Real England

is there a culture that can't be commodified? and i have to be v. v. careful not to paint my cultures, or the cultures i've drifted along the fringes of, as the only real England. the problem is that the word is usually only spoken out loud by a certain kind of cultural capitalist, whose vision of it is just as tangential as mine. bullshit about fair play and honest toil and love of the land that i'd counter with a nation of sneak thiefs, factionalists and urban wastrels. the contestedness is always part of the Reality of the nation, any nation really.

for every sleepy Sunday C of E-attending agnostic Tory there's an apocalypse-welcoming hair-splitting anabaptist

Everywhere north of Enfield is basically a wasteland isn't it? Brrrr... Nothing there. Just a man collecting lumps of mud and putting them into a cloth bag.

yeah but the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities

everybody shd read The Uses of Literacy to see how you can constructively get this wrong in a way that doesn't just mourn real heritage centres. obv Williams and E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall too

the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities

quite so, how about the British Isles then as a dumping ground/refugee camp/Wild West for Europe and parts south-east, over millenia, fuelling endless negotiation and conflict over territory, and that is the quicksand underneath Real England that we think of as bedrock?

look mate there's no need to get fucking personal, alright

btw if i was gonna put forward one Real England it wd be old photographs of works sports teams or outings or other ceremonial jollies

it would be the commie permawheezing mustachioed drunk one in tinker tailor, tho no doubt they'd have you b'leev it's smiley or haydon

wait haydon was the commie?

SPOILERS

nah think he was the aesthete on a protest against the yanks more than anything else, wasn't the dude ciaran hinds played proper lefty in stated methods tho

the sparking point of Real England is where the plummy port-swilling foxhunter runs up against the chippy millenarian work-dodger and we drink each others' health and promise ourselves deep down that one day our kind will crush theirs

the phoenicians sailed up round to albion to trade tin for spice before the romans had even got out of bed, and if they weren't trading with aboriginal pre-celt and pre-pict inhabitants, then it was certainly aboriginal+1: an island of proto-druid shopkeepers since time immaterial

stonehenge is actually a kind of cashpoint machine

xp

oh, Roy Bland. yeah Bland is the angry Puritan I've been talking about, defending his country so's his people can crush the effete Squire class one day

but mark, who's to say the aborigines hadn't hopped off the boat from Boulogne just ahead of the celts themselves and so on and so forth??

irish close to turks dna-wise iirc

i think that's exactly what mark is saying, tbf

Of all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry
The silence and the sun remain

xp he's called smiley, he has to be of outlander extraction

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/07/17/chalkhomer460.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Xw7LplzFws/TpDJGHBmFGI/AAAAAAAAArE/CCJlpL9TMeU/s1600/yeo+valley.jpg

^ I wasn't at that FAP

clun forest all-mercian jug band champions, tractor runs on wattle and daub

never get away with haircuts like that up in the Danelaw

post pictures of men who look like offa's dyke

for every sleepy Sunday C of E-attending agnostic Tory there's an apocalypse-welcoming hair-splitting anabaptist

― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:41 (58 minutes ago)

there is definitely a book to be written about those south-midlands dissenter sects, maybe in a sort of gently sardonic louis theroux tone, 'britain's very own wild east and its fire and brimstone pastors '

so a good effort, but not really real

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-CuQTcGVYo/TKdQeWpskMI/AAAAAAAAAoM/H64kcUh5Jjw/s1600/AvengersTV.JPG

real english dialectic demands picture of McGoohan dressed as hunt sab.

there is only one named wind in england

This suggests a few more. I sincerely hope that "custard winds" isn't made up.
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wxfacts/British-Weather-Terms.htm

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/11/8/1320750745209/Members-of-the-public-wai-004.jpg

Sir Jimmy Savile's coffin goes on display - Members of the public wait to pay their respects

haha when i posted MES's mugg up-thread i genuinely didn't know his new LP was called "Ersatz GB"

nah i was deliberately misquoting "The Classical" and i haven't heard a new Fall album in most of a decade tbh

it has probably always been his topic, of course

the problem is the paucity of our national realnesses, we have nothing so resonant as la france profonde nor even REAL AMERICA

the place is too small and thoroughly gone over to sustain any really vital autochthonist fallacy

"Middle England" as a conceptual culture, rather than a geography, has a resonance with politicians. There's an element of it that links back to the idea of a 'real England', away from metropolitan fancies. Much more bound up with class than 'real America', though.

