After a narrow escape in the hairdressers, Terry and Bob take refuge in the last place they’re likely to hear the England score - London’s Old Vic theatre.
It’s weird watching it being spun as charming or earthy or cheeky.
Do your job for the duration of the play you’re being paid to be in. Unless the character you’re playing wants to watch the game, and it’s in the script, mate, you don’t get to watch the game.
I think it’s cute. The audience, whether it wanted to see the football or not, will have booked tickets MONTHS before the game was scheduled, let alone before they knew who was playing in it. Penalty shoot outs take 5 minutes. It’s at worst amusing and harmless, I think?
It’s acceptable if footballers are allowed to stop the game to hold up their phone and show everyone in the stadium the Eurovision results or the trailer for a new Doctor Who episode when it drops. I like a national moment of unity as much as anyone. Let’s have it happen MORE.
I mean, you do get exclusive doctor who trailers at half time at football matches and during breaks in Wimbledon, because they’re all important to the bbc, and it wasn’t an interruption, it was before.
I was talking to a Who writer at the pub during the game about how it’s cultural good manners to be aware of both. Someone pointed out to me that even if you don’t give a shit about Who, you know loads of facts about it, as ambient culture. Blue box. Who’s the lead actor. What a cyberman is.
Ditto, it’s good manners to know some of the players, their reputations, how we’re doing. You forget how much you can pick up in the ether, and it’s all good to know. “Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool” as the sleeve notes to Peggy Suicide have it. (The Residents, I think.)
I have terrible manners then apparently!
(I think I go for the converse. I don’t expect anyone else to know about my interests and enthusiasms and I expect them to be able to deal will my not knowing about theirs. Not knowing is not “saying this is shit”, it’s just “not for me”.)
I’m not sure it’s manners / politeness, but I do think there’s a cultural osmosis, a kind of background radiation. I have never watched EastEnders consistently, & not a whole episode this century. But I could name most the original cast, big plots up and down the series history, sing the feem toon.
I have read no Harry Potter books. Exactly the wrong age. I have seen two of the films, one because it was the first one (poor) and one because it was Alfonso Cuarón. I know the names of the main cast / characters, heroes & villains. If you put a gun to my head I could probably title all the books.
I haven't even seen the films. I was in my 20s when the books came out and my nephews live in Devon so I have never been forced to sit through a film with them. When people talk about Harry Potter they might as well be talking about football.
I really miss it as a cultural shorthand. It was brilliant for quick gags, because you could assume everyone knew the language even if they didn’t read the things, and that anyone who didn’t clock the references would be oddly proud - because they were a conscientious objector.
I agree on that as a general point, and I miss TOTP and all the things we used to share, but sorry, this is an age thing. I forget many of my friends are about 10 years younger than me, but once someone started singing a song from The Little Mermaid and I was the only one who couldn't join in.
some of it is an age thing but definitely also some of it is increasing social fragmentation which has been increasing for a long time (at least since the end of WW2, arguably since the Reformation). increasing individualism is the same thing as increasing atomisation.
Very, very this. I think there’s something quite specific to england (and I think possibly the USA too) - ask anyone in France, Italy, Sweden or Ireland to sing you a song, and they’re draw from a cultural library that almost seems to live in the air around them. In England, it’s Happy Birthday and…
…maybe Wonderwall if you’re lucky. It’s not that there’s less or worse culture but, as you suggest, people have a very personal relationship to culture that exists within their field of vision, but not really beyond it.
I remember doing a gig with a Scottish-Italian singer in Italy. He loved to pull out surprises in the encore - surprises even for the band. One time he looked at all of us and went ‘watch this’ before going out and singing an old Italian folk song I’d never heard, and an audience of 3000 people…
…sang every single word. I remember it striking me at the time that I couldn’t imagine what the equivalent of that would be in England. Like, Hey Jude or something. But it’s different - that song is a commercial product, not *really* a folk song. But maybe it’s England’s version of one.
TBF what is extraordinary about the talent of Paul McCartney is that he essentially writes folk songs. You hear them once and you feel they must always have existed. And we legendarily have a much better music scene in the UK than most of Europe. But yeah.
It’s definitely true. I wonder slightly if the two are linked: during the 60s, when a lot of the world was essentially using the (fairly) new medium of television to bring people music they already knew, Britain was bringing them music they didn’t.
Football chants come to mind here as another C20th English folk medium (also I think England is probably a relevant distinction here, more of a folk tradition in the other three nations) (well, two quite different folk traditions in one of the other three!)
I think football chants are a proper version of exactly the kind of musical function I’m talking about - the *whole* function of the music is to be sung, nobody really ‘wrote’ it, and it doesn’t need any kind of company involved for you to learn it. It just exists in the air.
And even there, you are often riffing off them to create lyrical ripostes using the same melody ("glory glory Man United" becoming "who the fuck are Man United"), which I assume Italian villages probably also do
There's also fascinating folk tradition stuff going on with playground chants, jokes, and games, which are far far more persistent than any student's time at school.
