Stuff Brits Like

by Fraser McAlpine

  What this all means, apart from the normal run of matches and playoffs, is that when the Six Nations rolls around, there’s a chance for four nations with reasonable grounds for a grudge against the English ruling class (plus Italy) to beat the stuffing out of them. And of course, the thing to remember about the English upper classes is they are hard, and ruthless, so it’s usually a fight worth watching.

  WHAT TO SAY: “What time do the cheerleaders come out?”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Is that guy called a ‘scrum-half’ because he’s half the size of the other players?”

  Curry

  An uncomfortable truth lies at the heart of British cuisine. The most popular dishes and beverages—with surprisingly few exceptions—are either imported or contain imported ingredients. The English (in particular) consider themselves a proud, isolated island race with passions and interests and vices that are uniquely theirs, but they did have to go off around the world and fetch them back, before drawing up formal adoption papers and then pretending they had been there all along.

  Take a look at a roll call of great British foodstuffs. Tea isn’t local. Nor are the potatoes in fish ’n’ chips and bangers ’n’ mash, or the carrots and broccoli in a Sunday roast. Grilling some tomatoes with your fry-up? Adding some beans, perhaps? Yeah, they’re not from around here. And that’s before you consider the more obvious imports, like pizza and pasta, Chinese takeaway, or the spices used to flavour HP Sauce.

  But the greatest incorporated import of them all is curry. Whether it’s a pre-mixed sachet of powder in the cupboard, ready to give some leftover meat a boot up the jacksy, a sweating takeaway in a carrier bag on the bus home, or a hot sauce, pooled and dripping on a portion of chips, the Brits have a particular affinity for any spicy food that comes from the general direction of India.

  In fact, they love curry so much that they have developed their own dishes. Chicken tikka masala—regularly voted the most popular meal in Britain—is barely known in India or Pakistan, having been created in an Indian restaurant in Glasgow in 1971 (or so the legend goes). Now it’s available as a meal, a flavour of crisps and even a pizza topping. Balti curries are also claimed to be a UK innovation, first credited to Adil’s Restaurant, Birmingham, in 1977. And this was forty-two years after the arrival of Jubilee chicken, a salad dish made from chicken, mayonnaise and curry spices that was created to honour the silver Jubilee of George V. When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the dish was given a culinary reboot by Constance Fry and renamed Coronation chicken. It remains hugely popular as a sandwich filling or a topping for baked potato.

  Some homegrown attempts at creating curry have led to discoveries that have since been claimed as entirely English. One is the recipe handed to pharmacists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, who failed to make it into a palatable curry sauce, as they didn’t have the right ingredients, and left their concoction stewing in a barrel once they realized it had failed. This allowed it to ferment, and when they came back to it and tasted it again, they discovered they had accidentally created Worcestershire sauce.

  Naturally there are British traditions around drinking and curry. Thanks to the influence of the immigrant families from southern Asia in the middle of the twentieth century, the Indian restaurant—known chummily as a curry house—fast became a stopping-off point on a big night out, or the last stop on a weavy, shouty journey home, to grab a takeaway and drop it on the floor of the bus.

  Certain customs are associated with a visit to the curry house too. It’s common for people to overorder and then share their food—common enough for sticklers and connoisseurs to have to dig their heels in and fight for sole access to their dishes—and there’s an element of showing off, in ordering the spiciest dish on the menu, just to prove you can take it. There was even a hugely celebrated sketch about it on the BBC comedy show Goodness Gracious Me—written and performed by British comedians of Asian descent—in which a group of drunken Indian office workers barge into a restaurant demanding “an English” and asking for the blandest meal on the menu.

  It would be lovely to be able to say that this appreciation for the various cuisines of southern Asia has led to greater understanding and tolerance between communities, especially in areas such as London’s Brick Lane—home of an entire street of curry houses—or those parts of Birmingham, Bradford, Batley, Blackburn, Dewsbury, Keighley, Leicester, Slough, or anywhere that can boast a particularly significant Asian community.

  Sadly this isn’t always the case, although if anyone is looking for a good bread to break during a peaceful community get-together, naan seems particularly well suited to the task.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Of course I can take it. I eat spicy food all the time.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Water. Please. Or I shall have to stick my head in the fish tank.”

  Moaning about Bureaucracy

  Did anyone say decorum? Emotional reserve? Stiff upper lip? Pah! For all that the Brits will tell anyone who’ll listen that they’re a nation that prefers not to talk about feelings, the one emotion you can always rely on hearing about is mild irritation. It’s there in John Cleese’s comedy, as the spiralling fury of Basil Fawlty; it’s there in the narkier songs of Half Man Half Biscuit; and it’s there in every angry comment on the Internet that begins with an eye-rolling sneer and ends with “Open your eyes, sheeple!”

  And the one thing that causes greater outbreaks of petulance and irk than any other is bureaucracy. Which may seem odd, given the international British reputation for properness and bookkeeping, but while few things are more conspicuously British than a well-written series of regulations aiming to prevent something bad from happening, the only people who are pleased about those rules are the ones who drafted them.