"Middle England" is a coy acknowledgment of the middle class that doesn't yet quite dare to speak its name

so here i sit in a real England on a sunny Friday morning, but trapped inside the gloom of the institutional looking out at the sun, of course.

is our realness a sense that authenticity lies outside? what kind of culture will we leave for the archaeologists that isn't a bastard-Norman legacy of tea-cups and arcane manners? fate of an island to be the sticking point for a lot of flotsam and jetsam maybe, a 5 mile high mountain of tide-stranded rubber ducks and fashions.

maybe real england is that real desire to never belong, to always get back to sea.

got a familiar soul-crushing view of our education "system" this morning, that impossible mixture of stolid, meaningless tradition frantically being stirred by idiots with no plan beyond the conviction that stirring in itself is the most important thing in the world, as long as you can do it on the cheap.

the most beautiful building in the panorama in front of me is a corn silo.

tbf that educational system perfectly prepares people for 95% of careers

that doesn't help :(

gramnivorous quadruped ftw

maybe real England is something to do with the grey, measured chunks of work as tedium shot thru with escaping to booze each night.

yeah you'd almost long for a good steepling in catholic guilt tbh

some fear of vengeance plus some contempt for order wd be a huge improvement i must say.

as a newly invested minor underling of the boss class i've got to say i'd like to stab the boss class in the throat

have to embrace the cunt to get that close, is the problem

http://old-town.co.uk/piccadilly/

??

Ugh, found those Red Lion photos sinister and unpleasant. but it's five in the morning, tired hungover and dyspeptic, so a good time to catalogue some real England fragments.

I went to the countryside around Folkestone a year or so ago, to find the house a favourite author of mine had lived in (Jocelyn Brooke, himself a subtle unsentimental explorer of sentimental Englishness). But it prompted a lot of thoughts about Real England at the time. I'd got lost cycling out of Folkestone, and ended up a dead end, at an army base, with nissen huts and bored patrolling soldiers, on the other side was a light industrial warehouse/office building, the LoveWorld Conference Centre. Outside that there was a coach idling, with a bored looking coach driver (this image felt very English) and a couple of elderly people standing on a bit of scrub by the road, looking a bit blank. This was all behind an empty outpost of the massive Channel Tunnel complex that sits just behind Folkestone. The skies were very grey and there was a little light spitting rain and a slightly too cold for comfort breeze. That's one imagine of Real England for me - the slightly out-of-town light industrial 'parks', small offices with three or four parking spaces. And that untennanted feeling of places that don't get a lot of people passing through, from one place to another. Office labour with no places to go for lunch, so tesco sandwiches at your desk, while overcoming that wash of beery hangover, brought about by post work drinks and not eating properly.

When I cycled up onto the North Downs to find this village, I passed a field with a rotting caravan painted in UKIP colours in it. That rotting caravan by itself would have been enough to symbolise something about England, but the UKIP colours added an extra obviousness and curiosity to the symbol - THAT'S what you're fighting for? Tiny caravans stuck in a traffic jam on the way to Cornwall?

