Tickling the English Page 5
Anyway, the town deserves a funnier room. It doesn’t help that, due to some listings mix-up, half the audience were told it was a seven-thirty start and the other half were told eight. Obviously, the only thing to do here is to start at eight, but you try explaining that when the crowd catches you wandering up to the stage door with a burger in your hand at seven forty.
Here’s an example of how beautiful Liverpool can be in an intimate room: the gig in question being Rawhide comedy club, in a nightclub on the Albert Dock. I had done my show and was now mingling with the crowd and having a drink when a man approached me at the bar. He was a stocky, well-built man, shaven-headed – what I would describe as a ‘squaddie’ type. He stood close to me, leaned in and said:
‘That was very funny.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, what you were saying about Northern Ireland. That was very funny.’
‘Thanks.’
I had done a few gags about the North earlier, as was expected of any Irish comic in England at the time.
He leaned in closer.
‘I had a couple of friends stationed in the North,’ he continued, taking a beat, ‘and they were killed over there.’
I’ve told his story a few times in the years since, and I always pause at this point, just to enjoy the silence in the room. It exactly mirrors the silence between me and this army guy at the time. I could not think of anything to say. As I always tell it, it was like there was a giant thought bubble over my head, with nothing inside it. Just a nagging feeling that no amount of inherent Irish charm was going to get me out of this one.
There was an achingly long pause, and then the man leaned in even closer.
‘Yeah. They were in an army truck,’ he went on, in a genuinely scary way, ‘and a tree fell on them.’
Suddenly a memory came flooding back, a memory of one of the oldest jokes in Ireland about the Northern Ireland situation, a joke I hadn’t heard since I was in school. I locked eyes with the man and raised one hand to interrupt him.
‘Are you about to tell me,’ I said, ‘that the IRA planted it?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, leaning back and grinning happily. ‘Have you heard that one before?’
Yes I have, my friend, but never in a way that made me evacuate myself.
Birmingham Hippodrome (2 nights, the second of which was 17 March, Paddy’s Day)
1 man who drives a truck filled with fasteners
1 domestic-insurance salesman
1 college student studying ‘dinosaurs’:
‘Thank you. I know what palaeontology is. I’m not a moron.’
1 man who worked in air-conditioning (retired)
1 man who sells light bulbs, there with his entire family, who also sell light bulbs
The Hippodrome in Birmingham, now, that is a room. Renovated without losing its shape or intimacy, it’s the perfect model for older theatres that want to modernize. Stick as many grand glass foyers out the front as you want, just leave the room in the middle the way it was.
We had two nights of chatty joy, culminating in the world’s most middle-class crime story:
‘A burglar broke into the house during a dinner party.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Well, we all just presumed he was another guest.’
‘The burglar sat down with you? And what, you were all too polite to ask who he was?’
‘No, no. We just caught a glimpse of him in the hall, but when he didn’t appear at the table somebody asked the host where he was. And then we chased upstairs to find him.’
‘And where was he?’
‘My friends found him in one of the bedrooms and closed the door on him.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He climbed out the window.’
‘So he got away with the stuff he stole?’
‘No, we found it all later.’
‘Where?’
‘He dropped it all in the courgette patch.’
The Hippodrome is right in the middle of one of the major entertainment districts in Birmingham. There’s a major comedy club there, so Damon and I know all the local landmarks, even the quirkier ones. Slap bang in the middle of the nightclubs, bars and restaurants, there’s Mr Egg, for example, a local egg-and-chip caff which has achieved the incredible balancing act of being sufficiently popular to survive in a cut-throat late-night food market without ever having been successful enough to encourage someone to open another Mr Egg anywhere else in the country.
Birmingham’s more famous culinary export is, of course, the balti, invented here in 1977 by a Pakistani immigrant, and proof, of sorts, of how successful England is as a multicultural nation. You give stuff back to cultures that they didn’t even know they had. A billion people in India are going, ‘A balti? What’s a balti?’
There’s no reason for things not to be successfully exported from Birmingham. When it was known as ‘the Workshop of the World’, the city was the beneficiary of the country’s most extensive transport network. Now that the heavy manufacturing has been replaced by services (a sentence I could write for just about any town in England, by the way. Why don’t I not, and we can just presume I did? Thanks), efforts are underway to exploit this resource, with gentrification of the canal-sides, new apartment blocks and quayside restaurants. It’s a very famous (and possibly completely spurious) statistic about Birmingham that it has more canals than Venice; although, whether Birmingham is gentrified or not, you’d presume that the Venetian Tourism Board have relatively few sleepless nights about this.
Birmingham tourism is largely based instead on conferences and exhibitions. The city hosts 40 per cent of the nation’s conference business, which may explain the other famous statistic about the city.
