I remember the moment I first understood that we, the British, had a national character. It was in the mid-1970s and my family and I were watching a clip from an American TV show which was being shown to us by ITV for a giggle. It was a celebration of the love between mothers and daughters. A hyper-glamorous mother walked down a marble stairway on the left, her young daughter descended an identical stair to the right, and they met at a gently tinkling plastic fountain.
Over the soothing sound of the water they took it in turns to stare gooily into each other’s eyes and emote. The daughter lisped something along the lines of ‘You are my guiding light, Mommy’; the mother said something like: ‘You are the light of my life and I bless each day.’ This was repeated several times, to hoots of derisive laughter from the ITV British studio audience and from my own folks in the living room. I could only have been seven or eight but I was cracking up too. Somehow, I already just knew.
We have entirely lost our aversion to glutinous sentimentality. There is slush and syrup all around
‘Why are Americans like that?’ I asked. ‘We’re just different to them,’ my own ‘mom’ replied. But 50 years on, we have entirely lost this aversion to glutinous sentimentality. There is slush and syrup and cutesiness all around. We are bombarded by twee.
Let’s take a walk though the capital. There is a mural of St Paddington Bear on the South Bank. ‘Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in,’ it reads. In October, the BBC reported that Paddington Bear had ‘finally been issued with a British passport, 66 years after he was first said to have arrived in London’. It’s enough to make even the most reserved Brit want to run wild with an aerosol and spray ENOCH WAS RIGHT over Paddington’s faux-innocent face.
On the Tube? Sick bags should be supplied at the turnstiles. Transport for London seems to have adopted the characters from Charlie Mackesy’s eternally bestselling The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse as its in-house patron saints. It’s hard to find a station without that cloying little cartoon: ‘Be kind.’ What this means is not that TfL staff should remember to assist struggling elderly members of the public but that passengers on the Underground should remember to be nice to poor TfL staff who often suffer from anxiety. Remember, not every disability is visible.
Adverts are now uniformly twee on the Underground. Everything from orange juice to divorce is advertised with cheeky ‘You OK, hun?’ imagery and slogans. Even ‘assisted dying’ comes with a dancing ‘wine o’clock’ image and the message ‘My dying wish is my family won’t see me suffer’, which some may think comes within a hair’s breadth of being in bad taste considering the number of suicides on the network. And you are never far, on any form of public transport, from a particularly horrible parti-coloured pre-school children’s book style of illustration, which always includes someone with blue hair and someone with a hijab.
There is no escape from twee in the higher realms of politics and public life, either. We have Ed Miliband doing dad memes and singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to some turbines, and Suella Braverman attempting a spot of lip-syncing and cringe choreography on TikTok. Ed Davey has treated us all to ‘Love Is Enough’, the first ever single by a British political party leader: ‘When we’re brought into this world we only have each other…’ If the country was functioning this might be forgivable, but as a soundtrack to NHS meltdown and rising crime it takes on a simultaneous air of mirth and menace.
Where do British people turn for solace? Sometimes to the self-help guru Matt Haig, with his staggeringly inane nostrums – ‘Where talk exists, so does hope’, or ‘In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret,every moment of living’. Wouldn’t it be better just to cut your throat?
The established brands don’t have anything classier to offer. The Church of England’s social media feed is fairly indistinguishable from Haig or Mackesy, eschewing the adult complexity of scripture for bitesize morsels of twee – ‘Remember that there is something inside that is stronger than what is outside’, or ‘A hope for unity and peace needs to begin with self’.
Very serious matters are routinely addressed by our most senior politicians and intellectuals as if the general public is about eight years old. The Scottish government thought long and hard about how to calm racial tensions and came up with the cartoon ‘hate monster’, a little character you might expect to find on a crisp packet aimed at children. In this permanent cross between a playground and a care home, every TV presenter is in Going Live! mode, whatever topic is being discussed. Even the announcers between shows are cheeky and over-familiar, and no one is satisfied until at least one member of the public has broken down sobbing in front of near-strangers.
We are drowning in a sea of syrup. We’ve brought everything up, and now we can only dry heave. But how did we get here?
Twee was certainly around 50 years ago – there were those sick-making ‘Love Is …’ posters and the occasional queasy bestseller like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But it hadn’t entirely dominated our culture. It was confined as a taste to the minor league and sneered at by discerning sorts. British culture was calibrated so that there would always be a satirical edge to any sentiment, and this happened automatically, without anybody saying it or strategising it.
Something in the British psyche baulked whenever the sweetness level got too high. At Christmas 1980, the tiny gingham-ed girls of St Winifred’s School Choir reached number one with ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’, and this was considered a schmaltz too far. They were duly attacked with custard pies and buckets of water by the Phantom Flan Flinger of the anarchic kids’ TV show Tiswas, in what would now probably result in a parliamentary inquiry, victim impact statements and a massive fine from Ofcom.
It was understood then by just about everybody over the age of five that it was almost never necessary to be treacly, and that there was something – and I felt this in my young bones – wrong with people who felt the need to sweeten everything. Twee was a sign of something out of whack, uncanny, even suspicious. In a functioning society, social bonds are implicit. They don’t need to be stated and restated, certainly not to adults.
All this tweeness is intended to lift you, to smooth your path through life, but like a sugar binge, it actually makes you feel worse. There is the evident insincerity for starters. But the real whammy is the clash between the twee surface and the sour reality. The sickly feel-good stuff about happy-clappy multiculturalism, enriching refugees and our NHS sits very oddly with the truth of rampant anti-Semitism, horrifying wastage and persistent state failure. The day after ‘Love Is Enough’ hit the airwaves, a 95-year-old, Winifred Soanes, was left lying on a freezing pavement for five hours through the night because the NHS deemed her ‘not a priority’.
When everyone is shouting for attention, the simplest and tritest human response wins
My own theory is that twee has triumphed because we are overwhelmed with so much competing social media and have lost our ability to stop and think. We have moved further and further away from the written word towards shorter and shorter little visual bits. In a crowded market where everyone is shouting for attention, the simplest and tritest human responses wins. Huge, difficult, novel-length emotions are reduced to banal snippets. How can the epic scale and pity of the St Matthew Passion compete with a 20-second video of a lost puppy reunited with its owner? Our finer feelings don’t fit down the narrow funnel of the 21st-century content pipeline.
This has left us unable to face serious things with seriousness. Terrorist outrages are greeted by cartoon bees and naff pop songs about not being angry. Worse, the reverse has happened. We invest formerly delightful but slight pleasures – superhero movies, cartoons, pop music – with a significance and weight they cannot bear. I miss the character of the old, pre-twee Britain so very much. I resent how the small, simple pleasures that were a precious distraction from the trials of life have been spoiled by an avalanche of sinister mush.
Too much twee and people’s thinking changes. During the recent assisted dying debate, MPs and commentators scoffed at the very idea that people, for their own convenience, might coerce their sick relatives into an early grave. Because who on earth would do that? They’ve quite forgotten what humans are capable of. And this is the result of growing up in a twee culture, blinded by twinkles and glitter, a culture in which we assume that everyone (except the nasty racists) is nice at heart and just needs reminding every now and again to Be Kind.
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