Then when I got to the village there was a village fete going on, an archetype of Englishness. But I couldn't shake the bad taste in my mouth (I had been arguing with my g/f it's true). The very fact it was an archetype of Englishness worried me. I talked to a few people to see if they knew where the house was, but most of them hadn't lived there a long time, not long enough to know about a very very minor 20th Century writer who might have lived there. And I got the impression that they were city types who had bought in to the English village thing. This isn't new of course (nor is it reprehensible, depending on yr capacity for 'city types') ! But the takeover - the buying into it - seemed complete, as if revived or maintained to keep up the fiction that had been bought into. I get the same feeling from farmer's markets. I like markets! I don't like expensive markets so much - why are these vegetables, and these eggs and this milk so expensive?

So yeah, what's this? The complete appropriation of village culture by the wealthy, as a sort of open gated community? I buy this to a certain extent, although I also know people who make a living from working in the countryside, itself not a romantic or sentimental activity obviously, and also clearly not totally redundant.

And of the rest - well NV's corn silo feels appropriate as an image. + boss class as a consciously boorish casual psychological bullies. A sort of frightened belligerence to them - male and female, although in different ways, and it still feels male driven. The whole lexicon that goes with that - the 'mate' and the 'footy', and the 'what you need to understand is' the mixed up with the dated, ford-sierra sleek meaningless facility of management speak.

Some fragments:

A roads (how you get to those offices, but also walking down them in the middle of the night because it's the only way to get home, drink wearing off, just the humming and clicking of the amber lights).

Complexes of artificial fishing ponds always strike me as bleak, but then I don't fish.

Middle-aged corporate car obsessed men who talk about women drivers. (A subset of the Top Gear world). Is there a part of Real England that they come out of? I mean surely you get the male superiority type in many many countries. But what's their flavour? I guess you get a strong sense of Imperialism from them. That dessicated 'common sense' that is in fact the hangover of a thousand and one fictions about Britain being morally great, right, and no need to reassess. There's the obsession with maps and how best to get places - surely an offshoot of Britain's tangled road system (see A Roads - a favourite topic of these men, with their bottlenecks, cut throughs, traffic lights and speed cameras).

Mark E Smith singing on live versions of Repetition in 1978/79 - (doing that seagull screech he does) ENGLAND! ENGLAND! (goes into bored dreary tones) Look over England, what do you see? LUST and DRUDGERY. (this seems more apposite than his definition of England as 'white bread and cynicism' which feels positively optimistic really).

a+

Wetherspoon News. Editorial. First sentence:

As we all know, a strong current of tribalism flows through the veins of humanity

― Fizzles, Saturday, April 7, 2012 5:30 PM (4 minutes ago)

it does in Wetherspoon's pubs tbf

Unless you’re in Edinburgh where you can go for the delightful salt and sauce on your fish supper. #RealScotlsnd.

depends, if you get curry and chips from a Chinese takeaway they've usually put the curry sauce on before you have a choice

That's the USA BBQ axiom: always ask for sauce on the side!!

This got me to thinking about Curry and Chips, the late-60s Spike Milligan sitcom. I often wonder if Spike Milligan spent his entire latter-day career trying to make things that would be shown on television only once.

Only six episodes were broadcast, in November-December 1969, after which it was cancelled for being racist. The Black and White Minstrel Show lasted until 1978, so Curry must have been concentrated, liquid offensiveness. I'm actually curious to see what it was like. But not enough to watch any of it. The last episode was broadcast on Boxing Day, 1969. Imagine the people of Britain sitting down on Boxing Day, 1969, to watch Spike Milligan being unfunny on the television once more. Truly it was a different country, a different world, different people.

It hasn't been wiped, which is ironic because it's never going to be repeated. Meanwhile all those precious, precious TVS linking elements from Fraggle Rock are gone forever. It does raise the question of when curry was first added to chips. The show's title implies that in 1969 it was slightly unusual but not mind-boggling so.