  And it does not matter how reasonable those rules are. In fact, the more transparently necessary they are, the more withering the scorn for having to be told in the first place: “‘Don’t stick your head out of the train window?’ I mean, what kind of idiots do they think we are?”

  There’s an enormous disrespect for health and safety legislation, one that borders on ingratitude (which, again, is something you’d expect a culture that bangs on about manners all the time to be a little more aware of). If at a clifftop car park an appalling accident occurs in which a car drives over the edge, that’s one thing. But woe betide the regional authority that seeks to prevent such an accident from happening again by putting up a sign suggesting that drivers be careful—“Of course we’re not going to drive over the cliff! Who would ever do a thing like that? This is just another example of the nanny state telling people what to do. They can’t help themselves . . .”

  This mild apoplexy doubles if it’s pointed out that such a sign exists so that the owners of the car park cannot be held responsible for such accidents, should they occur. Brits may love America (see: America), but the legal system in the UK is less happy handed with the compensation payouts than they are in the States, and this is a source of some pride. They hold a special place of utter contempt in their hearts for ambulance-chasing lawyers seeking to make money out of tragedy (unless they have experienced such a tragedy themselves, of course).

  The irony being, had the sign not been there, but a strong fence put up instead—which is more draconian a measure, if we’re talking freedoms being curtailed—that would be absolutely fine. It’s the being told to behave that rankles.

  The same problem occurs with matters of “so-called” political correctness. Now, I should state that I’ve put the speech marks there on purpose, partly because you can’t say “politically correct” without hearing air quotes in your mind, but mostly because it also calls to mind the sound of someone who is more angry than clever prefacing the term with “so-called” because he or she thinks it’s doubly damning. It’s not a great rhetorical tool or even a convincing way to start an argument, but it does happen often.

  In general, it would be fair to say that everyone understands the basic idea behind political correc
tness, which is that certain terms and phrases were coined during a period of intense unfairness for the majority of people. Not minorities; that’s bull. Women account for more than 50 per cent of the world’s population before we’ve even started tallying up everyone else involved: people of non-Caucasian ethnicities and alternate sexualities, people with disabilities and so on.

  It’s natural for language to evolve, for terms and expressions to come in and out of fashion due to changing priorities in culture. That’s a process that never stops happening, and it only benefits and strengthens language that this is the case. So if a term comes from a position of extreme injustice, and it still carries the luggage of that injustice, it’s probably a good idea to retire that phrase from public use. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of words that can be used instead. And for anyone who holds a residual fondness for those old words and is reluctant to give them up, it’s sometimes useful to wonder if that’s because you got away with it then and you know it.

  But the problem is not the idea of dropping unacceptable words, it’s being told to drop words that may (or may not) be unacceptable. That’s what causes the irritation. And the process is not helped by spurious media reports about well-meaning councils that have banned words like manhole, blackboard or Christmas to appease “the PC brigade.” That most of these stories turn out to be either grossly exaggerated or flatly untrue is of no consequence compared to the appealing idea that this is just something the council bloody would do. It’s just typical!

  This can lead to some delightful legends springing up, such as the time trains were cancelled after a heavy snowfall in 1991. When explaining that the problem was not in clearing the lines, but that the unusually dusty snow was getting into the electrical systems of the trains and causing them to short-circuit, a British Rail executive fell on the wrong side of a BBC interviewer, whose barbed response—“Oh, I see, it was the wrong kind of snow”—set the tone for the subsequent media coverage. This did not linger long on the electrical side of things, favouring the suggestion that “the wrong kind of snow” was corporate doublespeak for “we can’t be bothered to clear the tracks properly.”

  So whether it’s out of a sense of frustration that everything in the world is not run better, or a natural chippiness about being told what to do, the one guaranteed way to truly irk British people is to try to prevent them from killing themselves. They hate that.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Oh, look, we can’t stand here. I expect there’s a good reason for that.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY (PLEASE): “It’s so-called political correctness gone mad.”

  Pub Quizzes

  It’s not enough that the pub is the hub of all social interaction in British communities (see: Pubs, Inns, Bars and Taverns). Once you’re through the front door, you’ve greeted the bar staff, ordered your drinks and settled down at a table, what are you going to do?

  Traditionally, pubs have offered quite a few ways to pass the time. There are the old traditional table games, such as shove ha’penny, tabletop skittles and dominoes, and the championship games, such as darts, billiards and pool. But these are all restrictive affairs, designed for only a few players and offering no chance to unite the room in one common endeavour.

  So, assuming there are no football or rugby matches to watch and the karaoke machine is broken, one of the most popular ways for Brits to spend their evenings is to engage in a group quiz, often with the chance to win a free meal at a local restaurant or a plate of meat from the butcher’s.

  Pub quizzes are popular at all points of the compass and they all follow a broadly similar format. People arrive, get the drinks in and sort themselves into teams. Some teams are formed from groups of happy friends who wish to have a fun night out; others are formed of experts who wish to dominate all pub quizzes forever.

  But whether novices or veterans, all the teams will attempt to come up with a funny name that either mocks their collective intelligence, strikes a saucy tone, or cleverly combines the twin pastimes of drinking and thinking in a pun. Genuine examples include: Alcohooligans, the Three Must-get-beers, Clitoris Allsorts, Don Quizote, DENSA, Agatha Quiztie and Eddie Quizzard.