Possibly because of all the conferences (we saw a lot of men in suits in the middle of town), Birmingham has the largest density of lap-dancing clubs in Western Europe. Obviously, the last thing you want in a lap-dancer is density, but you can’t fault the city for choice. Walking around that night, we were never more than a few minutes away from another Legs Eleven, Spearmint Rhino or Medusa; they’re all here. There was even a club on Broad Street once which offered both ‘Erotic and Exotic Dancers’, although you’d want to get there early and bagsy an erotic. The men who go to lap-dancing clubs would be sorely disappointed if Carmen Miranda walked in with tropical fruit on her head. Sometimes exotic just isn’t enough.
It seems unfair to dump this, ahem, into the lap of the Brummies, but Britain really is quite a, well, porny country. Maybe that isn’t too unfair on Birmingham. After all, the local football team is co-owned by David Gold, the chairman of Ann Summers (and, according to the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List, worth £450 million), and David Sullivan, owner of Private, the UK’s biggest chain of adult shops. The Rich List put him on £500 million in 2008. That’s a lot of dildos and copies of Readers’ Wives.
One of the old truisms about the English is that they aren’t interested in sex, and are also a bit embarrassed by it. Like so many of the generalizations about the country, this one clearly doesn’t apply, and it’s doubtful that it ever did. Certainly, the England of Chaucer and Shakespeare seems to have been a fairly bawdy place, and Fanny Hill doesn’t make eighteenth-century Britain seem like a repressed civilization. The Victorian era gets most of the blame for turning the English into a nation of prudes but, again, the reality was very different. There were around eighty thousand prostitutes on the streets of Victorian London at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when the population of the city was around two million. That’s roughly one prostitute for every twelve men. Obviously, not all of these women were full-time prostitutes – many were factory workers or seam-stresses who did a little freelance work – but the volume of the trade hardly suggests a lack of interest in sex.
Take the phrase ‘Lie back and think of England’ and the cliché that the English, or at least English women, were uninterested in sex. It’s worth noting the origin of the phrase. According to the O
xford English Dictionary, Lady Alice Hillingdon noted in her diary in 1912: ‘I am happy now that George calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week, and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.’ Lady Hillingdon was fifty-five in 1912, but George was still getting it twice a week, and this was apparently less frequently than of old. If these were the people who weren’t interested in sex, then the other English people must have been banging like rabbits.
In November 2008, an international academic study covering fourteen thousand people in forty-eight countries identified the United Kingdom as one of the most promiscuous countries in the world. The United Kingdom came eleventh out of forty-eight countries surveyed, but was ahead of every other major industrialized country, including the USA, Holland, Australia, France and Italy. Those results were certainly reflected in an Observer poll, which found that roughly half of all British adults had had a one-night stand and one in five had slept with someone whose name they didn’t know. More specifically, 29 per cent of men had slept with a woman whose name they didn’t know, but just 14 per cent of women had done the same, suggesting that women really are better at multitasking.
Very little about English culture today could make you think that this was a nation uninterested in sex. If anything, England now seems to be a country drenched in sexuality – the land of the Sun, Nuts, Asian Babes, of casual sex, dogging and teenage pregnancy.
Certainly, to me, growing up in Ireland, the place looked filthy. Your biggest-selling newspaper had tits in it, for Christ’s sake. It’s hard to explain how insane that looked from Ireland, or how furtive it made it as a purchase. It’s even stranger to come and live here and see that the Sun is regularly mentioned as a vital read, and as one of the major opinion formers in the country. It has tits in it. On page three, right inside the cover. Tits. And it claims to have won or lost national elections.
Every ten years or so, some Irish entrepreneur starts up a men’s magazine and, six issues later, it splutters to an embarrassed halt. Ireland’s a small media market certainly, but mainly these magazines die because there isn’t the appetite to tell Irish girls that this is a career choice worth taking. There is a massive industry in England, and a very mainstream one, from page-three girls to ‘Highstreet Honeys’ competitions to sections in Zoo and Nuts magazine claiming to get students, barmaids or girls on the streets to lift their tops; all this based on convincing young women that it is somehow ‘empowering’ for them to do so. There was an Irish girl recently who took up page three after gaining an excellent degree in one of the sciences in Trinity College. She parroted this line about choice, and the country just looked at her bewildered. ‘You’ve got a degree. Don’t you get it? You’re going to have a long, rewarding and successful career. That means you don’t have to get your tits out.’
Don’t get me wrong, we like tits. We just don’t think it’s a brilliant thing to base your working life on. But, and you can regard this as hypocritical if you want, we’ll look at yours. Google did a survey in 2006 about which nation types the word ‘porn’ into their search engine most. Britain came third. (Which city was number one in Britain? Sorry, Brummies, it was you again, although Manchester was just behind.) The number-one sex-seekers online, were – surprise, surprise – the Irish. We like tits. We’d just sooner it was your daughters and sisters and wives that were popping them out.
