Kes was Ken Loach’s second film, after spending a good deal of the ‘60s making gritty dramas for TV about social issues. His films are down-to-earth, unsentimental, funny and tragic at the same time, and that’s something that suits a certain British taste. Some people prefer escapism and robots on their cinema screens, but many Brits prefer to see life as they understand it, in accents that are close to their own. The films of Mike Leigh and Bill Forsyth also work in a similar way, as do the songs of Pulp, the Kinks and Arctic Monkeys.
A moment about halfway through the film shows one of the first times Billy experiences the support of his peers. Bullied into telling his English class about Kes, his enthusiasm starts bubbling out, and he winds up gabbling away ten to the dozen about this hawk, and how he trained her to fly to his glove from the edge of a field, and his classmates are rapt, his teacher enthused and sympathetic for the first time. It’s the “hey, troubled kid, I didn’t know you could rap” moment, only far less cloying.
Naturally the next thing that happens is Billy takes a hiding from a bully in the school yard and winds up rolling in a pile of coal while the whole school runs to watch. But because of that moment earlier, his teacher takes pity for the first time, visiting him and Kes in the field, and Billy’s world starts to make a kind of sense. He gets free scraps from the butcher to feed the bird; people stop him in the street to ask about it. For a while the wildness recedes.
And then, because this isn’t Billy Elliot, because of that British mistrust of easy sentimentality, the wildness returns. Billy fails to put two bets on for his brother, spending the money on a fish supper instead. Jud goes looking for Billy to give him a good hiding, and when he finds the kestrel instead, he kills her.
The final scene of the film is Billy quietly digging a grave for his hawk and tamping the dirt down, all questions about his future still unanswered, his moment of hope extinguished.
Taken as the story of a young man adrift in adult company, Kes is a British answer to The Catcher in the Rye, with Billy as an inverse Holden Caulfield. Instead of a self-obsessed and rather whiny privileged kid, he’s an underfed waif with nothing but misery for company; and rather than swan about acting aloof, he chooses to invest all his time and creative energy working with a genuine force of nature, because after everything he has experienced, he’s only comfortable with a creature that can’t be tamed.
WHAT TO SAY: “Are we supposed to find this bit funny?”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Those accents are impenetrable. I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
Mythical Beasts
While the Loch Ness Monster may cast the longest imaginary shadow and create the most opportunities for tourism and Scooby-Doo specials—the twin props of any thriving first-world economy—there’s an undiscovered zooful of mythical creatures still on the prowl in the British Isles, one that is entirely resistant to the dispelling effects of science, religion and photographic equipment. Some are dark and fearsome, some are haunting and strange, and some are bloody and weird. This is what the rural Brits were doing in between building stone circles and inventing cider.
First, there are the black dogs. Not an allusion to depression this time (see: Melancholy) but actual sooty hellhounds with scarlet eyes and pin-sharp fangs. In the northern counties of England he’s called Barghest or Gytrash; in Leeds he’s called Padfoot; in Wales he’s Gwyllgi; and in Scotland he’s Cu Sith. There’s even a hybrid ape-dog called Shug Monkey in Cambridgeshire, but for a good portion of the middle of England, one dog rules them all, and his name is Black Shuck.
This is the dog that chases catastrophe into your path, and your only protection is to close your eyes and pray. Not that this helped the congregation of Blythburgh church, Suffolk, in 1577. In a contemporary account, Black Shuck charged in with a storm at his heels and killed a man and a boy, then left with such startling velocity the steeple collapsed and there were scorch marks on the door.
Still at least they had firm evidence that something had happened. When it comes to hellcats, particularly those said to roam the moors down in the southwest, the reports get a little hazier. Exmoor is said to be the home of a big black cat, something like a panther or puma, that kills grazing sheep. Another one has been sighted on Bodmin Moor in North Cornwall, and a third way over in Brighton, on the southeast coast. Then there’s the Fiskerton Phantom, a ghost panther (or possibly bear) seen near a campsite in Lincolnshire.
