Note: Don’t worry if the arrangement of these lists offends your musical sensibilities, it’s not real. There’s no pantheon. It’s just something a particular type of British music fan likes to debate heavily in the pub before getting up to put Live Forever by Oasis on the jukebox again. In any case, you’d have a hard time getting anything like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame started in the UK, because no one would quite know where to look during the speeches.
WHAT TO SAY: “You can truly hear the soul of John Winston Lennon echoing down through the Jam and Oasis to the Arctic Monkeys.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Have you got any Wings?”
The BBC
The NHS and the BBC are often spoken of in the same breath as organizations the British should be proud of, and indeed they are. Both come from what critics would call a nanny state, one that believes in giving people what is good for them rather than what they want, although the BBC was created in the era when this meant strong medicine, rather than free school milk. But both organizations take a lot of flak for having the nerve to exist, while also taking a central and lifelong role in the lives of an overwhelming majority of British people, in a huge variety of different ways.
The BBC is a state broadcaster funded directly by every household with a television. The money doesn’t come from general taxation or subscriptions, but from an annual payment called the licence fee or the TV licence. In return everyone gets ten channels of national TV, ten channels of national radio (some analogue only, and the rest digital), plus forty local radio stations and the World Service. And no commercials! Then there’s BBC Online, a hugely respected current affairs resource, and the iPlayer, which provides a free catch-up service on all BBC programming. The idea being that whatever the age, social background, gender, sexuality or political affiliation of the audience, there will always be something to listen to, or watch.
And, by and large, this works wonderfully. While at times sections of BBC output can feel a little like a bowl of oatmeal on steak night—principally because the target audience is so incredibly broad that you can’t hope to please everyone all the time—it has also created some of the most internationally successful programming, by any yardstick you care to mark up, in television and radio history.
To make any list of highlights can only seem like stuffing a random grab bag made of nothing but holes, but hats are all the way off for any of the following: In the Night Garden; Newsnight; Only Fools and Horses; Panorama; Horrible Histories; Life on Earth; The Day Today; Top of the Pops; State of Play; The Sky at Night; Dad’s Army; Our Friends in the North; The Thick of It; Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review; Being Human; I, Claudius; Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle; Luther; Monty Python’s Flying Circus; and Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman bickering in Sherlock. All of these shows (and those described in detail in other chapters) deserve to be praised to the skies.
And there’s another reason why, to the majority of British people, the BBC feels less like an enforced state broadcaster and more like a member of the family. Despite having never fallen prey to the strictures of communism, there is something deep in British culture that seeks to elevate the common good (or more accurately, that believes that British culture seeks to elevate the common good). By which I mean the British Dream, if such a thing exists, is one that spends slightly less time worrying about individual persons getting everything they want, and more time making sure everyone makes the best of their lot in life. It’s there in Lord Reith’s leadership of the BBC from 1927 onwards: the drive to “inform, educate and entertain” is the backbone of the BBC even now and has become the ruler by which its best endeavours are measured.
It’s also there in home improvement shows like DIY SOS, in which a team of builders arrive at the home of a family with some fairly serious problems—long-term illness, sudden disability—and renovate everything. Everyone pulls together to help people who have been struggling alone for too long, and naturally there are tears before the credits roll. For all that the Brits enjoy sending Gordon Ramsay and Piers Morgan out around the world to tell people off, these relatively small acts of kindness say just as much about how they wish to view themselves.
As a result, the BBC remains a beloved and trusted institution, to the extent that big news events—and this can be anything from the outbreak of a war to the death of a pop star—must be verified by BBC News before the Brits will believe them to be true. And this continues at a local level too. During any cold snap, listening figures for BBC local radio shoot up as parents check to see if the schools have been closed. Other media outlets may have that information too, but the Beeb—known affectionately as Auntie—is the first place most people will look, and that’s because they know they’ll always find what they need.
WHAT TO SAY: “Frankly, it’s worth the money just for Wonders of the Solar System.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I need the toilet, but I can probably wait for the next ad break.”
Avoiding Confrontation
To be honest, I’d rather not talk about this now. It’s not really an issue. Everything is perfectly fine and anyway, whatever my silly old feelings on this topic may be, they are simply not worth lingering over. It’ll keep. Let’s not get into it now. Seriously, I am very happy with things the way they are; nothing about the act of avoiding confrontation is bothering me and if it were I would be the first to tell you. And you are not to take my silence on this topic as any form of passive-aggressive preemptive strike or anything like that. I shan’t be returning home to pen an angry letter to your superiors, and you’d be quite wrongly painting me as an egregious beast to assume I would ever do such a thing.
So what I suggest is that we just put this whole sorry chapter behind us and forget that it ever happened, and in return I’ll make sure not to bang on endlessly about you to my friends and family and Facebook as though it was a bloody nerve to expect a thoughtful and entertaining discussion of the famous, and possibly overmythologized, talent the British—most specifically those British people who are English and middle class and not from the north—have for tolerating things they should really complain about, in order not to make a scene. That is certainly not the case. At all. It really, really isn’t. And if it were, that would make me some kind of weasely hissing prig, and I’m really not. Honestly.
