I have just had a week of Austrian, Slovak and Hungarian telly, which
all comes down to 1990s American television with funny voices. Dubbing is a
mercurial craft, one we know very little about. “You’re so lucky,” my guide
in Budapest said. “You don’t have to waste time learning languages.” It was
refreshingly honest. We’ve always had speaking in tongues sold to us as a
marvellous cultural adventure, but if you are born with only Hungarian in
your mouth, getting bilingual is a brain-aching necessity.
Hungarian is particularly awkward for dubbing. It seems to be twice as long as
English and sounds like someone speaking Old Norse backwards. Europeans tend
to voice-over English-language programmes in deeper voices than in the
original, so Friends sounds like a lot of Bond villains flirting with
Marlene Dietrich. Some people are much better off dubbed. The Sweeney is
preferable in a language you can’t understand, as is Dad’s Army. And Tom
Selleck has a natural voice too light for his face: he sounds far sexier as
a husky Bohemian.
Speaking of nation dubbing truth unto nation, I returned to Little Britain
USA. I should begin by admitting I’ve never been much of a Little Britain
fan. The characters are unengaging and uninteresting, the situations
tortuous, repetitive and predictable, and the performances am-dram and
awkward. It is an idea that went straight from the screen to the back of the
school bus without ever troubling the grown-ups, and it’s never been within
hailing distance of a laugh. But I know you all love it, and I’m willing to
accept that not loving it is my loss. Have a look at Little Britain USA,
though, and tell me it isn’t proof of the limited imaginations and abilities
of the writers and performers.
It’s essentially the same characters and setups, with added American accents -
and a large element of embarrassment. This is supposed to represent us and
our sensibilities, our humour and popular culture. Over there, the Brits are
known in no small part for our humour, usually prefaced with “zany” - “You
and your zany Monty Python/ Eddie Izzard/Borat.” And now we have to
apologise for David Walliams. Americans tend not to be as scatological or
willy-obsessed as we are. It’s not prudery or lack of irony, it’s just that
they don’t think poo and hard-ons are hilarious per se, in much the same way
we don’t think German slap-stick is funny. What’s most depressingly
cringeish about Little Britain USA is that it has made so little effort to
adapt to or understand a new audience. It’s been constructed with that
sneery Soho snobbery that says being Brit is enough, and Americans are
irony-resistant naïfs who will roll over and simper at any old European
sophistication. That’s what’s really embarrassing.
Little Britain, by the way, is actually a place in France. Great Britain is
called Great, not because it’s impressive or good at anything, but to
differentiate it from Brittany, Little Britain. That’s not funny, but it is
true and a little bit ironic.
Jamie Oliver continues on his missionary trail to stuff the glory and eternal
life of fresh herbs up the deep-fried class. I liked his restaurant series,
and his school dinners. I like him. He’s a decent and enthusiastic purveyor
of sweetness and custard. These previous programmes weren’t just
entertaining and admirable broadcasting, they were also worthy and
worthwhile, and I’m liberally patronising enough to think television should
do good whenever it can. But on this latest crusade, Jamie’s Ministry of
Food, I’m afraid he is leaving me behind. He’s begun to sound like St
Columba, bringing the good cookbook to the heathen Picts. There is more than
something a little eye-rollingly otherworldly about him. He walked into
Yorkshire as if he were courting martyrdom on some auto-da-fé barbecue, and
perhaps unconsciously the denizens of Rotherham were filmed as if Margaret
Mead were the cameraman and they were a newly discovered tribe of grubby
Baldricks.
The assumption of the show is a need for mass improvement, and it’s all a bit
too sentimental-Victorian and bountiful for my stomach - like the squire’s
wife going round the mining back-to-back with a basket of windfalls and some
nourishing soup. This is a misunderstanding, and nearly a misuse, of what
television does best. It is a show-and-tell medium, not a look-and-learn
one. That’s not just a semantic difference. Television is, at heart,
democratic. It leaves the decisions to the audience, and people must have
the freedom to go to hell in handbaskets of their own making.
