Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Television Rules

  Those who do worry about such things can take comfort from the research findings showing that we are not, in fact, a nation of telly-addicted couch potatoes. At first glance, survey figures tend to give a rather misleading impression: television-watching appears to be by far the most popular domestic leisure pursuit, with 99 per cent of the population recorded as regular viewers. But when we note how the survey questions are phrased – ‘Which of these things have you done in the past month?’ – the picture changes. After all, it would be hard, in the space of an entire month, not to switch on the news occasionally. Ticking the ‘yes’ box for television does not necessarily mean that one has been glued to the set every night.

  We do watch quite a lot of television – the national average is about four hours a day (including online viewing) – but television cannot be said to be killing the art of conversation. In the same survey, 97 per cent of respondents had also entertained or visited friends or relations in the past month. I have been somewhat sceptical about television viewing figures since I was involved in a research project some years ago in which a team of psychologists installed video-cameras in ordinary people’s sitting rooms to monitor how much television they watched and how they behaved while doing so. I was only a lowly assistant researcher on this study; my job was to monitor the videotapes with a stopwatch and time exactly how long our subjects actually looked at the television screen, as well as making notes on anything else they might be doing. The subjects filled in forms every day, saying what programmes they had seen and estimating how much of each programme they had actually watched.

  The differences between their estimates and the reality, as clocked by my stopwatch, showed that when people tell a survey researcher that they spent an evening, or an hour, ‘watching television’, it is highly likely that they were doing no such thing. What they often mean is that they had the television on while they chatted with family or friends, played with the dog, read the newspaper, squabbled over the remote, gossiped on the telephone, cut their toenails, nagged their spouse, cooked and ate supper, fell asleep, did the ironing and hoovering, had sex, shouted at their children and so on, perhaps occasionally glancing at the television screen.

  If we were to repeat this experiment now, we would also see many people chatting with friends, family and strangers on the internet, on sites such as Facebook or Twitter, while ostensibly watching television. Often, they are posting and tweeting about the programmes they are ‘watching’, conducting a sort of running commentary consisting mainly of humorously derogatory remarks. But many find the internet chatter far more engrossing than the programme itself, so we are probably now actually watching less television than ever. This is certainly true of younger people, who spend considerably more time on the internet than watching television.

  There are also, of course, people who grossly underestimate the amount of television they watch, but they are usually lying, unlike our study participants who were at least trying to be accurate. The sort of people who claim that they ‘never watch television’ are usually trying to convince you that they are somehow morally and/or intellectually superior to the lumpen masses, who have nothing better to do than ‘goggle at hours of mindless rubbish’ every night. You are most likely to find this attitude among middle-aged, middle-class males, suffering from the same class-insecurities as those who sneer at Mercedes drivers. This anti-telly posturing always strikes me as a particularly irrational affectation in England, where we have what is generally acknowledged to be the best television in the world, and there really is something worth watching almost every day, even for those with haughtily highbrow tastes.

  For the rest of us ordinary mortals, television seems to promote the art of conversation, providing the socially challenged English with yet another much-needed ‘prop’. In a recent survey, television programmes came out as the most common topic of conversation among friends and family, even more popular than moans about the cost of living. Television is second only to the weather as a facilitator of sociable interaction among the English. It is something we all have in common. When in doubt, or when we have run out of weather-speak starters and fillers, we can always ask: ‘Did you see . . .?’ The likelihood is that many of us will have watched at least some of the same recent programmes, and despite the relatively high quality of English television, we can nearly always find something to share a good moan about.

  Soap Rules

  Our social inhibitions and obsession with privacy are also reflected in the kind of television programmes we make and watch, particularly our soap operas. The most popular English television soap operas are highly unusual, utterly different from those of any other country. The plots, themes and storylines may be very similar – the usual mix of adultery, violence, death, unwanted pregnancies, paternity disputes and other improbable incidents and accidents – but only in England does all this take place entirely among ordinary, plain-looking, working-class people, often middle-aged or old, doing menial or boring jobs, wearing cheap clothes, eating beans and chips, drinking in scruffy pubs and living in realistically small, poky, unglamorous houses.

  American soaps are aimed at the same lower-class audience as our EastEnders and Coronation Street (you can tell the market from the kind of products advertised in the breaks), but the characters, their settings and lifestyles are all middle class, glamorous, attractive, affluent and youthful. They are all lawyers and doctors and successful entrepreneurs, beautifully groomed and coiffed, leading their dysfunctional family lives in immaculate, expensive houses, and having secret meetings with their lovers in smart restaurants and luxurious hotels. Virtually all soaps throughout the rest of the world are based on this ‘aspirational’ American model. Only the English go in for gritty, kitchen-sink, working-class realism. Even the Australian soaps, which come closest, are glamorous by comparison with the grim and grubby English ones. Why is this? Why do millions of ordinary English people want to watch soaps about ordinary English people just like themselves, people who might easily be their next-door neighbours?