Some people like to be frank about every feeling of need they experience, at the moment they experience it, in a kind of eternally updated verbal blog with no searchable archive. They’re hot, they’re tired, they’re hungry, they’re frustrated, they’re bored, and they’re waiting for the opportunity to tell you these things even while you’re talking to someone else about something else. In contrast, the Brits—and again, this is most often a middle-class English sort of a thing—prefer to think of themselves as being too dignified to bother complaining about anything.
Don’t be lulled into thinking that this means they don’t notice things that are unsatisfactory. That would be a mistake. It’s just that, even if a soup is too cold or the bus conductor is too brusque before elevenses, the mind will scroll ahead to the inevitable messy consequences of making a complaint, and those seem every bit as bad as the original problem, so the best thing to do is affect a sour demeanour, purse the lips as tight as a cat’s bum, and radiate bad vibes outwards. That’s the full extent of the confrontation. To admit to having been troubled by something as inconsequential as feelings seems like a weakness and, worse, an unpardonable breach of decorum, and there are many British people who would rather die than make a fuss, even when it is palpable that they are silently furious.
However, some things are simply beyond the pale and require immediate attention. Anyone talking in a cinema, or demonstrably having failed to set their smartphone to mute during a play, can expect to be the recipient of a pretty stinging irate whisper (ZING!). Park inconsiderately, or in the space directly outside someone’s house on a busy street, and you can expect to find a very strongly worded note under your wipers when you get back (KAPOW!
). Supermarkets that deliver unsatisfactory vegetables? Not just an e-mail, but a tweet too (BOSH!). And to the selfish swine who puts on loud music—fizzily audible even on headphones—while travelling in the quiet carriage of a train or, worse, receives a phone call without immediately running for the carriage door, you can expect an apocalyptically theatrical tut when you get back to your seat (OOF!).
We don’t want anyone to think the Brits are pushovers, after all.
WHAT TO SAY: “I said I don’t want to talk about it. It’s fine. Really very fine, okay?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “I asked for one sugar in this tea. Are you trying to give me diabetes? Outside, now!”
Wimbledon
Unlike almost every other sporting event, bar the Olympics, Wimbledon could have been designed specifically so that a particular kind of British sporting aficionado can get their fix: the parttime expert.
Part-timers don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to devote constant vigilance to the various tennis tournaments of the world and the rankings, seedings, qualifiers and whatnot. While maintaining a passing interest, they’re not really there for the other events, but they do require an annual fix of around a fortnight, just to find out how everyone has been getting along. Wimbledon—the tennis tournament that manages to cram in so many things that are not tennis—fits the bill magnificently.
Lost in the pageantry of the event—the royal patronage, the faint echo of one-to-one combat with blunt weapons (to the death, unless it rains)—the part-timer absorbs a year’s worth of tennis information during the first couple of television broadcasts, then very quickly begins parroting key facts about Djokovic or Federer (or, if he’s an armchair wag, “Joke-ovitch” and “Federerer”) and assessing the potential of any British players who stand a chance of winning.
As far as the British media are concerned, there’s a strict hierarchy of interest around five trophies during Wimbledon fortnight. The mixed doubles is at the bottom—but still above the boys’ and girls’ and wheelchair tennis draws, which are practically invisible, sad to say—with the ladies’ doubles and gentlemen’s doubles taking fourth and third place respectively. Holding steady at number two is the ladies’ singles championship, but the real point of obsessive interest, especially for the part-time expert, is the gentlemen’s singles final, and most important, whether there is a British player in it or not.
This quest—another faint echo of a military past, this time of King Arthur’s search for the Holy Grail—has come to dominate everything about Wimbledon for the British, which is a shame. It’s a hugely charming tennis tournament that has its own character and traditions. All the players have to wear white, for example; even the stroppy ones who claim to have their own sense of style (or sponsors with very colourful logos). People feel honour bound to eat strawberries and cream, and they drink Pimm’s and hand bottles of Robinsons barley water to their children as if it were the 1920s all over again.
But rather than relax, kick back and neck some serious fruit, British people pine for a British (gentlemen’s singles) champion. Before Andy Murray won in 2013, there hadn’t been a British (gentlemen’s singles) winner at Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936, a fact the parttime experts are all too familiar with because it was a constant feature of media reports on the tournament. Not that they got all their facts straight. Some of the ecstatic headlines after Murray’s win rushed to proclaim him the first British champion in seventy-seven years, completely overlooking the fact that Virginia Wade won the ladies’ singles trophy in 1977. It might seem picky to mention it, but having the energy for this kind of argument is also part of the fun of being a parttime sports fan.
Before Andy, Britain’s greatest hope was a photogenic young man called Tim Henman, and his attempts to win—pockmarked with the slightly scolding rallying cry from his fans: “Come on, Tim!”—coincided with the advent of a huge TV screen erected within the grounds of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, facing a raised bank of grass that formed a kind of natural amphitheatre. Officially known as Aorangi Terrace, thanks to that area’s previous occupation by the London New Zealand Rugby Club, this was the perfect place for milling press and media people to rush out and get vox-pops without disrupting play. As most of these will have begun with the question “Do you think Tim Henman can win this year?” or, later, “What is your reaction to Tim Henman’s defeat?” the area took on the talismanic name Henman Hill, and this has stuck.
