British music that won’t adhere to the Good Mod narrative and therefore takes a seat slightly to the side. None of these bands is considered one of the Great British Guitar Bands, but all of them are great British guitar bands:
The Yardbirds, Cream, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, the Moody Blues, the Zombies, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, Queen, Electric Light Orchestra, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Dr. Feelgood, XTC, the Stranglers, the Cure, the Police, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cocteau Twins, Radiohead, Mogwai, Coldplay, Muse, Elbow.
Then there’s the underpantheon—British guitar bands who are great, but not Great in the mythical sense, and have been denied entry to the pantheon for being from the wrong place at the wrong time, writing the wrong sort of songs at the wrong time, or allowing women to join at any time:
The Hollies, the Troggs, the Bee Gees, the Spencer Davis Group, the Move, the Sweet, the Slits, the Fall, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, X-Ray Spex, Adam and the Ants, the Beat, the Soft Boys, Squeeze, the Housemartins, the Auteurs, PJ Harvey, Elastica, Cornershop, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, McFly, Girls Aloud.
And, while we’re here, the great British not-guitar bands: Depeche Mode, the Human League, Soft Cell, New Order, Yazoo, Talk Talk, the KLF, Massive Attack, Portishead, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, the Prodigy, the Spice Girls, Keane.
It would be mean-spirited to list the not-great British guitar bands. But there are a lot of them, and they all have the same haircut. Oh, and Kate Bush exists in a pantheon of one.
Stuff Brits Like Page 14