If Britain wants to be great again it needs to use the resources of the British state to retitle Wikipedia's article on "french fries" into "chips". If Nigel Farage can achieve this - I don't care if it involves nuclear weapons and withdrawal from all international human rights treaties - he has my vote. I would gladly unbutton my shirt and present my naked breast to his opponents. That's a firm offer. Unbutton. Naked shirt.

your wish is my command

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQTAMnRtyHo

oh wait it IS racist, I should not have posted

The show's title implies that in 1969 it was slightly unusual but not mind-boggling so.

Or else the title was referring to a clash of cultures.

... and nothing else.

lol

Six years later, Milligan once again blacked up in the BBC series The Melting Pot. Only one episode was shown, and the other five were pulled.[8]

That's the thing. I grew up with the media telling me that Spike Milligan was a comedy god, but seemingly nothing he ever did on television - The Telegoons, Q, There's a Lot of it About, The World of Beachcomber etc - was ever repeated. So as a kid I'm thinking "who is this man" and "why is milk delivered by electric vehicles and nothing else" and "why not newspapers or the post" and "could you use an milk-powered vehicle to deliver electricity".

Dot dot dot not repeated either because it had Pakistani Daleks, or random toplessness, or it was offensive in some way. The fact of it never being repeated gives his entire television output a kind of dirty, seedy quality. Like The Goodies. There's a stereotype nowadays that The Goodies was casually racist, but having watched it when I was young I suspect that the reputation comes about simply because it hasn't been repeated - and that it hasn't been repeated, in a way that implies it was deliberately suppressed rather than just forgotten about.

Episode two of There's a Lot of It About has some rare Youtube toplessness (at 16:20) that presumably slipped past Youtube's filters. The studio audience aren't sure how to react. They really are quite fantastic though.

I mean, there's the books. My Part In His Downfall etc. But this is 2025! Books are stupid. The written word is obsolete. Words! I hate reading things, and also writing.

We haven’t come as far as we would like to think when it comes to racism or unfunniness

I don't think Milligan was ever really funny after the Goons.

they repeated one of the Q series in the 90s, may have been edited, some parts were genuinely hilarious for example Hitler as George Formby, but it was 30 years ago and dunno if I would appreciate it now. But "grovelling bastard" is still an all-time moment.

Flashes of funniness but a lot of self-indulgent messing about.

He was good in The Bed Sitting Room imo.

But yes his comic reputation built on radio, not tv.

The goons has some absolute comedy genius in it but there’s still a lot of racism in a lot of episodes. There’s a lot of spike and sellars doing the two Indians bits, portrayals of Asian people, punching down on ray ellington, getting ray ellington to do some characters that were tired old racists tropes even in the 50s.

I don’t think spike was actively anti-immigrant or anti-minority; he was a jazz musician and the goons had one of the few regular black voices on the radio in the 50s. He was just carelessly and callously leaning into some lazy tropes for cheap laughs and kept doing it long after he should have known better.

And that is a lot worse

He was very much a child of the Empire too, born in India and grew up there and in Burma.

has to be said that Curry and Chips was written by Johnny "No Look I'm Satirizing Racism" Speight

I could never stand the guy, because roughly from foggy late 70's/80's memory he was frequently given ott reverential interviews on chat shows and genius comedy god, national treasure status. And I thought he wasn't funny and it turned me off ever going back to The Goons material. And he was a royal brown-noser, as much as he tried to make a joke of it by calling Prince Charles a bastard.

The goons has some absolute comedy genius in it but there’s still a lot of racism in a lot of episodes. There’s a lot of spike and sellars doing the two Indians bits, portrayals of Asian people, punching down on ray ellington, getting ray ellington to do some characters that were tired old racists tropes even in the 50s.

Well sure, I wasn't implying his radio work was racism free! Just that it was often v funny when not being racist, and that is what separates it from his tv work.

He did have Peter Sellers to work with on radio, that helped! Harry Secombe was also great in the Goons.

True, but he did write most of it afaik, and those scripts are often pretty great!

Would love an Annotated Scripts explaining all the contemporary references since lost to time.

He wrote pretty much all of it and burned himself out in the process, frankly.