There have been subsequent attempts to rechristen it Murray Mound, or even allow some of the women players who have managed to do well to lend their names to it. These have been stiffly resisted, partly because renaming a hill is a faintly ridiculous thing to do, but mostly because Murray won. There’s no romance like a doomed romance, no pain like that felt by a nation that pooled all of its faith in one man, a nation that risked all, and lost. Henman Hill will retain its name as a tribute to all those dreams that were lost in the heat of battle (see: The Underdog).
But apart from the media hoo-ha, Wimbledon has a delightfully egalitarian spirit. Non-ticket-holders can just turn up on the day and get into Centre Court, Court 1 or Court 2 just by joining a colossal queue (see: Queuing), although they do often stay overnight to be sure to bag a seat. Also, the local schools traditionally supply the tournament’s ball boys and ball girls, who have to pass a fitness test and show themselves to be generally, y’know, on the ball, but are by no means hardened sports professionals.
It’s a sporting event where the matches are so long and arduous, they become impressive even to people who don’t like sport, which is what makes being a Wimbledon part-timer so easy. Those players are out there for hours, on their feet, blamming away with very little to sustain them apart from a bite of a banana and a sip of barley water. No strawberries, no cream; and at the end of a five-hour match, they pack their own bags and walk away. They do the hard work, so you don’t have to.
WHAT TO SAY: “Remember the year it rained and Cliff Richard led the crowd in a singsong?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY (ANY MORE): “Come on, Tim!”
Grade-B Swearwords
If you are of a gentle disposition, or prefer to believe that all British people, from St Ives to Inverness, are possessed of the kind of manners and decorum that would make Betty Crocker feel uncouth and dirty, this bit might be a little hard to take. However, the sad truth of the matter is that the British excel at swearing. And they’re proud of it too. Not only are all the best swearwords Anglo-Saxon in origin (something to do with those hard k’s and t’s and satisfying f’s and s’s) but there’s infinite expression in their delivery and use.
For example, there’s a world of difference between dropping a few choice expletives because the wind has caught your umbrella and wrecked it and calling someone an effing idiot because he or she pushed into the queue at the post office. You can use swearwords to add emphasis, to puncture pomposity and to win the heart of a fair maiden (albeit one with a robust sensibility, who has probably had more than enough of dealing with sodding dragons).
And that’s just if you’re using the kind of grade-A swearwords people understand all over the world, the ones live broadcasters have late-night fever dreams about, particularly when discussing a fracas in the Kentish countryside. Fortunately other words in circulation provide equally adaptable forms of obscenity, without once troubling foreign censors (although Ofcom would take a dimmer view).
One of the most expressive is bugger, a truly delightful word to say, especially now it has shaken off most of its judgmental provenance. Originally derived from an Old French word for “heretic”, bugger came to be synonymous with homosexual (one who commits buggery) in the sixteenth century, but took on an alternative meaning, denoting someone who deserves nothing but contempt or pity, in the eighteenth. Since then, the edges have become softened, and to be referred to as a bugger now is almost affectionate, in a gruff kind of way.
To be told to bugger off, while still a firm invitation to go away, comes from a similarly
warm place. And nothing undercuts the drama of disappointing news like a well-placed, explosive “Bugger it!”
Oddly popular both in the postindustrial north of England and in the resolutely rural West Country, bugger is the kind of word that is best left out of polite conversation, but will seal a friendship in trying times.
The same cannot be said for the other British grade-B wondercuss: wanker.
Loaded with the same Anglo-Saxon weaponry as other, more famous swears, the W word denotes one act, and one act only, and that is masturbation. To refer to someone as a wanker is fighting talk. You’re not just suggesting he spends far too long enacting rituals of self-love, you’re saying he’s not fit to breed.
It is not a word the Brits tend to find charming or affectionate, unless used within a close circle of friends. To draw a parallel with American slang, it’s probably slightly above jerk-off as an aggressive noun, and way above jackass, but slightly below most words that describe sexual organs. To even hint at it, say, by making a well-known hand gesture at a reckless driver in gridlock on a hot day, is to invite hostilities, if not an episode of actual road rage. Having said that, tosser and tosspot are comparatively mild, despite carrying the same meaning.
Punk fans will already be aware of bollocks, which means nonsense—as in “Stop talking bollocks, you lying bugger!”—or testicles. Oddly, to refer to something as the dog’s bollocks is to praise it highly, probably as a swearier alternative to the bee’s knees.
And below these are a host of even milder expletives that pepper British English like curried quail’s eggs in a game pie: sod (as in “Sod it!” or “Sod off!”) or git (“Shut your face, you mardy git!”—also used as get in Liverpool) or Ron Weasley’s perennial favourite, bloody hell.
Stuff Brits Like Page 15