Sometimes the fantasy worlds come to provincial Britain, as is the case with H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. We get to see Martian invaders in the suburbs of London. No flying saucer attacks on Big Ben or Buckingham Palace, but a journey on foot through Woking, Leather-head, Shepperton, Walton: the kind of humdrum areas in which notable things are unlikely to occur. J. K. Rowling used the same trick when she placed Harry Potter in a respectable house in a suburban estate, having been hidden there by the wisest wizard of a secret wiz-arding society, who realized that no one who knows their lumos from their expelliarmus would ever want to live in such an uncharming place.
Wells also created The Time Machine, in which a professorial character travels to a far future in which the realms of airy intellect and basic instinct have been separated genetically into two races, the Eloi and the Morlocks, because, from his Victorian standpoint, he could not conceive of a world in which people could breed across class boundaries. George Orwell took this one stage further in Nineteen Eighty-Four (a dystopian England in which it is always a wet Wednesday), by showing a totalitarian regime in which the working classes—the proles—are 85 per cent of the population, but so removed from society, as expressed through the hierarchies of the ruling Inner Party and middle-class Outer Party, that they’re not even considered worth keeping under surveillance. As long as they are fed and entertained, and troublemakers are weeded out, no prole need ever have to worry about a trip to Room 101.
There’s even a parody of this writerly response to inclement weather in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In a future dystopia in which natural urges have been both indulged and restricted, the character Helmholtz Watson faces exile and chooses the Falkland Islands over somewhere sunny, as he believes the bad weather would help him focus on writing. As if to prove this point, Nineteen Eighty-Four—which Orwell put together some sixteen years after Huxley’s Brave New World was published—was largely written in a farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura during a bitter winter, a mild summer and a relentlessly wet autumn. George Orwell, who had never had the healthiest lungs thanks to his devotion to strong hand-rolled cigarettes, was suffering, first from the tuberculosis that would ultimately take his life a year or so later, and then from the unpleasant aftereffects of a new TB drug. Consequently there’s a distinct lack of golden sunshine in that book, or talking lions, for that matter.
WHAT TO SAY: “Fetch the umbrella. I feel a utopia rising within me.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Shall we play Monopoly instead?”
Melancholy
Samuel Johnson called it “the black dog” and so, in his turn, did Winston Churchill. Nick Drake also had a dark hound of foreboding but only described its black eyes and the fact that it knew him by name. But all three did much the same job; namely, to act as the feral metaphor for an oncoming fug of wild melancholy. You could call it a result of changeable weather, you could say it’s a hangover from the decline of the empire or even a necessary by-product of a natural hardiness, but a significant proportion of the residents of the British Isles do seem to walk around underneath their own personal rain cloud all the time.
It has also been referred to as “the English disease”, but then, so have other such Anglified maladies as hypochondria, rickets, football hooliganism and putting spaces into compound words when writing in Dutch (no, really!), so let’s maybe stick with the black dog thing for now.
It’s not that the Brits are any more prone to dark moods or genuine mental illness than anyone else; it’s more that they simply don’t trust things that are 100 per cent happy. Actually, they don’t trust any simple emotions, but happiness—being uncluttered by anything except a giddy awareness of itself—is clearly accessible for only the simpleminded and people with no foresight and no memory for the heartbreaks of the past. It is not for rational thinkers with real lives, heads out of clouds and feet on the ground.
Having said that, sadness is just as troublesome. As far as the Brits are concerned, being noticeably sad is an affectation largely played out for effect and attention. All that wailing and rending of garments, all that pulling of hair and sobbing openly so that people can see. Well, it might be all right in Europe, but not in Britain.
So if you had to find a way to define a certain reserved, unavailable, undemonstrative and generally unforthcoming British state of being, that’s melancholy. It’s deep in the national psyche, peeping out mournfully and souring the milk.
They have a royal family who don’t look like they enjoy being in charge; they have celebrities whose principal role in the world of show business is to be perpetually disappointed by other people; they invented Morrissey and fog-soaked folk music and Winnie the Pooh’s grumpy friend Eeyore and Tony Hancock and Coldplay and Keats and Philip Larkin and Alan Bennett and the shipping forecast and the Kinks and Johnny Rotten and stone-faced comedians like Jack Dee and Stewart Lee. The greatest British romance is Romeo and Juliet, and while that does not end well for either party, it is still somehow considered an enviable passion. They are a nation for whom the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty, but once-full, and that’s the way they like it.
So it’s not that they enjoy being sad, or yearn to be happy; the way the Brits carry melancholy is as they would a heavy bag or tight pair of shoes. This is something that one simply endures. Not from a position of denial, far from it, but from the certain knowledge that there is very little anyone can do to shift it, beyond momentary distractions like drink or sex or crosswords. The trick is to make those moments last as long as humanly possible, which says a lot about how much the Brits like drink, and sex, and crosswords.