While we’re on big animals, what about the Owlman of Mawnan, in Cornwall? This Spring-Heeled Jack-type figure is a recent arrival—first seen in 1976, last seen in 1995—and seems to be either a man with wings, claws and a beak or an owl as big as a man, with the requisite red eyes and pointed ears: a hellowl, in other words.
Then there are the beasts that are like horses, only nasty. The Nuckelavee is a demonic Scottish brute said to resemble a composite horse-and-rider in one, only entirely skinless. It lives in the sea—which must sting something rotten, given the no-skin thing—with breath bad enough to spoil an entire crop and sicken a cow. Mother Supernature can be cruel sometimes.
Kelpies are perhaps better looking, in that they’re big black horses, with backward hooves, that live in lochs and freshwater pools; but they’re no less fearsome, because they eat people. In Aberdeenshire, the kelpies have manes of snakes, and the ones in the River Spey can sing travellers onto their backs, at which point they become stuck fast. Oh, and they can elongate their backs to fit more people on, because why not? They’re mythical.
Grindylows do not look like horses, but they do like to drag children into their watery, boggy homes if they come too close. Shelly-coats, knuckers and the Tiddy Mun are also best avoided, as is the eachy, which is either a humanoid lake monster or a thirteen-foot-long, three-humped, snake-faced beast. There are also asrai, which are water fairies or river mermaids, but they will die in direct sunlight, so it’s probably best to leave them be. In fact, if you’re by anything watery and you see movement of any kind (especially if it’s an underwater horse) just leave.
It’s a bit safer on land. The worst you’ll get from being conned into riding a brag is a dunking in a nearby pond, and if you climb aboard a dunnie, it’ll take you to the muddiest stretch of road and then vanish, followed by a wet plop (that’s you).
But not all mythical creatures are out to cause trouble. Some are even helpful, especially if you’re a miner by trade. Bluecaps are tiny fairies on the English-Scottish border that aid miners to find the best deposits, help to push tubs of coal, and warn them if the ceiling is about to fall in. They’re not unlike the Cornish knockers, who are paid in pasty crusts for their hard work.
Redcaps, on the other hand, are rotten goblins who look like old men with red eyes and live in ruined castles (in the same area as their helpful blue cousins) and kill anyone foolish enough to visit. Like Smurfs gone bad, they then dip their caps in the blood of their prey, which have to be kept moist or they will die. Mythical evolution is clearly even more bizarre than the real thing.
Then there are brownies, hobs and hobgoblins, elvish imps who all look broadly similar and do household chores, providing you don’t get on their nerves. Brownies are especially useful around the home—assuming no one is looking—and will take their wages in honey and porridge, provided this is not considered a payment. Lubberkin offers a similar service, even though he is far bigger and hairier, and has a tail. Oddly, he prefers a saucer of milk to porridge.
A similarly house-proud spirit was said to occupy Dryburgh Abbey in Berwickshire, Scotland. He would stamp the moisture from the air using heavy boots and was given the Jaggerish title Fatlips. On the more unhelpful side, boggarts will work in your house, but they’ll sour your milk, lose your stuff and make your dog go lame. And occasionally steal your children. Spriggans occupy ruined buildings and are horrific thieves. They can also inflate to huge sizes and might steal your kids too, so steer clear.
Then there’s Black Annis, an old woman with a blue face and iron claws who likes
to wander around Leicestershire looking for tasty young humans to skin, eat and then wear as a belt. Or Reynardine the werefox, who roams the mountains looking for maidens to abduct.
But the most grotesque story of them all is the tale of the Ratman of Southend. This terrifying creature, heard in scratches and moans late at night, is either the feral rat-faced child of the Mayor of South-end, kept in a cage in a specially built underpass, which he often escapes, or he’s a supernatural grotesque, the reanimated corpse of a homeless man who was kicked to death by a gang of kids (in the selfsame underpass) and feasted upon by rats.
