So we do not know what our neighbours get up to behind their closed doors (unless they are so noisy that we have already complained to the police and the local council about them). When a murder is committed in an average English street, the response from neighbours questioned by the police or journalists is always the same: 'Well, we didn't really know them...', 'They kept themselves to themselves...', 'They seemed pleasant enough...', 'We mind our own business, round here...', 'A bit odd, but one doesn't like to pry, you know...' Actually, we would dearly love to pry; we are a nation of insatiably curious curtain-twitchers, constantly frustrated by the draconian nature of our unwritten privacy rules. The clue to the popularity of kitchen-sink soap operas is in the observation that soap-opera characters are 'people who might easily be our next-door neighbours'. Watching soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street is like being allowed to peer through a spyhole into the hidden, forbidden, private lives of our neighbours, our social peers - people like us, but about whom we can normally only guess and speculate. The addictive appeal of these soaps lies in their vicarious satisfaction of this prurient curiosity: soaps are a form of voyeurism. And of course they confirm all of our worst suspicions about what goes on behind our neighbours' firmly closed doors and impenetrable net curtains: adultery, alcoholism, wife-beating, shoplifting, drug-dealing, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, murder... The soap-opera families are 'people like us', but they are making an even more spectacularly dysfunctional mess of their lives than we are.
So far, I have only mentioned the most popular English soaps - which are the unequivocally working-class ones: EastEnders and Coronation Street. But our television producers are a shrewd and kindly lot, and do their best to provide soaps catering to each layer of the English class system, and even to different demographic groups within these layers. EastEnders and Coronation Street represent, respectively, the southern and northern urban working classes. Emmerdale is one or two social notches up from these, with a number of significant lower-middle and middle-class characters, and also rural rather than urban. Hollyoaks is essentially a more youthful, teenage, suburban version of EastEnders, deviating somewhat from the warts-and-all norm in actually featuring some attractive-looking characters, although they are still dressed in realistically cheap high-street fashions. Even the middle- to upper-middles occasionally get their own soaps: for a while there was This Life, featuring a group of well-spoken but neurotic thirtysomething lawyers. They were fairly attractive and smartly dressed, but they did not, like American soap characters, wake up in the morning with their faces immaculately made-up and hair perfectly blow-dried; their (frequent) drunkenness was convincingly vomitous; their rows and squabbles involved a believable amount of swearing; and they had dirty dishes in the sink.
Sit-com Rules
Much the same warty-realism rules apply to English situation-comedy programmes. Almost all English sit-coms are about 'losers' - unsuccessful people, doing unglamorous jobs, having unsatisfactory relationships, living in, at best, dreary suburban houses. They are mostly working class or lower-middle class, but even the more well-off characters are never successful high-flyers. The heroes - or rather, anti-heroes, the characters we laugh at - are all failures.
This has caused a few problems in the export market: when popular English sit-coms such as Men Behaving Badly are 'translated' for the American market, the original English characters are often found to be too low-class, too unsuccessful, too unattractive, too crude - and generally just a bit too uncomfortably real. In the American versions, they are given job promotions, more regular features, better hair, smarter clothes, more glamorous girlfriends, more up-market houses and lifestyles. Their disgusting habits are toned down, and their language is sanitized along with their bathrooms and kitchens.48
This is not to say that there are no losers in American sit-coms: there are losers, but they tend to be a better class of loser; less irredeemably hopeless, squalid, grubby and unappealing than the English variety. One or two of the characters in Friends, for example, do not have glamorous careers, but nor do they ever have a hair out of place; they may get fired from their jobs, but perfect features and perfect tans must be some consolation. There is only one long-running, successful American sit-com, Roseanne, that comes close to the degree of realistic kitchen-sink seediness that is the norm in English television, and that is demanded by the empiricist, down-to-earth, cynical, prurient, curtain-twitching English audience, who want to see Pevsner's 'truth and its everyday paraphernalia' in their sit-coms as well as their soap-operas.
I am not trying to claim here that English comedies are necessarily better or more subtle or more sophisticated than American ones or anyone else's. If anything, the humour in most English sit-coms is rather less subtle and sophisticated than the Americans', and usually considerably more childish, crude and silly. In everyday life and conversation, I would maintain that the English do have a keener and more subtle sense of humour than most other nations, and this mastery of wit, irony and understatement is also evident in a few of our television comedy productions - but there are still a vast number in which farting and saying 'arse' a lot, or indeed virtually anything to do with bottoms, is regarded as the pinnacle of hilarious repartee.
We may legitimately pride ourselves on the sparkling wit of programmes such as Yes, Minister, and the English are undeniably brilliant at spoof and satire (we should be, it's what we do instead of getting angry and having revolutions), but let's not forget that we are also responsible for Benny Hill and the Carry On films, which differ from bog-standard sexual Euro-slapstick (and its American, Australian and Japanese equivalents) only in their excessive reliance on bad puns, double-entendres and innuendo - a measure of the English love of words, I suppose, but otherwise not much to our credit. Monty Python is in a different class from these, both socially and verbally, but it is still rather a childish, schoolboy form of humour.
The important question, it seems to me, is not whether our comedies are better or worse than other nations', or cleverer, or cruder, but whether they have some distinctive common theme or characteristic that might tell us something about Englishness. I've worked on this question long and hard, consulted quite a few comedy writers and other experts, dutifully watched dozens of television sit-coms, satires, spoofs and stand-ups - and thoroughly annoyed all my family and friends by insisting on calling this 'research'. But I did eventually arrive at an answer: as far as I can tell, almost all of the cruder type of English television comedy, as well as much of the more sophisticated, is essentially about that perennial English pre-occupation: embarrassment.
Embarrassment is a significant element in other nations' television comedy as well - and perhaps in all comedy - but the English seem to have a greater potential for embarrassment than other cultures, to experience it more often, and to be more constantly anxious and worried about it. We tend to make jokes about the things that frighten us (we humans, that is, not just we English), and the English have an unusually acute fear of embarrassment, so it is not terribly surprising that so much of our comedy should deal with this theme. To the socially challenged English, almost any social situation is potentially highly embarrassing, so we have a particularly rich source of comic material to play with. In the field of situation-comedy, we do not even have to invent odd or unlikely 'situations' to produce the necessary embarrassment: many of our sit-coms have no 'sit' to speak of, unless you count 'an average suburban family going about its uneventful life' (My Family, 2.4 Children, Butterflies, etc.) or 'ordinary boring days in the life of an ordinary boring office' (The Office), or even 'an average working-class family sitting around watching television' (The Royle Family), and yet they seem to generate quite enough amusingly embarrassing moments. I could be wrong, but I suspect that it would be very hard to 'pitch' these as great sit-com ideas in any other country.49