To summarize: You’ve heard the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? That’s the English interior monologue. Give it a pleasing burr, round out the vowels, emphasize the r sounds and add some sharp expletives and it’s also the Scottish interior monologue. The Welsh interior monologue is, if anything, more dour and exasperated, but it sounds less so because the accent is friendly; and the Northern Irish interior monologue does not wish to be associated in any way with the English one. Oh, wait, some of it does. No, now it doesn’t. Oh, now it’s arguing with itself.
Or to put it another way: if the Brits had made The Lego Movie, the theme song would be “Everything Is Awful” and it would sound like Radiohead.
WHAT TO SAY: “Oh, dear, one of those days? Fancy a pint?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Cheer up, love, it might never happen!”
The Tabloids
All the news that’s fit to print. And some that is not.
This topic is messier to unpick than a jumper made of wet dog hair, and just as prone to unpleasantly sticky patches, but the tabloids are as palpable a presence in British society as, well, that same wet dog in an immaculate hallway. The trouble is, in print journalism nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems.
There are lots of very good reasons to hate the British tabloid press (or, to give full credit where it is due, the British press). They inflame as much as they inform; they intrude when they should observe; they take themselves out of the situations they have created and then ask innocently, palms aloft, how such a thing could ever have come to pass. Worst of all, they set an agenda of campaigning cynicism, pitting communities against one another from both sides of the political divide and inflaming deeply held prejudices—sometimes using only the most convenient of facts, if any—so that politicians feel they must react to a made-up situation or risk a speedy death at the polls. Their influence, in other words, is untempered by the consequences of their actions. They can always say they told you so, but rarely admit to being wrong.
There again, all that power comes from somewhere. Ask a political blogger with a small audience to what extent he or she feels able to influence government policy and you will get a hollow laugh in return. Give that same blogger an attentive readership of millions, and the response will be entirely different. So the tabloids, and the broadsheets too, give their peopl
e what they want. And because their papers sell (they reason), they must not be doing anything wrong.
It’s not unlike the argument about exploitative photographs in celebrity magazines. Ask the public if they think magazines should continually run shaming editorials about celebrities gaining or losing weight, or send paparazzi to lie on the floor and try to get shots of Emma Watson’s knickers, and they will fairly uniformly say no. Ask them to stop buying the magazines that contain those editorials and pictures and they will also say no, quite firmly too. What is a magazine to do?
And then add in the fact that British people really do want to have an enquiring and critical press. They want fraud and criminality to be exposed. They want shady dealings to be brought out into the light and subjected to a thorough examination. They also know that the life of a tabloid hack involves a great deal of righteous dirt-digging. Even during a period when the public was exposed to some of the darkest, most exploitative techniques of information retrieval in journalistic history—as exposed during the Leveson inquiry into, among other things, the hacking of mobile phones—the consensus was that these were the acts of bad apples, under pressure from bad editors and unchecked by a regulatory body with any teeth. The public perception of the work of actual dedicated newshounds, while never openly admired in the way the work of a firefighter might be, did not suffer unduly.
That’s because they love newspapers. They love them on their morning commute. They love them at lunchtime, spending a half hour with the crossword or giggling at the spectacularly bad advice given by experts on the problem page, and they love them all the way home. And if anything, that love is more intense at the weekend. Few pleasures can match a Sunday morning sitting at a big table with a pot of coffee and a pile of newspapers to wade through. The Sunday papers are thick enough to provide a week’s worth of reading in one hit, and still have a section or two left over to line the cat’s litter tray with, and they cover hard news, lifestyle, sports, gossip and culture in perfect nuggets that shouldn’t take too long to finish, in between buttering toast and applying marmalade. You just pick the editorial flavour that most suits your taste and away you go.
Then there are the campaigns. These are the largest muscles a newspaper can flex. They can be inspirational or hateful, principled or bullying, and always play out on the front pages, usually with a specific political outcome in mind. It might be a campaign to prevent road deaths for cyclists or to rescue an unhappy rhino from a cruel zoo (see: Animals). You’ll find the Daily Mail or The Sun—Britain’s top two popular newspapers—running stories about rampant immigration, fraudulent benefits claimants or the antics of Russell Brand (he really seems to get on their nerves), and within a very short space of time, new government policies are announced that seek to tackle immigration, to reform the benefits system, to curb the excesses of Russell Brand’s hair. The newspapers can claim to have the ear of the people and the throat of the government and will use their popularity to shout and squeeze with some violence.
Not that this means they aren’t campaigned against in turn. The Sun faces stiff opposition (no, really) to the daily topless model on page 3, and the Daily Mail—with the biggest traffic for any newspaper website in the world, thanks largely to a sidebar featuring celebrity women and their tiny, tiny flaws—fairly consistently tiptoes down the fine line between “saying what we’re all thinking” and “inventing appalling opinions for attention” with all the deftness, grace and elegance of a boulder landing on a wedding cake. For all that the Mail can muster troops to complain about the mistakes of the BBC and the NHS, there are no shortage of people ready for a counterattack on the occasions when it steps out of line.