Either way, I’d rather take my chances with Black Shuck.
WHAT TO SAY: “Right, I’ve got my holy water, my Bible, some honey and a broken shoe for mending; all I need is some black dog biscuits and I can go for a stroll.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Why any rational person would choose to believe in this supernatural mumbo jumbo is beyond me. Oh, look, is that a horse?”
The Theatre
Generations of British schoolchildren have experienced the deadening confusion of the “improving” trip to see a production of a Shakespeare play, the highlights of the trip invariably being a minor argument between best friends over who gets to sit next to whom and widespread incredulity as some members of the audience loudly guffaw at some incomprehensible business onstage in which a woman dresses as a man (see: Cross-Dressing), pretends to be her own brother, and ends up fending off the attentions of an amorous woman who has fallen for him (meaning her). Then those same people begin ostentatiously sobbing at a beautifully orated, but quite confusing speech in which the words seem to rise up like an angry snake and then fall back on themselves like a wet earthworm on a pavement. It is not the best way to encourage a love of the Bard.
But this does not mean that, as grown-ups, people feel a sense of hostility or unease about the theatre in general. It’s true that Shakespeare is a monolithic figure to get around—in much the same way that Everest is a monolithic mountain to get around—not least because he invented so many words and phrases that are now used every day by English speakers all over the world. And even if he had not, his plots and characters—scheming Iago and jealous Othello, angsty Hamlet, mad old King Lear—are the bedrock on which theatre rests. Even if we had no Royal Shakespeare Company or National Theatre in Britain, his works would continue to play out across stages and screens for as long as there are stages and screens. There’s a quiet satisfaction to that even for the most greasepaint-phobic of British citizens.
And even if they refused to set foot in a theatre ever again, they would still be well served by those who do so regularly. The biggest and best British screen actors and actresses got started by treading the boards, and they still nurse a quiet aspiration to get back there as soon as they’ve finished their latest project: playing an evil genius, a sarcastic detective, a black-hearted cop, or a sarcastic evil genius supervillain cop detective . . . in space. In Britain, acting is a theatrical skill, one in which you have to learn to talk quietly with enough clarity to still be heard by everyone in a large room.
This transfers to television and the movies because that kind of authority, that quiet intensity, becomes mesmeric in front of a camera. Just look at Ian McKellen—as magnetic playing Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as he is playing the genuinely magnetic Magneto in the X-Men franchise. And it’s the same for Tom Hiddleston, Emily Blunt, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Benedict Cumberbatch, Helena Bonham Carter and so on. And that resonant delivery shares a tone of voice with the great British novels, so it suits television adaptations of the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters. That’s the intermediary stage for all British actors between the theatre and Hollywood.
More recently, a hugely popular trend has been to film theatrical presentations and present them to cinemagoers as a special live-but-not-live event. This saves people the trouble of travelling all the way into London to see the as-Shakespeare-intended productions at the Globe theatre, and it circumnavigates the expense of trying to get hold of hot tickets. The extra bonus is this arrangement often guarantees a better seat in the house, which, in the case of the Globe stalls in particular, means any kind of seat at all.
Sometimes a cultural event happens that draws all the great theatrical performers together like gnats on a fruit bowl. The Harry Potter movies did that very thing, acting as a kind of end-of-year collaborative class project for the British theatrical tradition at large. It was also a rare collision of profitable circumstances, driven by a worldwide expectation from fans. J. K. Rowling’s stories were so popular they created a guaranteed audience waiting to watch them come to life in a cinema, and their expectations were threefold: (1) that all the characters in the books would be included (and there are loads), (2) that the magic look magical (which costs money), and (3) that everything be as British as Marmite butties. This, thankfully, was not hard to achieve, given the talent involved.