I also have a bone to pick with this programme’s premise: that this generation
has broken the long mother-and-daughter chain of skill in kitchens. It’s not
true; it never really existed. It’s a nostalgic conceit. Working people
didn’t cook because many of them didn’t have anywhere to cook. They ate
either communally, at cheap cafes and inns or from vendors. The idea that
the industrial poor were all making their own ciabatta and muesli is plain
wrong. What has changed in Rotherham is the quality and value of the
prepared cheap food - the vanishing of a heritage of tripe stalls, pie men,
pork butchers, jellied-eel sellers, boiled-mutton mongers, milkmaids and
muffin men, the legion of itinerant hawkers who fed the working class for a
pittance. Far be it for me to teach Jamie to suck eggs, but perhaps he’d be
better off teaching a generation of new street cooks to compete with
McDonald’s, Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken, rather than cajole and
guilt-trip a lot of hard-pressed women to cook as well as work and bring up
toddlers. Because there are few things as repetitively thankless and
ultimately inhospitable as knocking up the same six dinners for two and an
infant, night after night.
James May’s Big Ideas is a title that raises questions like: “Is that really
your big idea of a big idea - flying cars?” May’s shtick is to begin
everything with his childhood: “When I was a kid” is where all his ideas,
big and not so big, begin. Which is fine as far as they go, but the ideas of
a nerdy eight-year-old don’t really go very far. Simply wanting to fly your
own little plane before your testicles descended isn’t actually quite enough
to grip an audience, some of whom might be women. The permanent adolescent
deal is wearying. Every time he stood in front of a loopy, earthbound bit of
obsessive’s Meccano and enthused, “That is a really, really, really good
idea,” like Just William with a double-ended catapult, we all replied: “No
it’s not, it’s stupid and it doesn’t work.” Which it didn’t.
May sulkily finished by saying that personal aeroplane cars would never take
off because there’d be too much health and safety paperwork. Those grown-up
spoil-sports stopping our fun. And we all said that making sure 16-year-old
boys don’t race around cities in homemade aeroplanes is precisely why we
have health and safety, and anyway none of it is ever going to work because
it uses ridiculous amounts of petrol, and the noise would be intolerable.
May needs to drop the perma-kidult deal and grow up. He’s too clever, and
potentially too funny. He needs to tuck his shirt in, get a haircut and swap
the mechanical for the anatomical.
I find your comments on 'street food' spot on. Of course I would, would n't I as it forms part of my business: Northfield Farm, based on my farm & at London's Borough Market. In a sense, I suppose, I have been doing what you suggest for nearly ten years now, as have a handful of other small producer
Jan McCourt, Oakham, England
I have always thought that Little Britain was a lazy slip shod attempt to cash in on the fantastically dark and funny League of Gentlemen.
stephanie, manchester, UK
So many truths you bring up about Jamie's programme. However, I felt for that poor girl, in debt from, presumably, the 8 burner cooker she couldn't use, that she hadn't the emotional energy to think 'cook'. Same problems as the past, different sets of circumstances. Result; still cheap, crap food.
Kay Buckley, Huddersfield, uk
My dad told me that the fresh-produce markets used to stay open late on Saturday night (1920's) and everyone went to have hot roast beef and also to buy up the food being sold off cheaply. I was brought up in the 50's. My mother worked full-time and both parents cooked the meal in the evening.
JeanneMarine, Melbourne, Australia
You're absolutely right about Little Britain. The USA series is a weak excuse for flogginga dead horse.
david, milan, italy
You forgot to say that James May also looks just like Keith Miller in Eastenders, which is funny, given he has (presumably) chosen to appear on TV looking like that.
Cally, Manama, Bahrain
To Americans, English humour is Benny Hill, a smash hit there in the 70s.
The British working class prepared and ate meat and 2 veg, stews, pies and puddings easily enough prepared in their kitchen/living room from cheap, basic ingredients on a scrubbed wood table and cooked on/in an open range.
John Bowman, Sarlat, France
'Potentially funny'. That's hilarious.
Robert, Tokyo,