This month, GQ Magazine asked some celebs what they love about Britain. Names such as Emma Thompson, Anthony Joshua and Brian Cox replied with the predictable: the Lionesses, Adolescence and Paddington Bear. This horror show prompted us to ask our writers: what’s actually great about Britain?
Madeline Grant
Those two brave boys who ripped the face off that statue of Paddington. Of course I don’t condone vandalism, but I view it as the equivalent of when Iraqis tore down that statue of Saddam with such joy in 2003. Paddington has become a symbol – unintended by his author – of the twee, hectoring, brain sapping monoculture which has come to squat over every aspect of British life. The judge who sentenced these men said they ‘were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for’. Good – that has come to mean being bullied into recycling by passive-aggressive messages on your drinks bottle, those stupid cartoon ads telling you to ‘be kind’ and not stab anyone on the tube, and finally the sort of low level hectoring misery that defines almost every encounter with officialdom. Bravo to those lads who tore his face off, may they be the forerunners for the day we throw off Paddington’s twee tyranny forever.
Cosmo Landesman
Forget all that Paddington Bear and tea stuff. It’s the people that make Britain great.
I love the fact that British men have bad teeth – and don’t care. I love the fact that the British don’t take themselves too seriously. And that they say ‘sorry’ all the time even when they’ve done nothing wrong!
They stay up all night consuming vast quantities of really crappy drugs, drinking far too much alcohol and smoking like chimneys – and they’re still having a great time! They are truly a nation of guilt free hedonists.
Let’s not forget British women who are unbearably sexy. In the summer they walk around the streets practically naked. And the ‘fat’ ones and the ‘ugly’ ones don’t give a damn what you or I think. God bless ‘em!
Julie Burchill
I don’t recall the name of the female American writer who, after coming to live here believing that it would be a picturesque blend of Richard Curtis films and Jane Austen novels, was surprised to find out that even the most articulate of people were drunk a lot of the time – and shocked to find out that most of us had sex in that condition, too. In contrast with the Stateside dating scene where potential suitors on both sides are careful not to get ‘sloppy’, she couldn’t believe that, over here, a ‘first date’ often consists of getting blotto in the pub before tumbling legless into bed. And waking up in the morning without a clue what you did the night before – and doing it again, just in case.
Regrettably, a new generation of Brits, with their lily-livered ‘sober-curious’ ways, are letting the side down in this department. But I shall always have such happy memories – or rather, not – of the Bacchanalian free-for-all which characterised sex in the lovely, lost, lubricious twentieth century.
Sean Thomas
The greatest thing about Britain is swearing. English has the best swearwords, and they are best delivered in one of the saltier British accents – Glaswegian, Cockney, Norn – or in the icy vowels of RP.
I say this with some experience. For instance, I was once driving out of Amalfi in Italy, and I ran into a nasty traffic jam (as you do when driving out of Amalfi). An Italian motorist got angry at me and swore my way in a stream of unintelligible and effete Italian cuss-words. It sounded something like ‘your mother disgorges lasagne’. It simply made me laugh.
Then I turned to him and said “shut up you stupid motherfucking cocksucker”. And he instantly crumpled, in his silly linen jacket, and drove on in silence. The brilliantly emphatic sounds of Anglo-Saxon swear words had defeated him. Wanker.
Rory Sutherland
The contradictions. We lead the world in pageantry and in public drunkenness.
Gareth Roberts
The big attraction of 2020s Britain – roll up, roll up! – has to be that we remain the most class-riddled country in the world. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; the late years of the last century threw all the pieces of the class jigsaw up in the air. But now they’ve settled again – how hubristic to think all of that could be overturned in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! – and the big neon irony is that it’s the posh Herberts who make the biggest song and dance about ‘inequality’. The party of labour – literally its name – has a commanding poll lead among ex-public school attendees. These busybodying boondogglers infest the public sector, treading water around a tap from which gushes a never-ending supply of other people’s gravy, their class interest disguised – very, very thinly – as compassion for the lower orders and ‘social justice’, whatever that means. Yes, Britain leads the world in snobs, tarted up in tatty progressive drag.
Ed West
As the writer Marcus Chown once said: ‘If I had 6 letters to describe Britain. they would be NHS-BBC’.
The NHS is what makes Britain unique, which is why global audiences were enthralled by the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony and didn’t at all look at the whole thing with bemused confusion.
As for the BBC, at a time when the far right is on the verge of power across the world, it’s more important than ever to have an impartial service that combats misinformation and brings us vital news stories. I’m thinking of this urgent demand that ‘It’s time to talk about black rugby players’ hair’.
Or this crucial investigation into what ‘Census 2021 data mean for Norwich’s bisexual community’. Or the regular updates about a Muslim man who likes walking. Or, just this week, how we learned about the national emergency that is the shortage of afro hair salons. And where else would we receive the daily, almost hourly, updates on what drag artists up to, including such important stories about how drag queens are keeping gay sign language alive.
In old age my father still recalled the sound of the BBC’s Home Service during the war and how reassuring and familiar it was; as we face a new fascist menace today, this is how I feel reading the latest daily report about drag queen orMuslims Hikers on our beloved national service.
Nicholas Farrell
I was born in Britain and am British and lived there until I was 39. Not once did I use a bidet, nor think it relevant. Only people like my step-mother, a nasty piece of work, had a bidet. But in 1998 I came to Italy and never left and I soon found out that to the Italians life without a bidet is unthinkable. As a result, they treat the British with scorn, even if not to their face, most certainly behind their back. To the Italians, the British – there are no two ways about it – are unclean. They use the bidet so obsessively, I am convinced, as part of a vain attempt to cleanse their sins and to maintain la bella figura at all costs. They are obsessed with form at the expense of content – with appearance over reality. Yet there is something magnificent about the absence of bidets in Britain. For let us face it: we founded an empire, the most benign in history, with filthy asses – sans bidet.
Gus Carter
Old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist… oh wait, hang on. It’s now stabby roadmen on Lime scooters zipping through clouds of melon vape. Bits of old England do cling on, however. Like a freezing pub garden, endured with a pint of Tribute, a pack of fags and a gang of bitchy friends. Or getting the train to some miserable part of the Kent coast on a Sunday to look through antique shops and pay London prices for fish and chips. Or wood smoke and depressed pigeons cooing from sagging phone lines as the November sun gives up and descends beneath a cold chalk escarpment. Or how prickly the Scottish, Welsh and Cornish get in the presence of Englishmen. What I can’t stand is golf courses, earnest political YouTubers and mac ’n’ cheese. Fundamentally, though, I think it’s all over for us, only because that’s the one true English response to such questions. It’s been downhill since the Normans.
John Sturgis
Any list that reads: ‘The Oasis reunion. Nationalised healthcare. Sir David Attenborough…’ simply demands to conclude: ‘…your boys took one helluva beating’.
That immortal phrase was coined by a very excitable (and perhaps slightly inebriated) Bjørge Lillelien on the occasion of his home country Norway’s football team beating hapless England 2-1 in a World Cup Qualifier in 1981. ‘Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, Maggie Thatcher – can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher?” he thundered before his famous helluva pay-off line.
And we have long taken this piece of commentary to our hearts – because we are a nation of pisstakers and recognised this immediately as top drawer stuff. It took a Norwegian football commentator shouting ‘Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me…’ to tell us something important about ourselves: we are a little bit shit and as soon as we forget this we can come across as unforgivably pompous.
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