Chapter 5:
You’re About Fifth
Let’s take a brief pit-stop from the town-to-town and look at the bigger picture. This little quest started with the vocal objections of the radio-phone-in crowd to England being ranked above its station.
So, if we do a bit of research, where does England place?
Remarkably, about fifth in almost everything.
Britain has the fifth-largest economy in the world ranked by GDP, behind the USA, Japan, Germany and China. In terms of military might, Britannia no longer rules the waves but, depending on which figures you use, is ranked between second and fifth in terms of military spending. It comes third or fourth in terms of nuclear weapons stockpiled, and fifth in terms of arms exports.
It is the world’s sixth most popular tourist destination. Even in areas where you’d expect domination, England is not guaranteed the top spot – it is sixth in terms of beer consumption and doesn’t even always come top in tea drinking, with Turkey and Ireland occasionally topping that list. Britain comes fourth in terms of time spent in school, and has the fourth highest divorce rate in the world.
It now comes fourth in terms of the size of its English-speaking population, behind the USA, India and Nigeria. In sports, Britain struggles to stay in the top tier, even in the sports it claims to have invented. At the end of 2008, England was tenth in the FIFA world rankings, sixth in the Rugby Union world rankings, and England is ranked fifth in the world by the ICC for test cricket. Great Britain came fourth in terms of medals won at the Beijing Olympics.
Like I said, you’re about fifth.
For many of the two hundred plus sovereign countries in the world, this would be regarded as quite an achievement. Not so for the English, of course. For many, and not just the ones with access to a radio, a phone and too much free time, this is seen as an inexorable slide, as proof of an unprecedented decline and, worse than that, a form of rebuke.
Little more than a hundred years ago, Britain was the dominant world power: controlling more than a third of the world’s trade, a quarter of its land area, a quarter of its population (around 350 million people), and being the preeminent power on the world’s oceans. The unprecedented scale of the empire supported an understandable belief that there was something exceptional about the British way of life.
In fact, the empire was always fired with moral purpose. In 1896, Winston Churchill described the purpose of the empire as being: ‘To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacity for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain…’
I’ll spare you how funnily that reads to an Irishman.
The point remains, though, that the collapse of the empire may have felt as much of a rejection as it did a failure. The English have had to put up with the sinking realization described by the historian Niall Ferguson in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, that: ‘The empire had, after all, been one of history’s Bad Things.’
The story on the home front was no better.
At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, Britain produced more iron than the rest of the world put together. Britain also produced about half of the world’s textiles, two-thirds of its coal, and had the highest GDP. These things just aren’t true any more. Britain came eighth in the world in terms of its exports in 2007. In the same year, about four out of five workers were employed in the services sector, with just 18 per cent in manufacturing. The country now imports 50 per cent more than it exports. In my audiences, I meet very, very few people who make things.
The loss of empire, allied to the decline in Britain’s manufacturing and export success, must have felt like an awful battering for those whose national sense of identity and purpose was intertwined with its success. It’s not surprising that, when empire and manufacturing crumbled, some people found it extremely difficult to maintain a clear sense of what the country was for.
Of course, a country doesn’t have to be ‘for’ anything – it can just be a place where you raise your children, which you shout for during the World Cup and where you seek a bit of personal happiness. You’d have to presume that most of the nations of the world manage to exist very pleasantly without stressing about National Purpose.
But I’m here to analyse the English, and already we have a problem. You’ve probably already noted that a lot of these figures I’ve quoted are for Britain, and not for Englan
d. How are we to filter out the malign Celtic influence?
Well, for a start, by population. England’s population forms 83 per cent of Great Britain’s so, therefore, we’ll take all the figures to have at least 83 per cent chance of being accurate for the English alone. I think it’ll be more than that, especially for the less scientific opinion polls I might quote, for the simple reason that most of the polling companies are based in London, and probably just sent somebody out on to Oxford Street with a clipboard, with little thought for weighting the sample to include the people of the Scottish Highlands.
Even if we exclude the Celts from the equation, it won’t settle this whole British/English thing, though.
For one thing, what’s with all the names? Is there any reason to have six different names for each slightly more inclusive configuration? Especially since none of you can remember which order they go in. Snap quiz: without looking it up, which is bigger, Great Britain or the United Kingdom?
(I’ll give you a clue. The last Olympic team was called Team GB!, despite the fact that the name manages neatly to disenfranchise any Northern Ireland athletes who had spent the last fifteen years of their lives learning to pole vault.)
When it comes to titling itself, this country is like those children who write their address with ‘… Europe, the World, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe’.
In the small time I’ve been here, though, there is one, less cartographic, distinction that I’ve seen.