Tickling the English Page 9
Despite attempts throughout the nineteenth century by the temperance and abstinence movements to reduce alcohol consumption, the English continued to drink prodigious amounts of beer and spirits. In 1900, they were still drinking about 250 pints of beer and close to 7 litres of spirits per person per year on average. And that average includes children and the 10 per cent of the adult population who were abstinent, so the actual drinkers were getting through a good deal more than that.
This golden age of English drinking was brought to an end by the Great War. Lloyd George said that the country was ‘fighting Germans, Austrians and Drink, and as far as I can see the greatest of these foes is Drink’. Restrictions on pub opening hours followed, as did a weakening of beer and an extraordinary law that banned the buying of rounds. Consumption levels plummeted and stayed at low levels for almost fifty years.
In recent decades, the UK has tried bravely to get back to the good old days. In 1956, which was close to the low point of the century in terms of British drinking, each Briton over the age of fourteen drank an average of 180 pints of beer, 2 one-litre bottles of spirits, 3 bottles of wine and 4 cans of cider – about 5 litres of pure alcohol – each.
These figures have continued to grow. By 1965, average consumption had grown to 6 litres of pure alcohol, by 1975 to 8.8 litres, by 1985 to 9 litres, by 1995 to 9.3 litres and a genuinely impressive 11.4 litres in 2005.
Much of this is because of the greater number of women drinking since the 1950s; and, since the amount of beer drunk has stayed pretty static since that time, a further portion of the increase is due to the massive increase in the amount of wine consumed. British households now spend more on wine per year than they do on beer and spirits combined.
So the evidence for the Daily Mail-style social apocalypse-mongers is mixed. It looks bad next to the mid-fifties, but then the Daily Mail tries to make everything look bad next to the fifties. The mid-fifties often pop up when the English Romantics get all nostalgic, like some glorious template of a simpler time. In this, though, their view isn’t just rose-tinted. There was less drinking, less than half in fact. It’s just that today’s grandparents weren’t the norm, the standard from which people had slid; in the bigger picture, they were the statistical blip. They just weren’t putting the effort in.
As for the current generation, we’ll return to myself and Damon’s excellent work in the field. Do you want to know what we learned on our trawl through Cheltenham? For a start, if you want street violence, public drunkenness and the grimier side of British drinking, a Regency spa town isn’t the place to find it.
Well-to-do young people, the scions of middle-class Gloucestershire, tumbled out of boutique vodka bars nestled in arcades. If there were superpubs, we didn’t see them. The streets were relatively quiet, even by eleven. We found a chintzy vodka bar, and even managed to grab the only table. All around us at eye-level were the crotches of Cheltenham because, as the government push to have more ‘continental’ licensing hours, the publicans go the opposite direction and encourage people to do their drinking standing up. This is called ‘vertical drinking’ in the industry. It works the same as taking all the seats out of shopping centres. Keep you moving, keep you consuming. If you can’t rest your glass anywhere, you will drink more.
The vodka bar shut at twelve. We were pointed to a row of clubs in a Regency arcade across from the theatre and blagged our way into the one on the end, Sub-tone, which ranged across three floors and was thronged with punters. And, like descending into hell, we worked our way down; from the piano bar, singing ‘Sweet Caroline’, possibly repeatedly, my memory blurs, we eventually found ourselves in the basement nightclub, still compos mentis, but now dancing. Dancing, like the thirtysomething white men we were. They played ‘Jump Around’ by House of Pain, which is practically the Irish national anthem, and I jumped around. I jumped up, jumped up and got down.
England introduced twenty-four-hour drinking in 2005. The idea behind this was that it was time to allow the English drinker to make a mature choice about when and how much to drink.
