Stuff Brits Like: A Guide to What's Great About Great Britain - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fraser McAlpine is the lead writer for Anglophenia, BBC America’s blog for American Anglophiles, and consequently spends a good deal of his working life arguing about the finer points of Doctor Who, Sherlock, Downton Abbey and anything with Tom Hiddleston in it. He lives in Cornwall, which is the Florida of the British Isles, except it’s far wetter and there’s no Disneyworld.

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Introduction ■

Let us start this preposterous journey in the most British way imaginable: with a series of meandering apologies and caveats. I don’t know what it is about a book like this, but it seems you can’t make huge, sweeping, lawn-mower generalizations about the likes and loves of an entire nation without slicing up the odd precious and unique orchid here and there, and for that, I am truly sorry.

It would probably have been easier to write a book called Stuff Brits Don’t Like. That would have taken no time to compile and run to several volumes, such is the national zeal for complaining and taking things to task, but it’s not as if the Internet is short of people showing their displeasure, so it’s probably best to leave them to it.

And while we’re shutting doors in people’s faces, this book can only be a personal journey. It wasn’t subject to a public vote and there won’t be a chance to suggest subsequent chapters. People born and bred in the British Isles won’t always recognize themselves on every page; there will be lots of points along the way where, if this were a blog, the comments section would blaze with outrage and correction (see: Pedantry). But that’s because one book cannot hope to convey the full range of enthusiasms in a nation as endlessly and joyfully provincial as the United Kingdom.

Heck, I can’t even get them to agree on a list of favorite movies (excluding Star Wars, which is, ah, universal). So I’ve picked just five popular cinematic experiences, the ones that say something about how British people like to think about themselves. That is, if they would ever settle down and think of themselves as British in the first place.

By which I mean we need to get our definitions straight. For the purposes of brevity, if not painstaking accuracy, “Britain” and “the United Kingdom” have been used interchangeably to describe the same place (the full title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). However, the United Kingdom is made up of four countries—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—and Cornwall, which does not currently have nation status (it’s actually a duchy). The Cornish have been identified by the European Union as a recognized minority; they are, in other words, their own people.

Then there are the island communities: the Isles of Scilly, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Isle of Wight, and so on. On some islands cars are welcome, and on others they are not allowed and the taxis all float. This must make watching Top Gear there an entirely different experience from what it is in landlocked Birmingham. So again, sweeping generalizations are hard to pull off.

Also, Britain and England are so often conflated that Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish (and Cornish) residents tend to feel left out. Make a list of British things that are principally English things and you’re sure to get on someone’s nerves.

Then again (again), you can’t ignore the English either, not least because they made such a fuss about being in charge of everything in the first place. But which England? The north is a very different place from the south. As is the east from the west. And that’s before you consider the dividing influence of class—still a hugely influential factor in British tastes—and the various experiences of people from different ethnic groups too.

In fact, the only thing British people will definitely all agree on with regard to this book is that it is hugely flawed in almost every respect. I can only offer sympathy with that view, and my humble apologies. Ideally a balance can be struck between compiling the common clichés of bowler hats and stiff upper lips and writing a huge list of things that everyone likes, delivered as if no one has ever noticed them, like saying, “Hey, this oxygen stuff isn’t bad, is it?”

Oh, and while we’re on definitions, here’s a brief list of potentially confusing terms:

Everything else, bar an eccentric glossary at the end, is yours to puzzle over and investigate further. Good luck!

FRASER MCALPINE, CORNWALL, 2014

Pedantry ■

Let’s be honest, we all knew this was going to be the first chapter. The British have many international reputations to uphold, but the most fondly held is that of the uptight gentleman in an immaculate suit waiting politely for his turn to explain that you’ve just done something wrong. Even in the act of putting together ideas for a book about things that British people tend to enjoy—not a controversial or damning theme—I started to worry about the kindly meant corrections, the outrage at having left something out. Y’know, the pedants’ revolt.

Now I’m fretting that I’ve put the apostrophe in the wrong place just there. Do I mean it’s a revolt of a single pedant or a group of pedants? Does it belong to them? Do people get that the phrase is a pun on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381? Should I explain that or does it ruin the joke? It’s all very stressful.

There’s also the fact that the only people who refer to the Brits as the Brits are not Brits. Regional pride runs strong and deep in the United Kingdom, a state of affairs that is only intensified by the fragmented nature of Britain as a combined nation. As there’s a certain amount of cultural antagonism between the five nationalities involved—or, more accurately, between the other four nationalities and England—any reference to British people will draw the Pavlovian response that Britain is not England, that the two terms are not interchangeable. And that’s before we’ve even started to take into account the significant differences between individual counties, districts, and villages, some of which really do not get on well.

You can pin this intense desire for subjective accuracy down to a need to create order out of chaos—using unimprovably impatient phrases like “Why don’t you just . . .” or “Surely you’d be better off . . .” as a preface—but the British and their high standards manage to find chaos everywhere, even in places that look pretty ordered already, thank you very much.

By which I mean the Brits won’t forgive the rest of the world for driving on the right-hand side of the road, much less America for taking so many letters out of British English words—colour, catalogue, axe—just to make spellings easier.

Naturally the online environment has only intensified this state of affairs. Create any kind of Web list—Five Best Tea Shops in Rhyl, Nine Greatest Achievements of Clement Attlee, Seven Greatest Beatles Songs—and the first comment afterward will be “You forgot Liffy’s caff” or “You forgot maintaining government order in a cabinet of strong personalities” or “You forgot ‘Nowhere Man,’” as if the omission of one runner-up deprives the whole enterprise of merit. That’s largely why people create these online lists, of course—to encourage pedants to read, snort, and comment—and it’s incredibly effective.

But there are also blogs and Twitter feeds devoted to the...