  The answer, I think, lies partly in the empiricism and realism88 that are so deeply rooted in the English psyche, and our related qualities of down-to-earthness and matter-of-factness, our stubborn obsession with the real, concrete and factual, our distaste for artifice and pretension. If Pevsner were to write today on ‘The Englishness of English Soap Opera’, I think he would find the same eminently English ‘preference for the observed fact and personal experience’, ‘close observation of what is around us’ and ‘truth and its everyday paraphernalia’ in EastEnders and Coronation Street that he found in Hogarth, Constable and Reynolds.

  But this is not sufficient explanation. The Swiss painter Henry Fuseli may have been correct in his observation that our ‘taste and feelings all go to realities’ but the English are quite capable of appreciating much less realistic forms of art and drama; it is only in soap opera that we differ so markedly from the rest of the world, demanding a mirror held up to reflect our own ordinariness. My hunch is that this peculiar taste is somehow closely connected to our obsession with privacy, our tendency to keep ourselves to ourselves, to go home, shut the door and pull up the drawbridge. I have discussed the privacy-fixation in some detail in earlier chapters, and suggested that a corollary of it is our extreme nosiness, which is only partially satisfied by our incessant gossiping. A forbidden-fruit effect is operating here: the English privacy rules mean that we tend to know very little about the personal lives and doings of people outside our immediate circle of friends and family. It is not done to ‘wash one’s dirty linen in public’, or acceptable to ask the kind of personal questions that would elicit any such washing.

  So we do not know what our neighbours get up to behind their closed doors (unless they are so noisy that we have already complained to the police and the local council about them). When a murder is committed in an average English street, the response from neighbours questioned by the police or journalists is alw
ays the same: ‘Well, we didn’t really know them . . .’, ‘They kept themselves to themselves . . .’, ‘They seemed pleasant enough . . .’, ‘We mind our own business, round here . . .’, ‘A bit odd, but one doesn’t like to pry, you know . . .’ Actually, we would dearly love to pry: we are a nation of insatiably curious curtain-twitchers, constantly frustrated by the draconian nature of our unwritten privacy rules. The clue to the popularity of kitchen-sink soap operas is in the observation that soap-opera characters are ‘people who might easily be our next-door neighbours’. Watching soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street is like being allowed to peer through a spyhole into the hidden, forbidden, private lives of our neighbours, our social peers – people like us, but about whom we can normally only guess and speculate. The addictive appeal of these soaps lies in their vicarious satisfaction of this prurient curiosity: soaps are a form of voyeurism. And, of course, they confirm all of our worst suspicions about what goes on behind our neighbours’ firmly closed doors and impenetrable net curtains: adultery, alcoholism, wife-beating, shoplifting, drug-dealing, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, murder . . . The soap-opera families are ‘people like us’, but they are making an even more spectacularly dysfunctional mess of their lives than we are.

  So far, I have mentioned only the most popular English soaps – which are the unequivocally working-class ones: EastEnders and Coronation Street. But our television producers are a shrewd and kindly lot, and do their best to provide soaps catering to each layer of the English class system, and even to different demographic groups within these layers. EastEnders and Coronation Street represent, respectively, the southern and northern urban working classes. Emmerdale is one or two social notches up from these, with a number of significant lower-middle and middle-class characters, and also rural rather than urban. Hollyoaks is essentially a more youthful, teenage, suburban version of EastEnders, deviating somewhat from the warts-and-all norm in actually featuring attractive-looking characters, although they are still dressed in realistically cheap high-street fashions. Even the middle- to upper-middles occasionally get their own soaps: for a while there was This Life, featuring a group of well-spoken but neurotic thirty-something lawyers. They were fairly attractive and smartly dressed, but they did not, like American soap characters, wake up in the morning with their faces immaculately made-up and hair perfectly blow-dried; their (frequent) drunkenness was convincingly vomitous; their rows and squabbles involved a believable amount of swearing; and they had dirty dishes in the sink.

  Sit-com Rules

  Much the same warty-realism rules apply to English situation-comedy programmes. Almost all English sit-coms are about ‘losers’ – unsuccessful people, doing unglamorous jobs, having unsatisfactory relationships, living in, at best, dreary suburban houses. They are mostly working class or lower-middle class, but even the more well-off characters are never successful high-flyers. The heroes – or rather, anti-heroes, the characters we laugh at – are all failures.

  This has caused a few problems in the export market: when popular English sit-coms, such as Men Behaving Badly and The Office, are ‘translated’ for the American market, the original English characters are often found to be too low-class, too unsuccessful, too unattractive, too crude – and generally just a bit too uncomfortably real. In the American versions, they tend to be given job promotions, more regular features, better hair, smarter clothes, more glamorous girlfriends, more up-market houses and lifestyles. Their disgusting habits are toned down, and their language is sanitised along with their bathrooms and kitchens.89 (This process has itself more recently been the subject of a satirical comedy, Episodes.)

