In the last hundred years there have been major shifts in the cultural influ-ences that British people cite as reflecting their tastes. In the past, common reference points would be individual musical hall performers such as Marie Lloyd, or singers such as Vera Lynn or Gracie Fields – people giving live performances in theatres around the country. With technology and the growth of radio and television, groups of entertainers came to predom-inate. The Beatles or Rolling Stones, Blur or Oasis are obvious examples.
The same is true of radio and television comedy shows where a team (the Goons, Monty Python, the Goodies) was involved in making the show.
Now, on the other hand, possibly because of a new cult of individualism, the emphasis has moved away from the group to the individual in entertainment. Young people in Britain today name as their formative cultural influences such lone stars as Vic Reeves, Jo Brand, Ruby Wax, Steve Coogan or Victoria Wood.
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F I G U R E 2 . 3 Shopping is now the number one leisure activity in Britain
A current television trend that the Salvation Army, among others, finds disturbing is the increase in confrontational shows. They claim that they encourage ‘greed and deception’. Anne Robinson’s The Weakest Link is deliberately rude to its contestants. In ITV1’s show Shafted, which is hosted by the ex-MP Robert Kilroy-Silk, one individual takes the whole pot if he or she votes to ‘shaft’ and the other one votes to ‘share’.
There is also now a noticeable preference by young people for inan-imate over aninan-imate sources of entertainment. This is evident not just in the decline of such live arts as theatre or home pastimes such as card playing or in the preference of night clubs with DJs over live gigs. Technophiliac
‘Generation X’ (from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel of that name) prefer things to people: cash machines to bank cashiers (US: tellers); computers to socialising; cyber cafés to coffee houses; virtual reality to reality; the internet and technological gizmos such as pagers, mobile phones, and answering machines, to live individuals. Nor do people just prefer televi-sion and cinema to live entertainment. Within electronic media they prefer cartoons to ‘real’ representations of people. By the early 1980s Britain was already fertile ground for the revival of puppetry – the American Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show was based in London. Spitting Image had enormous popularity on British television and was credited politically with destroying the leadership of the Liberal Party. In sum people now seem to prefer electronic representations of life to ones which purport to offer more
‘real’ slices of life through film or video.
Technology has proved that it can deliver the ‘real world’ yet people want images less ‘real’ than those contained in traditional representation.
They prefer animated characters in television advertisements. Illustrations for a Boddingtons’ Beer television advertising campaign are supplied by Dan Clowes, who is better known for his grunge illustrations. Puppets and cartoons have replaced people on hugely successful television shows such as Beavis and Butthead and Crapston Villas. Television has had huge successes with animation. Several shows have followed the age curve for children brought up on The Muppets and The Simpsons.
Cartoons have always been directed at children, but recently there have been developed television cartoon series characterised by seriousness of purpose and directed at adults. Disney’s computer-generated Toy Story (1995) was the start of the trend. Many young people brought up on games arcades prefer artificially animated films to ones inhabited by humans. The Simpsons is more popular per capita in Britain than in America. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have even produced a band (Gorillaz) which is a cartoon.
Another notable change in the pattern of people’s leisure is a move away from socialising at home to frequenting public places of entertainment:
‘fun pubs’, multiplexes (containing cinemas, bowling alley, fruit machines, 1111
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and night clubs). There are regional variations, but generally the fact that British socializing took place in the pub or club made it difficult for new people to integrate into postwar British society. Asians in particular preferred to socialise at home, and this exacerbated cultural differences and separated people. In time, however, as in so many aspects of culture referred to elsewhere (body piercing, casual clothing, rap music, use of marijuana), while young mainstream people adopted immigrants’ practices, young people from minority backgrounds joined the move to socialise outside the home. So young people of all ethnic origins now mix in places of public entertainment. McDonald’s has had a universalising impact here. Their premises, balloons, party poppers, and so on are supplied free of charge for children’s parties, and draw in all-comers. Operators of multiplex cinemas, bowling alley and night clubs (many of them multinationals, such as Time-Warner) benefit from this groundwork and cater to a young population brought up on ‘canned’ culture and dedicated to Britain’s consumer society.
Most Britons are unaware that the owner of the greatest number of pubs in Britain (4,867) is the Japanese company Nomura.
