Watching the English

PLAY RULES AND ENGLISHNESS

The rules of play have provided further confirmation of all the main 'quintessences of Englishness' identified so far - all the usual suspects: humour, hypocrisy, class-anxiety, fair play, modesty and so on. Empiricism now also seems to be emerging as a strong candidate for inclusion in the English cultural genome. But most of the rules in this chapter have been about one particular defining characteristic of Englishness - the one I have taken to calling our 'social dis-ease', our inhibited insularity, our chronic social awkwardness, bordering on a sort of sub-clinical combination of autism and agoraphobia. Almost all of our leisure activities are, one way or another, a response to this unfortunate condition. And almost all of our responses are forms of denial and self-delusion. In fact, our phenomenal capacity for collective self-deception is beginning to look like a defining characteristic in its own right.

The collective self-deception involved in the English use of sports, games and clubs as social facilitators is particularly interesting - the fact that we have to trick ourselves into social interaction and bonding by pretending that we are doing something else. Our belief in the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol is part of the same delusional syndrome. We have a desperate need for social contact and emotional bonding, but we cannot simply acknowledge this need, and get on with the pursuit of human warmth and intimacy in a natural, straightforward fashion. We have to create elaborate structures and myths and rituals to disguise our craving for social contact as a burning desire to throw balls at each other, or to perfect our flower-arranging or motorcycle-maintenance skills, or to save the whales, or the world, or something - and then go to the pub, where we can pretend that we are only there for the beer, and attribute any embarrassing evidence of normal human emotion to its miraculous properties.

Really, I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery and malaria in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep.

45. But perhaps I am being too harsh. Jeremy Paxman thinks that the millions who visit historic houses and gardens are expressing, among other things, a 'deeply felt' sense of history. I'm not convinced; we are chronically nostalgic, yes, but that is not the same thing. Still, it is somewhat disturbing to find myself sounding more cynical than Paxman.

46. Some middle-class English people, mainly teenagers, are secretly addicted to EastEnders, but very few watch Coronation Street.

47. I do realise that there is a distinction between empiricism and realism as philosophical doctrines (holding that all knowledge is derived from sense experience, and that matter exists independently of our perception of it) and the broader, more colloquial senses that are implied here, but I would maintain that there is a strong connection between our formal philosophical traditions and our informal, everyday attitudes and mindsets, including those governing our taste in soap operas.

48. I am indebted to Simon Nye, author of Men Behaving Badly, and Paul Dornan, who was involved in its 'translation' for the American market, for these observations, and other helpful insights into the nature of English comedy.

49. Other nations may watch and enjoy some of our sit-coms (Butterflies has a following in America, I believe), and we certainly watch and enjoy many of theirs (e.g. Friends, Frasier, Cheers), but I am interested in what English television comedy, the comedy we produce, tells us about Englishness.

50. I will have more to say about English beliefs about alcohol and the etiquette of drunken comportment later in this chapter.

51. A little spasm of scrupulous honesty just propelled me to our own loo to check the current bogside reading matter. I found a paperback edition of Jane Austen's letters and a mangled copy of the Times Literary Supplement. Oh dear. Could possibly be seen as pretentious. I suppose it's no use saying that both are gloriously bitchy and extremely funny. Perhaps I should be less quick to cast aspersions on other people's bogside libraries. Maybe some people really do enjoy reading Habermas and Derrida on the loo. I take it all back.

52. Apparently we read more newspapers than any other nation, except - surprise, surprise - the Japanese. What is it about small, overcrowded islands?

53. Daniel Miller makes this observation in his excellent ethnographic study of shoppers in North London - I was intrigued by it and subsequently 'tested' it in various semi-scientific ways in my own fieldwork.

54. Another Daniel Miller observation, again 'tested' and successfully 'replicated' in my fieldwork.

55. Lest I be suspected of rather un-English humourless earnestness, I should add that I also joined a jokey organisation called SAVE, which stood for Students Against Virtually Everything.