  This is not to say that there are no losers in American sit-coms: there are losers, but they tend to be a rather better class of loser; less irredeemably hopeless, squalid, grubby and unappealing than the English variety. One or two of the characters in Friends, for example, did not have successful careers, but neither did they ever have a hair out of place. The girls in 2 Broke Girls may be broke, and working as waitresses, but perfect features and permanently flawless make-up must be some consolation. There has only been one long-running, popular American sit-com, Roseanne,90 that comes close to the degree of realistic kitchen-sink seediness that is the norm in English television, and that is demanded by the empiricist, down-to-earth, cynical, prurient, curtain-twitching English audience, who want to see Pevsner’s ‘truth and its everyday paraphernalia’ in their sit-coms as well as their soap operas.

  I am not trying to claim here that English comedies are necessarily better or more subtle or more sophisticated than American ones or anyone else’s. If anything, the humour in most English sit-coms is rather less subtle and sophisticated than the Americans’, and usually considerably more childish, crude and silly. In everyday life and conversation, I would maintain that the English do have a keener and more subtle sense of humour than most other nations, and this mastery of wit, irony and understatement is also evident in a few of our television comedy productions – but there are still a vast number in which farting and saying ‘arse’ a lot, or indeed virtually anything to do with bottoms, is regarded as the pinnacle of hilarious repartee.

  We may legitimately pride ourselves on the sparkling wit of programmes such as Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister and the offbeat genius of The Thick of It, The Office and The Royle Family. The English are also undeniably brilliant at spoof and satire (we should be, it’s what we do instead of getting angry and having revolutions) but let’s not forget that we are also responsible for Benny Hill and the Carry On films, which differ from bog-standard sexual Euro-slapstick (and its American, Australian and Japanese equivalents) only in their excessive reliance on bad puns, double-entendres and innuendo – a measure of the English love of words, I suppose, but otherwise not much to our credit. Monty Python is in a different class from these, both socially and verbally, but it is still rather a childish, schoolboy form of humour.

  The important question, it seems to me, is not whether our comedies are better or worse than other nations’, or cleverer, or cruder, but whether they have some distinctive common theme or characteristic (apart from the empiricism already mentioned) that might tell us something about Englishness. I’ve worked on this question long and hard, consulted quite a few comedy writers and other experts, dutifully watched dozens of television sit-coms, satires, spoofs and stand-ups – and thoroughly annoyed all my family and friends by insisting on calling this ‘research’. But I did eventually arrive at an answer: as far as I can tell, almost all of the cruder type of English television comedy, as well as much of the more sophisticated, is essentially about that perennial English preoccupation: embarrassment.

  Embarrassment is a significant element in other nations’ television comedy as well – and perhaps in all comedy – but the English seem to have a greater potential for embarrassment than other cultures, to experience it more often, and to be more constantly anxious and worried about it. We tend to make jokes about the things that frighten us (we humans, that is, not just we English), and the English have an unusually acute fear of embarrassment, so it is not terribly surprising that so much of our comedy should deal with this theme. To the socially challenged English, almost any social situation is potentially highly embarrassing, so we have a particularly rich source of comic material to play with. In the field of situation-comedy, we do not even have to invent odd or unlikely ‘situations’ to produce the necessary embarrassment: many of our sit-coms have no ‘sit’ to speak of, unless you count ‘an average suburban family going about its utterly normal and uneventful life’ (My Family, 2.4 Children, Butterflies, Outnumbered, etc.) or ‘ordinary boring days in the life of an ordinary boring office’ (The Office), or even ‘an average working-class family sitting around watching television’ (The Royle Family), and yet they seem to generate quite enough amusingly embarrassing moments. I could be wrong, but I suspect that it would be very hard to ‘pitch’ these as great sit-com ideas in any other country.91

  ‘Real
ity TV’ Rules

  So-called ‘reality TV’ provides yet more evidence, if any were needed, of English social inhibitions, and what a psychotherapist would probably call our ‘privacy issues’. Reality TV bears little resemblance to what any sane person would regard as ‘reality’, as it often involves putting people in bizarre, highly improbable situations and getting them to compete with each other in the performance of utterly ludicrous tasks. The people, however, are ‘real’, in the sense that they are not trained actors but ordinary unsuccessful mortals, distinguished only by their desperate desire to appear on television. Reality TV is by no means a uniquely English or British phenomenon. The most famous and popular of these programmes, Big Brother, originated in Holland, and many other countries now have their own versions, making it an ideal example for cross-cultural comparison. The format is quite simple. A dozen or so participants are selected from the many thousands who apply, and put together in a specially constructed house, where they live for nine weeks, with hidden cameras filming their every move, twenty-four hours a day, the ‘highlights’ of which are shown every night on television. Their lives are entirely controlled by the show’s producers (collectively known as ‘Big Brother’), who set them tasks and dish out rewards and punishments. Every week, the housemates each have to nominate two of their fellow participants for eviction, the viewing public then votes for the one it wants to evict, and one housemate is chucked out. At the end, the winner – the last surviving competitor – is awarded a fairly substantial cash prize. All participants get their fifteen minutes of fame, and a few go on to become D-list ‘celebrities’.