Twenty-four-hour drinking ended before 3 a.m. in Cheltenham. In many parts of England, it ends before midnight. It has led to no great revolution in English lifestyle; in fact, for those of us who work at night, England is still a terrible place to drink. If you don’t fancy a city-centre super-pub, or dancing, there’s nowhere to go. Most of us are sitting somewhere in the gap between the legislator’s ideal of Mediterranean restraint and the grim reality of drinks manufacturers pouring lemonade-flavoured raspers down the throats of teenagers as quickly as possible.
In February of 2008, a Home Office review of the all-day-drinking laws showed that drinking and violence had remained at roughly similar levels since the laws had changed, although the peak time for violent incidents had moved forward by an hour, suggesting that the kind of people who like a drunken scrap had altered their behaviour; they were having a couple more drinks before punching you in the face on the way home.
That dreaded binge drinking had been happening all around us on that night out, certainly by official standards, since the official definition of ‘binge’ is four pints or more in a single session for men and three pints or more for women. Incidentally, what does it say about all of us, that every time I tell people the official definition of a binge they go, ‘That’s not much, is it?’
But no, that’s not much. It’s practically a self-fulfilling prophecy, pretending to be a statistic.
In Irish terms, that would make a ‘binge’ about half a ‘session’ and about a third of being on the ‘complete rip’.
By government standards, about six million Brits binge drink at least once each week. And if they came home after four pints, they’d probably be quite shocked if someone shouted ‘Binge drinker!’ at them.
I certainly would have felt aggrieved by the branding. We got back to the hotel by 3.30 a.m. that night. We’d only been out for four hours, in a truncated night that could have gone on just a little bit longer. Luckily for us, the hotel bar was still open.
Chapter 8:
I am the Sorcerer!
There’s a certain childlike thrill to landing on an island. A proper island, that is, one you can see in its entirety as the plane comes in to land. There’s a fairytale quality to it. It’s just not normal. Of course, usually when people land on an island small enough to take in with a glance, they’re on holiday and mundane life is on hold. It’s more than just that happy association, though. It’s not just a Pavlovian response to a couple of visible coastlines, or the memory of Hervé Villechaize, a dwarf in a white suit, shouting, ‘The plane! The plane!’
When there’s this much coast and this little land, your brain tells you, No! Normal life cannot work here. Something must have been sacrificed. They don’t have the room here for all the stuff we have clogging up the mainland, so they must have prioritized. The islanders have taken this clean slate, and rebuilt from first principles. What have they shown that we really need? What will make a community work in such a small space?
And you start wondering what they can survive without. An MRI machine? A piano factory? A waterpark?
I lived on the Holloway Road in North London for a couple of years when I moved over from Ireland. At the rougher end of Islington, the Holloway Road is like London’s version of the famous Afghanistan trade routes. Everything was available there if you knew who to ask. You want silk, spices, illegal DVDs, a black taxi, shop mannequins, S&M gear; it’s all somewhere on the Holloway Road. My favourite was always the small shop at the northern end of the street which claimed to be ‘London’s Premier Golf Trophy Shop’. All it sold were hundreds of huge, gaudy, multi-level trophies with little silver golfers on the top.
The islanders will survive without a Golf Trophy shop.
It’s not just infrastructure, though. Given a chance to rebuild society away from the mainland, what laws would you change? What freedoms would you grant? The possibilities for re-invention are endless. Islan
ds are a place to hide, somewhere to begin again, to regress, a place for the lawless. Welcome to the last wild frontier. Welcome to Jersey.
The arrival in Jersey was a little too drizzly to sustain this much magic. It was a grey day, and the stone walls, green fields and rain made it feel much more like the west coast of Ireland than fifteen miles from France. As the taxi sped out of the airport, accelerated to thirty-nine and a half miles per hour and then held there, in deference to the absurdly strict motoring laws, it felt like commuting through County Galway on a wet October Sunday.
On the St Helier waterfront there was an old Ferris wheel, or at least the shell of an old Ferris wheel, with only a couple of remaining carriages dangling in the rain. It looked like every nightmare of a deserted and run-down beach resort, out of season and out of favour.