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F I G U R E 2 . 4 The Millennium Eye in London
The trend towards eating out, on the other hand, benefits local restau-rateurs and will continue to do so, because of the room for growth still in the marketplace. (The French spend 45 per cent of their disposable income on food, the Americans 25 per cent, and the British only 11 per cent.)
The older generation meanwhile, which saves 13 per cent of its disposable income (against the national average of 4 per cent) continues to opt for home entertainment. Eighty-four per cent of British households have video machines and are catered for by an estimated two thousand video shops – supplying a market which didn’t exist thirty years ago.
Overseas ‘bars’
Lastly in this section on leisure, a revealing debate have been taking place about the influx (perhaps partly as a result of recent increases in permitted opening hours for the sale of alcohol) of Irish pubs, wine bars, and café bars on to the British high street. This trend, a ‘simple’ commercial phenomenon, is seen to have all sorts of other implications. Irish pubs are financially successful, but people ask: ‘What are they saying about Britain?
Do they suggest it is a soulless place which needs an infusion of Celtic culture?’ CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, resists the trend as part of a commercialising of the English institution of the pub – a dilution of authentic English values. Others are unhappy about the ideological impli-cations of this raising of the profile of a ‘minority’ culture in the war for hearts and minds in relation to an Ulster political settlement. Others again are concerned that national identity is being exploited for purely commer-cial ends.
Some see the trend as just one more illustration of a postmodern phenomenon which uses elements of the past and elsewhere as a vocabu-lary with which to write the new Britain. They apply that particularly to the advent of bars such as Starbucks and Caffe Nero, which are ‘themed’
as American or Italian. In this context, Irishness, Americanness, or any other nationality is merely part of a benign process of internationalisation and enrichment of Britain’s hitherto provinces-led culture. The nationality of the ‘Italian wine bar, ‘Spanish’ tapas bar, ‘Japanese’ sushi bar, or
‘American’ McDonald’s has only a surface significance. They suggest that the trend should be welcomed as more evidence of tolerant multicultural Britain.
However, perhaps the most significant thing is that the forum in which this nationalistic venture is being played out – the high street – is a more democratic one than Parliament, whose legislation cramps and controls people. (The postwar Labour administration, which produced a thousand pages of legislation per year, was seen as ‘interventionist’. The present government produces three thousand pages per year.) People want 1111
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to liberate themselves through culture and feel that cultural change can’t be legislated. They suspect that laissez-faire capitalism will produce stam-pedes of commercial developers to out-of-town shopping centres or a situation where all high streets have more or less the same shops: Halfords, Boots, Marks & Spencer. In other words, a homogenising commercial process will take place which will ultimately dilute rather than enrich culture and cultural identity. In order to counter these forces they have only the cultural practices listed above. By exercising individual choice, they can wrest control over their lives from commercial or government agencies.
Conclusion
To sum up this chapter: the cultural ambience is not neutral, it is a plane on which warring factions contend. Education, work, and leisure are defining aspects of British cultural identity. Schools place a distinctive stamp on their pupils – a past pupil will be defined both in society at large and by the individual himself or herself as a grammar school boy or girl, or more specifically as a product of Shrewsbury School or King Street primary. This pattern is repeated in the work arena when society labels people ‘owned’ by particular industries or by the state as a Ford worker, a civil servant. People acknowledge these descriptions of themselves, because they also define themselves by their schools and their work func-tions. The rhetorical question ‘How do you do?’, on being introduced to
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F I G U R E 2 . 5 Strawberry picking remains a popular summer leisure activity
people, is very shortly followed by ‘What do you do?’ and soon thereafter by ‘Where did you go to school?’ So education and work are significant defining aspects of identity. As we have seen further, people will always try to take control of their lives and define their own identities through the exercise of individual choice in their leisure activities. And finally we have highlighted a number of debates which arise in relation to these issues.
1 Reading checklist
■ Why are public schools so called?
■ What is the origin of the word ‘education’?
■ What is the difference between wages and salaries?
■ Are average female earnings the same as those of males?
■ What are ‘hen’ and ‘stag’ nights?
■ What is the Protestant ethic?
■ What is a ‘glass ceiling’?
■ What is a wireless?
■ Where is the Kop?
■ How are soccer and cricket teams differently named?
■ When is the Sabbath?
■ What is a Merchant/Ivory representation of Britain?
■ Who plays the Principal Boy in a pantomime?
