on some of the latest imports to British small screens. In a recent re-run of an episode of Mike Judge’s cult cartoon of teenage nihilism, Beavis and Butthead, the sniggering duo were sitting on their ripped sofa as usual, watching a video by the British band the Verve. ‘Aren’t these dudes from that country where everything sucks?’ remarked Beavis, eventually. Similarly, in the adult cartoon South Park, with its accounts of the goings-on in a small boring town in Colorado, the foul-mouthed children of South Park Elementary would sooner sit next to the red-eyed son of Satan in class, than the British kid Pip – ‘because you’re British, ass-wipe’. Pip, dressed in the cap and jacket of the boy hero of Great Expectations, accepts all abuse with a generous good humour that somehow makes him even more pathetic.
What seems to give these American comments on Britishness their comic edge is the manner in which they identify that strand of cultural self-consciousness that has provided Britain with some of the best, as well as the worst, of its national self-expression. Since Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer wed Pop to absurdism in their ground-breaking television show, ‘Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out’, in the early 1990s, the cultural fetishizing of Britishness by way of ironic nostalgia and post-modern caricature has been approaching critical mass. The inevitable response to the burn-out of irony would be the rise of the post-Prozac public confessional – the New Sincerity, aided by its sidekick of New Sincerity with street-credibility – the New Authenticity.
An attempt at self-defence at a time of cultural insecurity, the cry of ‘Any old irony’ had been echoing around the studios of British television for some years, and would seem to have authorized a situation in which – as W. H. Auden once suggested in his poem about the perils of trying to reach Atlantis – it had become impossible to tell the true from the false in terms of articulate statements about Britishness. What had come into relief was a raised tracery of distinguishing national characteristics, from the archaic comedies of British manners acted out by Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse, to the baggy British groups with their trademark nasal whine of post-Oasis BritRock. And these are the enduring traits of Britishness that the cutting edge of American comedy has found so easy to lampoon. In addition to the targeted sarcasm of South Park and Beavis and Butthead, who could forget Frasier’s temporary obsession with a horrible English pub? Or the time that a thinly disguised Mary Poppins came to help out The Simpsons, and wound up on the sofa with her stockings rolled down to her ankles and a fag in her mouth?
As the advertising industry has the most calculated interest in reflecting versions of Britain back to itself on television, so it has taken the trend for ironic retro-kitsch – itself an infantilist reflex of nostalgia for our pop-cultural youth – and applied it to articulations of national identity. The TV advert for Mercury ‘One 2 One’ cellular phones, is a computer-generated montage of Vic Reeves interacting with the great British comedian Terry-Thomas, in scenes from the 1960 classic, School for Scoundrels. Beyond the product message, what emerges from this advertisement is a working definition of the way in which ‘Englishness’, as a contemporary concept, is terminally stylized in order to be culturally rehabilitated from any reputation for nationalism or anti-multiculturalism.
This notion is compounded by the latest television advertisement for Rover cars, in which suppositions of Britishness are visually punned into a new, fashionably acceptable vision of Britishness. To an immaculate early-Seventies soundtrack, sourced from vintage Roxy Music and Sparks, the Rover commercial ‘remakes and re-models’ (to borrow from the title of another early Roxy Music number) a British landscape in which the Edinburgh Tattoo becomes the tattooed arm of a young woman at a rave, and a kid munching fast food on a skateboard becomes an arch reference to Meals on Wheels. With a knowing catchphrase, ‘It’s nice to know that things haven’t changed a bit’, Rover’s heavily pushed advertisement is selling New Britain as a state of mind by effectively suggesting that Old Britain is dead and buried.
This trend for montaging laundered notions of British popular culture into a commodified vision of New Britain has been matched – in this age of fetishized Newness – by the search for the New Authenticity. Rather like a short story by Chekhov dramatized by old clips from police surveillance videos, perhaps the function of the New Authenticity is to suggest a social conscience in the lingering dusk if post-modern chaos, and to provide a new cast of everyday heroes to people moral fables. As the national media report the case of a twelve-year-old mother who had sex with her thirteen-year-old boyfriend because they were bored with watching the coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral, there is a sense that the layers of irony attendant on mediating definitions of contemporary Britain have gone beyond critical mass, and finally imploded.
In a blistering editorial in the May 1998 issue of Living Marxism, Mick Hume described the conversion of ‘Cool Britannia’ into what he terms ‘Ghoul Britannia’. Having identified a parading of dysfunctionality, death and despair in many aspects of British culture, from the lyrics of Radiohead and the pathological end of BritArt, to films such as Nil by Mouth and Gummo, he suggested that the dangerously self-defeating miserabilism of ‘Ghoul Britannia’ is ‘symptomatic of a society which has lost faith in itself, one which sees humanity drowning in a bloody gut-bucket of its own making’.
Such a conclusion, in many ways, could be the ultimate destination of the British search for cultural authenticity: the belief, mistaken or otherwise, that the only aspects of ordinary life worth recording are those which reflect dysfunctional behaviour. And this could be seen as a repetition of the trend for problem films, in the early 1960s, that exhausted the true artistic potential of British ‘kitchen sink’ cinema by merely cloning the various ‘problems’ into a threadbare formula. Writing in the Spectator, in 1962, one exasperated critic remarked: ‘We’ve seen the brooding terrace, we’ve heard the moaning factory whistle and frankly we don’t care any more.’ This was not, one feels, indifference to social issues; rather it was impatience with the idea that the whole of British realism could be seen through one, increasingly self-parodic, point of focus.
As though to address this aspect of New Authenticity, there is now a new middle ground to Britain’s pop cultural reflection of itself. The success of Men Behaving Badly, as the grand manifesto of Laddism Nouveau, has been succeeded by the televisual equivalent of a ‘call to all cars’ to find something – anything, pretty much – that will bring the success of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary to the television screen. And this New Comedy of Recognition has a twin in what could be called the New Tragedy of Recognition: more than a decade after thirtysomething turned middle-class American domestic trivia into the stuff of epic theatre, the patrician classes of the British media have hatched a robust cult for public confession, which is now demanding a home on television. And, doubtless, will get one.
Between the vogue for ironic retro-kitsch and the drift towards New Authenticity, a situation has arisen in the articulation of Britishness that could be said to demand the exchange of cleverly honed trends for a return to old-fashioned – some might say reactionary – statements of intent. There is a feeling of slight relief when one comes across one of those brightly coloured adverts that announce, with no further ado, ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin!’ After the succession of dizzyingly jump-cut, defiantly conceptual and ultra-fashionable blipverts, there is something faintly endearing about the straightforward hard sell. And the same, perhaps, can be said of those works of art or cultural interventions that make no attempt to lubricate the wheels of their conceptual thinking with self-advertisement, irony, pastiche or high-minded punning.
As part of the ‘artranspennine 98’ exhibition, which used the whole of the trans-Pennine region from Liverpool to Hull as a venue for showing contemporary art, there was a work by Joseph Beuys, situated in the Victoria Gardens beside the Henry Moore Institute, in Leeds. As an artist, icon and shaman, Beuys can be ranked with Warhol and Duchamp as a figure who managed to harness the energy of his century, and translate his personal experience of that energy into monolithic statements about humanity.
The piece by Beuys in Victoria Gardens is part of a work called ‘7,000