‘The Jersey Eye could do with a lick of paint,’ joked Damon. There was a long silence from the driver. We just presumed he was sad to see it fall into disrepair. He probably had his first kiss on it or something.
Luckily, this grim day wasn’t my very first impression of the island. I had been in Jersey once before, the summer previous, when I had come over to address a conference of accountants. That arrival had been far more glorious, not least because Jersey’s most famous resident, Alan Whicker, had been sitting on the plane beside me. Looking exactly as dapper as you would hope, his blazer and tie marked him out as someone who had made an effort for the journey, single-handedly raising the flight from Stansted out of the mundane and into the glorious age of travel that he always embodied. I felt like John Candy on Planes, Trains and Automobiles next to him. I introduced myself, of course.
‘Hello, Mr Whicker. My name is Dara O Briain. I work sometimes with the BBC doing travel documentaries. I just wanted to say how much I admire your work.’
He smiled back.
‘Hello. Yes. I’ve seen your work. Well done.’
Now, let’s be clear about one thing. Alan Whicker had no idea who I was. Alan Whicker has not seen my work. Alan does not catch a lot of Dave, or type ‘Mock the Week’ into Google to find clips online. I was just a large stranger on a plane, leaning into his field of vision and claiming to be a part of his world. He’s just a very classy man, and that’s what very classy men say. I left, skipping, and he could carry on his day, elegantly.
If that was one lesson in how to conduct showbusiness, a far harsher one was to follow.
I was doing the after-dinner speech in a hotel ballroom in St Helier. In an unusual piece of double booking, there were actually two accountants’ dinners that night in that hotel. I was speaking at one, and at the other, bizarrely, the address was being given by Nick Leeson, the man who broke Barings Bank. Quite why you’d invite an arsonist to address the firemen’s dinner I don’t know. It makes a perverse sort of sense, I suppose, but I was pretty sure that my accountants were going to have the more memorable show. And they did, although not because of me.
The coffees were being served when I was introduced to the stage. A man in a gold chain of office read a brief biography and told the ballroom that they were all very happy to have me here and could you please welcome onstage…
And I bounded on to a round of applause that was on the polite side of enthusiastic. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an accountants’ annual dinner in a ballroom. It’s not a rock and roll crowd.
I warmed them up with some quite excellent jokes about Jersey’s recently introduced General Sales Tax, jokes which, having told once, I will clearly never need to tell again. In fact, I’m guessing that my opening with jokes about Jersey’s newly introduced General Sales Tax will make you, the reader, either go, ‘Wow, Dara, how professional are you!’ or, more likely, ‘Wow, Dara, you really are some manner of whore.’
I don’t care. Them GST gags were gold. Pretty soon, the venue was kicking, accountant-style. There was almost definitely laughter, some momentum and energy and, just occasionally, a brief smattering of applause when a good punchline was unleashed. The roof was not coming off the joint, I would not be carried out shoulder high and my face would not be appearing on any currency. But I was definitely getting away with it. Take that, Leeson, I thought, you hack.
Then the woman collapsed and the gig turned weird.
The first sign of this was the sudden sound of chairs moving in one corner of the room. All the people on one table had seen the woman slump to the floor and were now scurrying around trying to help.
The number of people who can realistically offer any help in this situation won’t ever be more than two or three, but the tables in this hotel ballroom seated ten and that left half a dozen accountants desperately trying to look as concerned as possible. And what help could they offer? Some use they would be to the woman’s husband:
‘Help, help, my wife has collapsed!’
‘Does she need her accounts done?’
‘Why, actually, yes. It was the stress of not having her VAT in on time that caused her to collapse.’
‘Well, unfortunately, we’re not those kind of accountants. She should have collapsed in the other ballroom.’
So there’s a collapsed woman, her by-now frantic other half and, swirling around, a collection of accountants offering all manner of advice and trying to look useful. Lift her up, hold her flat, give her something to drink, stick a pencil in her mouth, revive her, don’t revive her – and now the rest of the room is beginning to notice. As each table turns towards the human drama unfolding at table thirteen, my audience is beginning to drain away and still I’m telling my little jokes.
