(CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG (KEN HUGHES, 1968)) Albion is a context where certain rules are observed. Comedy develops from the violation of these and the best violations are by comedy foreigners who only serve to bring forward a re-assertion of Albion’s values. The screenplay of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) was written by Roald Dahl based on an original by mas-ter Englishman Ian Fleming (who patriotically lived as a tax exile next to the equally patriotic Noël Coward in Jamaica). Dick Van Dyke plays an eccentric inventor who lives with his frighteningly Aryan children in an old windmill.2 His old soldier father lives alongside in a floating outhouse, all ‘fuzzy wuzzies’ and Edwardian sideboards. Dad is an explorer manqué 3 who occasionally breaks out into Cockney dancing, thumbs flying to his braces for a knees-up. It is eggs, sau-sage and cottage loaf for tea. ‘Truly Scrumptious’ is the English rose, daughter of the fiery local sweet magnate whose pinafore-clad minions man the factory.
However, comedy foreigners are often the cause of disruption in Albion’s green and pleasant land: Vulgarian spies have been dispatched
Cottages. Photograph by Donna Hetherington.
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37 to capture the flying car, one with obligatory Hitler moustache and lots
of ‘schnell, schnell, raus, raus’ Germanisms: they are by turns menacing, militaristic and uptight. The extended family end up at the paedophobic court of Baron Bomburst, a Teutonic mix of decadence and mirthlessness enforced by the Dickensian ‘childcatcher’ dressed in Gestapo black (chil-dren should be neither seen nor heard). Though by no means a political allegory, there are several interesting oppositions in the film: the upper class are bossy and arrogant (Truly mocks Potts, the court mocks the Toy Maker) whilst the workers are guileless and honest; adults are cruel and children are not; and finally ‘Abroad’ is weird and pointy whilst Albion is homely and verdant. After the peasants and children revolt, ‘Chitty flew high over the mountains and back to England.’ Van Dyke ends up with Truly and the class divide is bridged by romantic love. Albion is imagined, then, in an idealized version to be marketed back to us. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was also subject to a Broadway makeover, scooping up further awards and profits.
‘WHO WILL DEFEND, EV’RY INCH OF ENGLAND, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SEND? WHO’S STANDING FIRM IN THEIR OWN FRONT YARD? THE SOLDIERS OF THE OLD HOME GUARD, THAT’S WHO!’ (BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS (STEVENSON, 1971))
Bedknobs And Broomsticks (1971) represents the plucky spirit of Albion besieged as the horrid Germans, comedy Nazis all, invade the tranquillity of the sea-side village Pepperinge Eye which according to the narrative has ‘been out of things for the last few hundred years’. The film opens with a 1066 style tapestry before dissolving to the perennial white cliffs. Post offices, red tel-ephone boxes and Player’s cigarette adverts define Albion, as they all make do and mend whilst mucking in. Three Disneyfied cockneys, simultaneously orphaned and exiled, are forced upon village spinster Miss Eglantine Price, who rides a motorbike, wears sensible shoes and practises some form of bucolic voodoo. She is reluctant to have them encroach upon her experiments with a flying broom handle at her cottage.
Pepperinge Eye is contrasted with London as the group travel on the magic bed to find Professor Emelius Browne, head of the Correspondence Course of Witchcraft. He is a meagre mountebank and a disappointment, squatting in a splendid house with an unexploded bomb in the garden. There follows the Portobello Road dance routine at the bric-a-brac market with bright and blowzy women, colonial troops and costermongers. Enter Bruce Forsyth as Swinburne the spiv – ‘Oi Tosh, nylons for the lady?’ – complete with rakish trilby, fancy tie and flick knife.
After some animated anthropomorphic adventures on the Island of Naboomboo, they end up back in Blighty. Professor Browne bolts at the first hint of commitment to the pseudo-family and whilst he is attempt-ing to sleep on the platform of the Brief Encounter-style station, the Nazis appear. Utilizing her rustic witchery, Miss Price rouses the armour and uniforms from the local museum and thwarts the ‘beastly little raid’: eve-ryone pulls together for the war effort and England is saved. The vibrant, multi-cultural London with its spivs and sharks, banter and camaraderie rubs semi-contentedly alongside the sleepiness of peripheral Pepperinge Eye.
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38
‘AH, WHERE’S THE INN THAT I ONCE KNEW/WITH BRICK AND CHALKY WALL/UP WHICH THE KNOBBLY PEAR TREE GREW/FOR FEAR THE PLACE WOULD FALL?’
(BETJEMAN 1956: 231)
Following the lead of Poppins and Chitty, Working Title Films utilized the combination of American star and idealized Albion in comedy to successful ends. This Albion remains a marketable one: an England with no riot cops, welfare spongers or supermarkets. Albion is not modern or European but quaint, whimsical, stoical. It is Betjeman’s old pub and the church on the green that represents the village, alongside the pub and post office. This church, nei-ther Roman nor Orthodox but Anglican, stands humbly but proudly in dusty raiment and provides an equally powdery morality at odds with urban mores.
It is these churches (never registry offices) where the bulk of Four Weddings &
A Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) takes place with its well-crafted script, sharp jokes and pleasant urban milieu. Hugh Grant’s stammeringly good comic timing almost gets away with the corny forgotten ring routine and delivers the best best-man speech on celluloid.
In Four Weddings, there is just a single industrial deviation from an oth-erwise oaken Albion: Gareth’s funeral procession starts in the shadow of the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, revealing him to be a council estate lad in a florid waistcoat dissembling as a thespian. The sanctity of marriage, so celebrated and idealized throughout the film, is sabotaged by Grant at the denouement as he cruelly jilts his fiancé for Andie MacDowell, but our hearts are with Hugh rather than the unpleasantly named ‘Duckface’; indeed, her humilia-tion goes unheeded as rain-soaked love wins out beneath well-timed thun-derbolts. The friends all match up eventually. The success of Four Weddings can be attributed to Grant’s stumbling upper-middle-class oaf, his butterfly lashes and the undoubted American attraction of MacDowell. It was a for-mula that found appreciation in the States and its $245 million profits are no surprise.4
‘WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA BEFORE YOU GO?’
(HUGH GRANT IN NOT TING HILL (ROGER MICHELL, 1999))
Curtis et al. repeated this formula – Grant plus US star (Julia Roberts) in a sanitized Albion and laugh-out-loud set pieces – with Notting Hill (1999), another success. This is a west London devoid of junkies, poverty or street hassle and almost as accurate as the Portobello Road sequence in Bedknobs And Broomsticks. Grant again plays the half-idiot/charmer embroiled in unbelievable scenarios whilst over-pushing the pathos button. Instead of churches it is a series of dinner parties that connects the travails of the upper- middle class ditherers. She stays at The Ritz, he rides in a Routemaster bus5 and fakes being a correspondent for Horse & Hound, Albion’s definitive fanzine. It is a story of global celebrity befouling Albion’s front lawn and when the paparazzi discover her hiding out at Grant’s he asks, in classically English fashion, ‘How about a cup of tea?’ Until the Divine Brown fellatio incident, Hugh Grant (a floppy haired stutterer married to an English rose) was Albion personified for the US market: no amount of tea could rectify that in some people’s eyes. For others, he went up in their estimation. The film took $364 million.6
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39 7. http://www.
boxofficemojo.com/mov ies/?id=101dalmatians liveaction.htm. Accessed 15 September 2009.