sadmanbarty

Well-known member
songs, sit coms, politics, films, books, plays, essays...

a pan-cultural patchwork guide to the british revival


A rough outline as I understand it:


70's crystallisation of Britishness in the popular imagination

he'll post youtube clips of old sitcoms. maybe films. maybe songs. he'll extrapolate and detail what archetypal britishness is. wicker man

nu-britian

he'll document how this was shaken in the 80's and 90's. union busting. south wales valleys. sade. electro soul. blair's social liberalism and internationalism. jungle. garage.

90's latent british revivalism

The pre-Britpop context is interesting. Late-92 to late-93 was the key period (which also coincides with the darkcore era in the alternative Dissensus canon): there was the Morrisey Finsbury Park incident in August 92 and the BNP council by-election victory in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 which sparked an Anti-Nazi League revival. This all culminated in a big anti-racism concert in Brockwell Park in May 1994.

This is the same time that Blur were creating their British Image. The best contemporary review of Modern Life is Rubbish was in Lime Lizard and it was an extended essay, basically, on this phenomenon, which opened with the very serious and outraged and anxious question of Blur: “Why ‘Britishness’? Why now?” This was never properly answered, no one even really engaged with it, until suddenly Parklife was the greatest British album since the Beatles or the Jam depending on your perspective, and then it was too late to go back to it.

Everything happened so fast in those days, one thing reacting to the previous thing, that it’s difficult to go back and unpick what happened between then and Parklife but some significant (and negative) shift occurred and British culture ended.

Unless you were listening to jungle.

maastricht

midsummer murders

00's

rise of ukip

british comedy

2010's

mrs browns boys

migrant crisis

brexit
 
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luka

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Today, 11:49 AM #2894 Corpsey's Avatar Corpsey Corpsey is online now
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Here's the pitch:

Craner's Facist 50

An exploration of Facism through popular/unpopular music.

Inspired by a) your use of the phrase 'yacht-facism' to describe novelty bow-tie bri's solo music b) your long germinating fascism essay c) our desperate need for more cranerprose.
rap'n'bullshit
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
craner's next essay's going to be on the revival of britishness as an aesthetic and political force.

he'll explore the the framework of what britishness is as portrayed in 60's and 70's film and television. hancock's half hour and all that.

then it's demise in the 80's followed by this early-90's ground zero he's just honed in on and taking us right up to farage/mogg/ boris/ brexit.

it's going to be fucking amazing.

peek craner.


corpse stole mine
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Jeremy Hunt spearheads the re-legalisation of fox-hunting.

Fox-hunting subsequently and universally known as 'fox-cunting'.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
2010's

mrs browns boys

migrant crisis

brexit

Mumford/Sheeran as the Blur/Oasis of austerity Britain. Food banks the new norm. Entire permanent tribes of homeless on every high street.

A student bar in Oxford called 'Big Society' (no, really).

Bullingdon Club revelations. Burning fifty quid in front of a tramp. Squeal, piggy!

Empire nostalgia. The ubiquity of Victoriana in branding. Nothing is allowed to be British without being Great British.

Steampunk tweeness. The Wallace and Gromitification of the industrial revolution. Brunel's cigar photoshopped out so as not to give the kiddiwinks any ideas. Young teens used as smack couriers while Rory Stewart parties like it's 1899.

Peaky Blinders. Flat caps, neckerchiefs, plus-fours, waistcoats. Full beards and curly moustaches. Royal Navy tats on nice soft lads with Russell Group degrees. Thirty types of gin in Wetherspoons. Plans for post-Brexit economy based on cheese, biscuits, jam. The word 'provender' dusted off after centuries of disuse. Bath chaps on pub menus. CAMRA, the WI and Soil Association each acquire a paramilitary wing.

Injury: Windrush immigrants told to go "home".
Insult: Jamie's "jerk rice".
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
suez is probably the birth of this british identity. the death of our imperial idnentiy and the ground zero of our humble (and humbled) one.

our military might is transformed in the popular imagination so as to portray us as underdogs; the centrality of dunkirk in our national mythologising, zulu in 1964.

coronation street's 1960. 'britishness' is now about domestic, lower-middle class town life. it'd eventually also encapsulate a more upper-middle class, rural lifestyle (downton abbey, midsummer murders)

thatcher's veneration of finance industry titans, blair's preoccupation with foreign policy, jungle's futurism, garage's cosmopolitanism. all affronts to the small town, lower middle class british idyl .
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
'britishness' is now about domestic, lower-middle class town life. it'd eventually also encapsulate a more upper-middle class, rural lifestyle (downton abbey, midsummer murders)

Not forgetting the OG "everyday tale of country folk"...


(Downton is about full-bore aristos, isn't it? Never seen it myself, I think Mrs. Tea has watched it a few times "for the sets and costumes...")
 

craner

Beast of Burden
The Archers was one of the reasons my parents got divorced. Also, Fawlty Towers didn't help.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
craner a living embodiment of our nation's dichotomy.

bred from a socially liberal mother and a reactionary father.

a london junglist in the dispairing heart of the south wales valleys.
 

version

Well-known member
"The classic English gentleman abroad. It's David Niven, it's Stewart Granger, it's Nigel Havers... "

 
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