Further to my recent reflections on the British press, it was newspapers that drove me out of the UK ten years ago. At least that’s what I jokingly said, as a kind of shorthand to avoid conversations I did not want.
I found them remarkably unworldly, and was utterly bored. Even the quality papers were infatuated with the antics of a very British kind of couple, the dumb athlete and the young big-busted and blond morning television presenter. Now I see that I was speaking more truly than I cared to admit.
The English papers (and this is not a misnomer, the national British papers are not Welsh, or Scottish, but English) are still reprehensibly narrow in their interests, and out of touch with global realpolitik in their emphasis of the Anglo-American so-called “special relationship.” And as far as the infatuation with public displays of idiocy go, there is a straight line that leads not only to the British dumb athlete/blond bimbo morning TV presenter combo from the old Carry On films and bawdy sexual comedies that used to run in London’s West End, but also to something more political, something that has a lot to do with Britain’s still thriving class system.
Andy Kershaw, an old BBC friend of mine, used to say that this infatuation with the asinine antics of a uniquely modern English aristocracy—athletes and TV celebrities who are hugely paid and photographed constantly—was the effect of England never having had a revolution and chopping the heads off their upper classes, when the rest of Europe was busy guillotining theirs back in the 19th century.
The English upper classes laid low for a while and endured, from the closing of the war through the “kitchen-sink” dramas of the nineteen sixties, by “angry young man” playwrights such as John Osborne, Joe Orton and Alan Sillitoe. They now live their either unfathomably wealthy (if you are part of the old titled order) or studiously garish lives (if you are a football player or minor film or TV star) with impunity. The point of these people’s appearances in the (front section) pages of newspapers, or in Tatler, is to put on a show for the lower classes that will never be able to join them.
The occasional moment when one of their own is seemingly allowed to rise—consider, for instance, the case of the most recent Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle (and Paul Potts before her)—is what keeps the UK class system going. The completely false idea that such good fortune could be anyone’s.
That’s what drove me out. Back to Canada and its remarkable interest not just in Canadians but in the fortunes and realities of the rest of the world; to its talent, the other side of the fence, that has made me positively weepy of late. Tune in to CBC Radio Two’s excellent morning deejay, Molly Johnson, if you are in doubt of this.
Canada has talent, loads of it, and, mostly it’s only we who know. Being happy in our cornucopia, and at ease about our not meaning much to the rest of the world, is one of the things that makes this country. We are a small community, but reflected vigorously in our art and thought. Man, I love this place, in all its complexity that, by and large, only we are at all interested in. It’s good to be back. It’s good to be home.
Noah Richler’s Our Man In Toronto column appears regularly on Rover.
Photo by Barbara Stoneham.