  Some will fail, and they may resort to being called “Tom, Barb, Jimmy and Jackie” or “Table Six”, but having a good pub quiz team name is like going to Oxbridge: it provides the kind of start that will ensure you have the confidence to succeed.

  Then the quizmaster steps up to the microphone. It’s a terrible microphone, very muffled and with a marked tendency to create howling feedback at the drop of a question about a hat. The quizmaster will have spent a week preparing fiendish questions, organized into rounds by topic. The objective is not to pander to anyone’s misguided self-belief about their specialist subject; it is to crush and humiliate, to sort the addled-but-capable from the entirely incapacitated and to ensure there is only one winner at the end.

  To that end, it is not uncommon to be faced with an entire round of questions that would befuddle a top crime scene investigation team led by Sherlock Holmes himself. Subjects might include: “Pop music from before ‘Rock around the Clock’”, “Coins of the Roman Empire” or “Some of the things my mother said to me yesterday between lunch and her afternoon nap”.

  And it is equally common for frustrated quiz-ateers to make up silly answers to the questions they cannot fathom, just to break the tension. However, most teams have at least one member who cannot see the funny side, and a frosty silence can develop, punctuated by hissed arguments and bad-tempered shushing.

  At the end of each round, the teams swap answer sheets and mark each other’s papers. This is an opportunity to keep your rivals at bay, so any spelling mistakes, any attempt at levity, any deviation from a perfectly expressed correct answer will be marked as incorrect. The foolproofedness of such a plan lasts just long enough for each team to receive its own sheets back and discover that everyone is marking to the same impossible standard.

  Then the scores are tallied and the quizmaster reads out the leader board in reverse order, giving all of those hilarious team names a good airing, with cheers coming from various different points around the pub, even for the teams at the very bottom.

  And that’s it, save for a few bad-tempered arguments between the quizmaster and various pedants and experts who can’t believe their correct answer was marked wrong because the question was badly phrased (or the answer given is, in fact, incorrect), and a possible tie-break round at the end.

  By this time all the funny team names have lost their giggly allure and become entrenched in the collective mentality, as if they’ve somehow acquired the status of minor republics in the United Nations, with superpower status being allocated to the final two, no matter how preposterous their names may be.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Actually the song is called ‘Make Me Smile—brackets—Come Up and See Me—close brackets’, so . . .”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Dunkirk! It’s definitely Dunkirk! Unless it’s Dieppe . . .”

  Movie 4: Kes

  The England that is shown in Kes doesn’t exist any more, but unlike, say, The Railway Children and The Great Escape, it most certanly did while the film was being made. So while it was originally shot as a contemporary view of working-class life in the mining communities of Yorkshire—among some of the lowest-paid workers in the country at the time—it has now become a snapshot of a particular moment in English history, as loaded with significance as a sepia-tone shot of pioneers settling the Wild West.

  Kes was filmed during that period when the 1960s was just about to turn into the 1970s—the same year the Beatles walked tetchily over the zebra crossing outside EMI (later renamed Abbey Road) Studios—but no one had thought to tell the people of Barnsley. The long hair and flares of Swinging London had still not permeated far enough north, so all the grown-ups wear beehives or comb-overs, and everyone gathers in the workingmen’s club for a drink, a saucy sing-along and a knees-up just as they always have. There are no teenagers here, just insolent kids and ang
ry grown-ups. There’s a bit of pop music, but it’s already out of date—musicians dressed like the Searchers in the era of Jimi Hendrix—and there’s no youth explosion.

  That’s not to say progress has not happened. In fact, there’s a long speech from a truculent headmaster about the youth of the day, declining standards, and the beneficial effects of tearing down the old slum housing and building new estates and new schools. But the new estates have the same reputation for trouble as the old ones, and the headmaster is merely justifying his indiscriminate use of the cane, even on the hands of a boy who only came into the office to deliver a message.

  Kes is also one of the first of those films where working-class people—usually children—are lifted out of the drabness and unpleasantness of their everyday environment by something spiritually enriching. In Billy Elliot, thirty years into the future, it would be ballet. For Billy Glover in Kes, stuck in 1969 and running from paper round to school yard and back home again without his games kit or a proper uniform or even a clean pair of ears, it’s a stolen kestrel that he can encourage and train.

  It’s also a film about the wild, but not the wildness of nature. The rolling fields around the housing estates of Barnsley and the trusting kestrel that Billy raises carefully with instructions from a stolen library book are a civilizing influence when compared to the brutality of the humans. There’s the savage elder brother, Jud; Billy’s wayward mother; the fierce headmaster; the belligerent sports teacher with his Manchester United T-shirt and preening ego; and various untamed children to the left and right.

  Two weeks from leaving school and looking for work, and terrified of becoming a miner like his brother, Billy spends his life in a series of battles with people who think they know best for kids like him, or with his classmates. Only in the stolen moments with his bird does he blossom into something else; just for a short while, his potential is reached. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the anticlimax of reaching adulthood.