Watching the English

by Kate Fox

But most of us instinctively obey the rules, including the one that allows a significant degree of exaggeration in our accounts of what happened at the office Christmas party.

I would not go so far as to say that we have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with work. That would be too passionate and extreme and un-English.

We can neither embrace work with wholehearted Protestant zeal, nor treat it with Latin-Mediterranean insouciant fatalism. So we sit awkwardly on the fence, somewhere in the middle ground, and grumble about it all – quietly.

We are not keen on dramatic change, revolutions, sudden uprisings and upheavals. A truly English protest march would see us all chanting: ‘What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!’

When in doubt, which would seem to be much of the time, we turn to our favourite, all-purpose coping mechanism: humour. I

We already knew that the English put a high value on humour, but we had only seen this ‘in operation’ in purely social contexts, where there is perhaps less need for clarity, certainty and efficiency than in the workplace.

We found that when the requirements of advertising and marketing are at odds with the English modesty rule, the rule wins, and advertising must be reinvented to comply with the prohibition on boasting.

have a hunch that fair play will also turn out to be a fundamental law of Englishness.

‘home is what the English have instead of social skills’.

Our love-affair with our homes and gardens is, I believe, directly related to our obsession with privacy, which in turn is due to our social dis-ease.

Compare these figures with those for church attendance, and you will find the real national religion.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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...

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 regula...

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

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 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.

Although the show is a competition, any sign of actual competitiveness was severely frowned upon by our Big Brother contestants. ‘Cheating’ was the worst sin – a violation of the all-important fair-play ethos – but even admitting to having a game-plan, ‘playing to win’, was taboo, as one competitor discovered to his cost, when his boastful remarks about his clever strategy resulted in him being ostracised by the rest of the group and swiftly evicted. Had he kept quiet about his motives, pretended to be ‘in it for fun’ like all the others, he would have had as good a chance as any. Hypocrisy rules.

Inhibition, embarrassment, indirectness, hypocrisy, gritted-teeth politeness – all very English, and, you might say, not particularly surprising. But think for a minute about who these Big Brother participants were. The people who applied and auditioned to take part in this programme actively wanted to be exposed to the public gaze, twenty-four hours a day, for nine weeks, with absolutely no privacy, not even on the loo or in the shower – not to mention being obliged to perform idiotic and embarrassing tasks. These were not normal, ordinary people: these were the most shameless, most brazen, most attention-seeking, least inhibited people you could hope to encounter, anywhere in England. And yet their behaviour in the Big Brother house was largely characterised by typically English inhibition, squeamishness and awkwardness.

only broke the rules when they were very drunk – or, rather, they got drunk to legitimise their deviance from the rules92. – and even then there ...

The Daily Mail, the archetypal compact, panders to the fears of the less-educated middle classes, and is endlessly mocked for its obsession with house prices, while the Sun, the bestselling red top, is more squarely aimed at a working-class readership, and is more likely to get irate about the price of beer.

(unlike the tabloids, which are all essentially conservative). Both The Times and the Daily Telegraph are somewhat to the right of centre – although the Telegraph, also known as the Torygraph, is traditionally regarded as more right-wing than The Times. The Independent and the Guardian balance things out neatly by being somewhat to the left of centre – again with one, the Guardian, being seen as slightly more left-wing than the other. The term ‘Guardian-reader’ is often used as shorthand for a woolly, lefty, politically correct, knit-your-own-tofu sort of person. This

is England, though, so none of these political positions is in any way extreme; indeed, the differences may be hard to discern unless you are English and familiar with all the subtle nuances. The English do not like extremism, in politics or any other sphere: apart from anything else, political extremists and fanatics, whether on the right or the left, invariably break the all-important

important English humour rules, particularly the Importance of No...

Among their many other sins, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco were not noted for their use of the understatement. No such totalitarian leaders would ever stand a chance in England: even leaving aside their ethical shortcomings, they would be rejected immediately for taking themselves too seriously. George Orwell, for once, was wrong: 1984 would be unlikely to happen in England; ...

and a lot of ...

This is effectively what happened to our own would-be fascist le...

the vast majority simply found him ridiculous and treated him...

The English love to complain, and the English educated classes do have a tendency to complain noisily about matters of which they have little or no knowledge. But

But leaving the moral issues to one side, the quality of the writing on both broadsheets and tabloids is generally excellent. There

a difference in style between the ‘popular’ and the ‘quality’ press, but the skill of the writers is equally outstanding.

It seems to me that the English love of words

barriers – is most perfectly demonstrated not by the erudite wit of the broadsheet columnists, brilliant though they are, but by the journalists and sub-editors who write the headlines in the tabloids.

Take a random selection of English tabloids and flip through them: you will soon notice that almost every other headline involves some kind of play on words – a pun, a double meaning, a deliberate jokey misspelling, a literary or historical reference, a clever neologism, an ironic put-down, a cunning rhyme or amusing alliteration, and so on. Yes, many of the puns are dreadful; much of the humour is laboured, vulgar or childish...

may find yourself longing for a headline that simply gives you the gist of the story, without trying to be funny or clever. But the sheer ingenuity and linguistic playfulness must be admired, and all this compulsive punning, rhyming and joking is uniquely and gloriously English. Other countries may have ‘quality’ newspapers at least as learned and well written as ours, but no other national pre...

And, best of all, cyberspace is a disinhibitor.

Just as we may sometimes regret things we have said or done while under the influence of alcohol, we may also sometimes regret our unrestrained behaviour in cyberspace. The problem is that cyberspace is not separate from the ‘real’ world, any more than the office Christmas party

takes place in a parallel universe.

English inhibitions are cultural, a matter of obedience to unwritten cultural rules and norms.

These rules may be deeply ingrained, and our obedience to them largely unconscious, but they are not personality traits.

And, incidentally, it is perhaps no accident that our young people’s increasing obsession with online social media has coincided with a substantial decline in public vandalism. Who needs to smash up bus shelters, spray graffiti on buildings or scribble angry messages on the walls of public lavatories when you can express your teenage angst, get attention, win friends and influence people on Facebook, Twitter, forums, chatrooms and blogs?

Among anxious heterosexuals, it is tacitly understood that only gay men – and a few ultra-politically-correct, New Man, feminist types – take pride in their shopping skills.

shopping is a skill, and it is customary, even among the relatively well-off, to take some pride in doing it well, which is understood to mean with a concern for thrift. Not necessarily getting everything as cheaply as possible, but getting value for money, not being extravagant or wasteful.

This rule applies across all social classes: the upper echelons would regard boasting about extravagant expenditure as vulgar, while the lower classes would regard it as ‘stuck up’ or showing off. The