This is a showbusiness dilemma. A man might be sharing the final moments with his wife and, while he bends over her to hear her precious last words, her message of love after the life they’ve spent together, I’m still cracking out the gags onstage. But, equally, a tipsy middle-aged woman may have slipped off her chair while falling asleep at yet another of her husband’s dull works dinners. When she opens her eyes, the whole room is suddenly staring at her while the after-dinner speaker is tapping his watch and clearing his throat impatiently. The embarrassment would be legendary. The gravity of the first situation has to be balanced by the likelihood of the second. Whichever path I take, I have to commit to it entirely. I either stop the show completely, or carry on without mentioning it at all. There is no middle ground, no throwaway quip to lighten the mood before carrying on: ‘Hey, I thought I was the one dying here! But anyway…’
Luckily, while one part of my brain carries on telling jokes and the other furiously weighs up the probabilities, the situation is taken out of my hands. One of the organizers very noticeably walks into the space between the top tables and the stage, on to the dancefloor basically, and makes the twirly hand-over-hand signal, which is internationally recognized as ‘Keep it going’. Except in basketball, where it means ‘Foul. Travelling.’ I went with Keep it going.
Now we have the second dilemma. What material best covers a medical emergency? I can’t pretend I’m unaware of the situation, which is showing no sign of calming down. But I have to soldier on, making sure that whatever story I start telling, it won’t include any punchline that might suddenly seem horrendously inappropriate. I sometimes finish shows with a routine about the dangers of being eaten by a shark. We might skip that entire bit tonight. And it wouldn’t hurt, either, if whatever line I did finish on, just also happened to be the funniest joke in the world. But this isn’t like dying onstage. The audience aren’t turning against me. In fact, they realize that it’s really difficult for me precisely because it’s so awkward for them. They desperately want to see what’s happening over on table thirteen, but propriety demands that they also have to pretend that nothing is happening. I’m pretending to do a gig, and they’re pretending to listen to it. And it works. I deliver a gag – I cannot recall what it is – and they start to laugh, louder than before. I tell another story, and they laugh at that as well. All is well. We are getting through this together.
And then there’s a huge clatter of table
s moving and chairs scraping the floor as hotel staff push a stretcher right through the middle of the crowd.
I just went, ‘Thank you and good night!’ and walked off the stage.
Jersey Fort Regent
1 fifteen-year-old who wants to be a vet, here with his mum, a teacher
1 teacher of IT for thirty years:
‘They laughed at you at first, didn’t they? Back in the seventies, with your wooden computer.
“Just you wait,” you said.’
1 lawyer down from London to see the show
1 man with a weird laugh
4 accountants
I opened with the story of the woman collapsing from my previous visit. It seemed like a nice experience to share, especially since there were two couples in the audience who had been at that fateful accountants’ dinner. It’s always useful to have someone to corroborate the stories; not least to reassure the crowd that nobody died on the night. (Nobody died; she had just fainted and came to with the help of a glass of water.) Not that I was stuck for opening lines.
We could start with the venue. Fort Regent looms solidly over St Helier. Built in the early 1800s as a response to the French invasion of 1781, it is a proper military keep with dense, high walls and set at a strategic location facing France. The absence of any other subsequent French invasion could be taken as proof of its success as a deterrent, although Napoleon may have had other priorities by that stage. It was de-militarized in 1927, in good time for the German invasion of 1940. The occupying forces used the fort until Liberation Day, 9 May 1945, when Jerseyman Major Hugh le Brocq demanded their surrender and hoisted the Union Flag over the fort at 4 p.m. Liberation Day is still celebrated, and falls the day after VE day, indicating that there were a full twenty-four hours during which the people of Jersey were politely coughing and checking their watches and waiting for the Germans to get the hint and leave.