■ What is CAMRA?
■ Which was the last country in Europe to have a National Lottery?
2 What kinds of schools are more likely to be portrayed in films? Why is this? You might consider viewing on video some of the films referred to in the chapter: Kes, The Belles of St Trinians, Another Country. How do these representations differ from the school in (say) Dead Poets’
Society?
3 Why are portrayals of work so rare in British novels or plays? Is American writing more likely to deal with work? Are British cultural forms more or less escapist than American ones?
4 Is it healthy or unhealthy to watch soap operas?
5 Discussion questions
■ What is the effect on individual identity of pupils attending state or private schools?
■ Does education always involve the imposition on one group in society of the values of another?
■ How is unemployment related to identity?
■ Does self-employment confer more dignity on workers?
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Exercises
❖
■ The chapter refers to the presence in Britain of McDonald’s and The Simpsons. Are overseas influences in a culture to be welcomed or resisted?
■ Should the state fund culture? If so, should it aim to encourage high or popular culture? If not, why not?
■ How important are tradition and traditional ways in a culture?
Marwick, A. The Penguin Social History of Britain: British Society Since 1945, Penguin, 1996. Solid basic introduction.
Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, Harvester, 1993. A very accessible book set in a British context.
Room, Adrian. An A to Z of British Life, Oxford University Press, 1992. A mine of infor-mation. Comprehensive and well illustrated, a useful reference source.
Giles, J. and Middleton, T. Writing Englishness 1900–1950, Routledge 1996. A very useful sourcebook of traditional material relating to the construction of the concept of Englishness.
Films
How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) dir. Bruce Robinson. Satire on the advertising and marketing professions.
Educating Rita (1983) dir. Lewis Gilbert. A working-class woman, unfulfilled by life at home with her husband, tries an Open University English course and develops a strong relationship with her tutor.
Clockwork Mice (1995) dir. Jean Vadim. Gentle drama about a young teacher starting at a Special Needs School, his relationships with pupils and staff, and his attempt to involve the children in a cross-country running club.
Another Country (1984) dir. Marek Kanievska. Speculative drama about the claustro-phobic public-school life of two future British spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
The Browning Version (1995) dir. Mike Figgis. Remake of the Terence Rattigan play about a boarding-school teacher’s realisation that he and his wife have led empty, unloving lives.
Books
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) Powerful story of the effects of education on susceptible young people.
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Reading
Cultural Examples
David Lodge, Changing Places (1975). Deals with insights into human nature gained by academics from Britain and America who exchange jobs, houses, educational experiences, and much more.
Linda La Plante, The Governor. (1995) Drama about a women whose working environ-ment is a prison, where she is the governor.
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island. (1996) Idiosyncratic but informed view of Britain offered by a resident American journalist with experience of British work and leisure.
Television programmes
Boys from the Blackstuff. Sympathetic portrayal of unemployed people who work on the side, and their encounters with officialdom. Written by Alan Bleasdale.
Porterhouse Blue. Series set in Cambridge academe with David Jason and Ian Richardson – from the novel by Tom Sharpe.
Drop the Dead Donkey. Award winning weekly comedy series set in a newspaper office.
Written by Andy Hamilton.
As Seen on TV. Comedy programme of very talented comedienne Victoria Wood.
Includes sketches, stand-up, piano songs.
The Royle Family. Written by Caroline Aherne and starring Ricky Tomlinson. A couch-potato Salford family watch television, eat, drink, and entertain. Has won numerous awards.
The Navigators. Ken Loach drama about privatised railway maintenance workers. Mocks the jargon and short cuts of the 1990s enterprise culture.
www.nc.uk.net/
Official site of the National Curriculum, with information about what attainment levels are required in each of the subject areas
www.knowhere.co.uk
This is an informative youth and leisure-oriented site – the antidote to Tourist Information
Football365@http://www.stats.Football365.co.uk Lots of facts here for the football-oriented www.its-behind-you.com
Gives an account of the evolution of pantomime through commedia dell’arte, mystery plays and Elizabethan masques
www.efestivals.co.uk
An online agency containing information and booking for many UK festivals www.liv.ac.uk/IPM/
Institute of Popular Music at Liverpool University. Has collections and sound clips www.leagueofgentlemen.co.uk
Website devoted to the cult television programme. Has a scrapbook and down-loads from first and second series
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Websites
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