There again again, none of the above applies to celebrity journalism. That’s an entirely different fish tank of maggots. In celebrity journalism the exploited and the exploiters switch sides with such breathtaking speed it’s hard to be sure what’s really going on. You may find suspiciously staged photos of a young actor or would-be pop star out for a jog, because he or she wants to be seen in the paper. You may find that same star arguing with a photographer outside a nightclub, or angrily tweeting about being harassed, later that same week. But some stars are tabloidworthy only because their work is enormously well liked. They have never courted that attention but they get it nevertheless, and they’re largely expected to deal with the intrusion with good grace. Some of them even manage it. And the journalists often use the excuse that they’re well paid and in the public eye, so why should they complain? This line of reasoning only bears what little weight it can because the hacks are once again appealing to the people who really pay their wages: their readers, who are neither famous nor rich, but who will buy papers.
And that’s really what the British tabloid press are all about: the bottom line. They write those things and they take those pictures because there’s a willing audience that wishes to see them and believe them. The tabloids and the broadsheets aren’t like that because they’re run by evil masterminds bent on world domination—although that may also be the case—but because that is the way their readers want things to be, even those who buy the papers just to be appalled by them.
All we can say with any certainty is that Brits enjoy having their feelings whipped up by the press; but there again again again, maybe if the media were more honest about their own involvement in the news stories they cover, if they allowed themselves to be seen in the rooms they describe, things might be different. Do you agree? Text YES to this number . . .
WHAT TO SAY: “And you can read all about my sensational life in this week’s Mirror!’
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “No comment.”
Cars and Top Gear
You don’t have to be cruising down the freeway with the top down, or leaning out of a meandering Cadillac looking over the top of your sunglasses at a pretty lady (or pretty man), to have a soft spot for cars. In fact, there’s almost as much romance to be found winding your way down Cheddar Gorge in an asthmatic Morris Traveller, rolling obliviously up the A1 with a caravan (and ten-mile tailback) in tow, or making furious revving noises in a souped-up Ford Focus while waiting at the traffic lights at the Hammersmith roundabout. Almost.
In Britain, as in every other country in the world, most people think cars are nice—helpful even—but find it hard to muster the enthusiasm to keep theirs clean. We don’t need to linger on this middle-ground view for now, beyond saying you don’t have to obsess over mpg or torque to have a bond with an automobile. Nor is this the moment to consider the views of the people who actively wish to ban the internal combustion engine on ecological grounds, as the overwhelming majority of people care only about the usefulness of the vehicle and try not to think too hard about its fuel.
However, some people do take their passion to an obsessive degree. Roger Taylor from Queen, for example, who wrote the song “I’m in Love with My Car” and meant it too. It’s a languid, unsettling snog between man and machine that only really makes sense (note: it doesn’t really make sense) if you take the view that the automobile in the song is a metaphor for a sexy lady, or if you consider that Roger Taylor from Queen is very much the kind of rock star who would buy the kind of car that a rock star might find erotically stimulating. One that purrs.
Not that you have to be a rock star either. Talk to any of the Brits attending bank holiday rallies in which everyone who has the same sort of a car—Minis, VW camper vans, Beetles, Citroën 2CVs, vintage steam tractors—gets together in a field to admire their vehicles and the subtle differences in colour, design, performance and . . . ah . . . did I say design? Then there are the admirable obsessives who maintain and drive the oldest cars in existence and take them out on the first Sunday in November for the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. This is the longest-running motoring tournament in the world and is emphatically not a race, more a chance for a communal parade of a private passion. Should you be considering turning up with your DeLorean or knackered old Volvo, you should be aware that cars are eligible on
ly if they were built before 1905.
That’s not to say the British are too genteel a nation to enjoy the thrills and spills of a good race. In fact, they’ve even invented some of the hairiest circuits on the planet. Never mind Formula 1, the Isle of Man TT race comes from the era of putting high-performance vehicles (in this case motorbikes) onto public roads and letting the chips fall where they may, and that’s still an underlying attitude taken, if not by the organizers themselves, then by the participants, and definitely by the audience. The risk of injury, or even death, can’t be removed from the thrill of the spectacle and that’s partly why people love it.
Did I say never mind Formula 1? Strike that; Formula 1 racing is something of a national obsession, making household names of not only the best drivers but the TV commentators too. The BBC’s Murray Walker is the name most associated with the sport, although he has now retired. But in his prime he had a voice like an engine revving furiously in too low a gear, one that could cut through the sound of a pack of finely tuned performance cars doing exactly the same thing. At the same time, the TV coverage made a permanent link between Formula 1 and the coda section on the Fleetwood Mac song “The Chain”, the bit that starts with just a bass guitar and the pitter-patter of tiny drumsticks on a snare.
Stuff Brits Like Page 18