And the list of great British actors who appeared in the Harry Potter movies is truly impressive. Skim a stone across the surface of a random selection and you’ll hit Maggie Smith, Ralph Fiennes, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Julie Walters, David Thewlis, John Hurt, Jason Isaacs, Imelda Staunton, Michael Gambon, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Jim Broadbent or Timothy Spall. And it was a two-way street, making future theatrical stars out of its three child leads: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. And of course, international recognition of this sort doesn’t just enrich the soul; it also brings money to the British economy, and with money comes state recognition. That’s one of the reason why so many of the best loved of British actors, directors and playwrights have appeared on the Queen’s Honours List.
But most important, the success of Harry Potter gave those bored kids in the theatre a taste for longer narratives and complicated words—credit where it is due, there’s no difference between Shakespeare inventing wild-goose chase and J. K. Rowling inventing expelliarmus—and some even began watching the Bard voluntarily, on the BBC in the form of The Hollow Crown, which took his history plays and made them look like Game of Thrones.
WHAT TO SAY: “As with all theatrical presentations, it takes about a half hour to attune yourself to the language and wait for Dad to fall asleep, and then you’re off.”
WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Dude, where’s the popcorn stand?”
Banter
Let’s clear up any confusion from the start: banter—also known as bantering, bantersaurus, bant, bants, bantz, top bantz, underbants, bantarctica, bantastic, bantam roastering and bantasmagoria—is a terrifically overused word.
It is most often used to describe a group of friends, work colleagues or strangers sharing a joke. Or several jokes. It may once have meant sharing a joke at someone’s expense, and certainly that is the version that causes the most problems, but any fine detail has been worn so thin by overuse it now includes everything from indulging in prank phone calls to tossing a pun into a Twitter hashtag game. If you have sat around a bottle of wine or jug of beer with mates and thrown around competitive one-liners on any topic, congratulations! You have indulged in banter. It’s a nice thing to do, but as with all nice things to do, overuse or misuse can lead to unpleasant situations.
There are two schools of thought around banter and its manifold applications pertaining to the crunching gears of contemporary British life.
One claims that a little bit of light mockery does everyone a power of good and if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t make them and if you’re not making jokes what kind of a person are you? Let’s call this the tightrope school, because you’re always one false step from being hit in the face (by a rapidly approaching floor).
Graduates of the tightrope school enjoy the idea that they are speaking to friends, who automatically understand whether they believe what they are saying or not. This allows for a thrilling frisson whenever the conversation blunders over traditional boundaries of taste or decency, as these banterers p
retend to be just like stand-up comedians—or the presenters of Top Gear—for the night.
It comes from the same corner of the brain that understands that mutually understood sarcasm is a form of honesty (see: Sarcasm) and that affection can take the form of pretend abuse—providing the abuser and the abusee are both in on the joke—and the Brits, being suspicious of public displays of emotion, are rather fond of it. You can’t tell people you love them by saying “I love you”, because that would be rank sentimentality; you should instead embark on a really long and systematic dressing-down, taking in all of their foibles and failings, followed by a drinks order. That’s banter.
The opposing school holds that banter is a pernicious umbrella and a convenient mask for people in positions of power—white people, men, straight people, straight white men etc.—to wear so that they get to say horrific things about anyone they like and pretend that they don’t really mean it to avoid taking the consequences of their own unpleasant views. This tends to come up as a point of conflict in communities where all context has been shorn from the original comments. Jokey thoughts are one thing when shared among friends, but they look very different when, for example, broadcast on social media. This doesn’t mean it’s fine to say whatever, whenever, but Twitter is no place for nuance.
Antibanterers tend to be hostile to the idea that context is key to working out if someone is genuinely being a rotter or not. How, they wonder, could someone even think of those things, or use horrific terms of abuse, if they don’t really mean them? What kind of a person would say unsayable things if they didn’t wish them to be said? That’s banter of the ringmaster school, in which the speaker has the red jacket and the whip hand and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can always send in their clowns.
Stuff Brits Like Page 22