How the World Sees England

luka

Well-known member
As an english ex-pat, when I think of England I think of: builder's tea, pies, breakfast, dark beer and K Cider, London, squats, Indian take-away, baked beans, racist nans, wet bricks, round-abouts, little cars that all look the same, trains, Fruit Pastilles, JD Sports, juice concentrate, back gardens with ponds in them, door knockers and post flaps, crisps in pubs (esp. walker's cheese and onion), pirate radio, documentaries on prime time television, the news being eternally about missing children, "lemonade", sparkling or still, walk left stand right, please put your hood down sir, and people enjoying rocky beaches on cloudy, cold days.

better than orwell
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
english people seem to have far less of a clue about how they are/the uk is viewed by the rest of the world compared to other countries. just far less of a clue about they might appear. prob as they dont have to or just rarely seem to feel embarassed or apologise about anything english (eg - cameron's statements about empire). was thinking this while watching rick stein's colonial-romantic cooking travelogue programme on india on bbc 2 at the weekend. just totally, blissfully, clueless, compounded by the fact im not sure he really likes or knows all that much about indian food, never mind the country, beyond his proud reciting of em forster. had a similar issue with the simon reeve programme on greece last night. confidence+stupidity=lethal combination.
 
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
did you watch it? cos you have to have seen his face eating certain dishes and looking a bit confused/unsure what to say. in fairness, hes got a lot of enthusiasm, but hes like the presenters of so many tv docus, where they dont actually seem to be experts, but act as kind of proxies for the similarly un-knowledegable audience.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
No, but I'm familiar with some of his oeuvre. He's a bit of a knob, but it sounds like you're being a bit harsh. I mean, it's not like anyone complained when Keith Floyd did this sort of thing.
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
did you even read what i wrote? i said they should know something about the subject. ie the food, its history, etc. its not expecting too much. food is meant to be their specialised subject. i accept every chef cant know about every cuisine but if they dont, get one who does. its not a difficult concept to grasp.

though thanks for making it clearer to me who the audience for these sorts of programs is.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Well, like I said, I didn't watch it. I did read what you wrote, but I can't help it, I don't expect to be receiving a history lesson when I watch these programmes. Nor did I sit there fuming at Keith Floyd for being a colonial English cunt when he came to Wales in 1989 and took the piss.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
did you even read what i wrote? i said they should know something about the subject. ie the food, its history, etc. its not expecting too much. food is meant to be their specialised subject. i accept every chef cant know about every cuisine but if they dont, get one who does. its not a difficult concept to grasp.
I see your point here, but it's more a feature of modern documentary making than British cultural colonialism, isn't it? You can't just have someone telling you about something they know a lot about, you have to have James May asking them blokey questions about it and then frowning in concentration when they answer.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I hate that sort of programme, but (previously, anyway) Stein hasn't made that kind of thing.
 
So what exactly do you have to do to prove that you "really like" Indian food, then?

My Rick Stein Eastern Odyssey cookbook and an exquisite curry I had at one of his places in Padstow, which I've no doubt he laboured over himself, suggest he does really like Indian food.

What makes this rubber dinghy bloke a pan-cultural panjandrum? Absolutely fuck all, I bet.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I just think that his post revealed more about how he views the English than, say, the rest of the world does. And it seemed a bit cruel dragging poor old Rick Stein into it, as if it's remotely comparable to Sue Perkins on the Mekong river or Stephen Fry in America or something. If the English have got anything to be embarrassed about it's Fry, but everyone loves him. At least Stein knows a lot about fish and can write good recipes for them.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I quite like Rick Stein, and his curry recipes look pretty decent to me, but it's hard to deny he does sound like a bit of a knob during some of this programme ('it goes without saying that not everyone from the East India Company was liked by the Bengalis'):

[enhanced here by making him sound like a hobbit]

it's not that he's particularly bad, it's more symptomatic of a format that does attempt to explain history at the same time as cookery, but does so in such a cursory way that it can only come off as staggeringly ill-conceived. Better if they just sidestepped history and politics altogether, if they're going to get a white English chef to present the programme.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Yes, I agree with all of that (even though I still haven't seen the programme in question, but seen enough Stein stuff to get the drift) but I would only say your measured assessment makes a fundamentally different point to the original one made by Rubber Dinghy. That's the shit group think of current BBC documentary making that reduces everything to pseudo-dramaturgy and glib sound-bites: it's the idea that history has to be sold to a uneducated audience either through established historians or art critics debasing themselves or unleashing some idiot former Footlights performer or unfunny Comedy Club twat on an interesting part of the world.

Now that technique and style has polluted the cookery programmes, too; bit that's not Stein's fault, and however much of a knob he is (and he's just a bit of a knob, he's pretty good otherwise) he is a good food writer and a decorated chef. There's nothing fundamentally stupid about his programmes, or unwarranted in their commissioning.
 
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