'Reality-TV' Rules
So-called 'reality TV' provides yet more evidence, if any were needed, of English social inhibitions, and what a psychotherapist would probably call our 'privacy issues'. Reality-TV bears little resemblance to what any sane person would regard as 'reality', as it generally involves putting people in bizarre, highly improbable situations and getting them to compete with each other in the performance of utterly ludicrous tasks. The people, however, are 'real', in the sense that they are not trained actors but ordinary unsuccessful mortals, distinguished only by their desperate desire to appear on television. Reality-TV is by no means a uniquely English or British phenomenon. The most famous and popular of these programmes, Big Brother, originated in Holland, and many other countries now have their own version, making it an ideal example for cross-cultural comparison. The format is quite simple. Twelve participants are selected from the many thousands who apply, and put together in a specially constructed house, where they live for nine weeks, with hidden cameras filming their every move, twenty-four hours a day, the highlights of which are shown every night on television. Their lives are entirely controlled by the show's producers (collectively known as 'Big Brother'), who set them tasks and dish out rewards and punishments. Every week, the 'housemates' each have to nominate two of their fellow participants for eviction, the viewing public then votes for the one it wants to evict, and one housemate is chucked out. At the end, the winner - the last surviving competitor - wins a fairly substantial cash prize. All participants get their fifteen minutes of fame, and some go on to become D-list 'celebrities'.
Britain and America are the only countries in which none of the Big Brother housemates has been seen having sex (I think the reasons are slightly different: we are inhibited, while the Americans are prudish). In Holland, they apparently had to be told to stop having sex all the time, as viewers were starting to find the non-stop humping rather tedious. In Britain, the newspapers went into paroxysms of excitement if two housemates so much as kissed. When, in the third series, a pair of housemates finally took things a little bit further, they made sure that they were carefully concealed under a duvet, and it was impossible to tell what was going on. Even when our Big Brother producers, in a desperate attempt to spice up the show a bit, provided a special little lovers' den, allowing couples to cavort away from the prying eyes of their fellow housemates (although still filmed by the hidden cameras), none of the inhibited housemates could be tempted. They used the den for 'private' gossip sessions instead. In 2003, a tabloid newspaper offered a reward of ?50,000 (almost as much as the prize-money for winning Big Brother) to tempt the housemates to have sex, but still nothing happened.
In other countries, Big Brother housemates regularly have screaming rows, and even stand-up fights and brawls, with broken chairs and flying crockery. On the British Big Brother, even a raised voice or a mildly sarcastic comment is a major incident, discussed and speculated over for days, both within the house and among the show's many devoted fans. Our housemates' language is often foul, but this reflects their limited vocabulary, rather than powerful emotions. Their behaviour is quite remarkably restrained and polite. They rarely express anger at a fellow housemate directly, but rather, in true English fashion, bitch and complain constantly about the person behind their back.
Although the show is a competition, any sign of actual competitiveness is severely frowned upon by our Big Brother contestants. 'Cheating' is the worst sin - a violation of the all-important fair-play ethos - but even admitting to having a game-plan, 'playing to win', is taboo, as one competitor discovered to his cost, when his boastful remarks about his clever strategy resulted in him being ostracized by the rest of the group and swiftly evicted. Had he kept quiet about his motives, pretended to be 'in it for fun' like all the others, he would have had as good a chance as any. Hypocrisy rules.
Restraint, inhibition, reserve, shyness, embarrassment, indirectness, hypocrisy, gritted-teeth politeness - all very English, and, you might say, not particularly surprising. But think for a minute about who these Big Brother participants are. The people who apply and audition to take part in this programme actively want to be exposed to the public gaze, twenty-four hours a day, for nine weeks, with absolutely no privacy, not even on the loo or in the shower - not to mention being obliged to perform idiotic and embarrassing tasks. These are not normal, ordinary people: these are the biggest exhibitionists in the country, the most shameless, most brazen, most attention-seeking, least inhibited people you could hope to encounter, anywhere in England. And yet their behaviour in the Big Brother house is largely characterized by typically English reserve, inhibition, squeamishness and awkwardness. They only break the rules when they are very drunk - or rather, they get drunk to legitimize their deviance from the rules50 - and even then there are boundaries which are never crossed.
I see Big Brother as a useful experiment, testing the strength of the 'rules of Englishness'. If even the flagrant exhibitionists on Big Brother conform to these rules, they must be very deeply ingrained in the English psyche.
Reading Rules
The English love of words features, in some form, on a large proportion of the lists of our 'national characteristics' that I came across during the research for this book. And the fact that there are so many of these lists only reinforces the point: our response to insecurities about our national identity is to make lists about it - to throw words at the problem. Orwell may have started the list-making trend, but now everyone seems to be at it.
Jeremy Paxman, whose own Orwellian list of quintessential Englishnesses includes 'quizzes and crosswords', calls the English 'a people obsessed by words', and cites the phenomenal output of our publishing industry (100,000 new books a year), more newspapers per head than almost any other country, our 'unstoppable flow of Letters to the Editor', our 'insatiable appetite' for all forms of verbal games and puzzles, our thriving theatres and bookshops.
I would add that reading books ranks as even more popular than DIY and gardening in national surveys of leisure activity, and over 80 per cent of us regularly read a daily newspaper. Our passion for word games and verbal puzzles is well known, but it is also worth nothing that every one of the non-verbal hobbies and pastimes that occupy our leisure time - such as fishing, stamp-collecting, train-spotting, bird-watching, walking, sports, pets, flower-arranging, knitting and pigeon-fancying - has at least one, if not many more specialist magazines devoted to it. The more popular hobbies each have at least half a dozen dedicated weekly or monthly publications, as well as umpteen Internet sites, and we often spend much more time reading about our favourite pastime than we do practising it.
The Rules of Bogside Reading
We read compulsively, anytime, anywhere. In many English homes, you will find what I call 'bogside reading': piles of books and magazines placed next to the loo, or even neatly arranged in a special rack or bookcase for reading while sitting on the loo. I have occasionally come across the odd book or magazine in loos in other countries, but bogside reading does not seem to be a firmly established custom or tradition elsewhere in the way that it is in England. There are many English people - particularly males - who find it very hard to defecate at all unless they have something to read. If there is no proper bogside reading, they will read the instructions on the soap-dispenser or the list of ingredients on the spray-can of air-freshener.