Seven Sins of England? Is that All?

Way back when I was a pretentious teen in the late eighties there was a show on bbc2 called “three minute culture”.

It’s thesis was that our attention spans had shrunk to 3 minutes as that was how often we changed the channel on the TV. And that was back when the majority of people only had 4 channels, imagine how short they are now?

‘Scuse me, I’ve got to go play second life for a while.

Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah, I was saying that I never really took the thesis of that programme all that seriously. Everyone watches TV, but if medical students only had a 3 minute attention span it’s hard to see how they could remember those 15 million words of text they’re supposed to learn (according to a movie I once saw).

The makers of this programme including the smug Canadian presenter Michael Ignatieff might have looked at the research more positively and seen channel-hopping as a sign of intellectual curiousity rather than laziness. It could be argued that globalisation has made our lives into one big channel-surf where we don’t know where we’ll end up next. Who’d have thought Gay Byrne would end up as road safety commissioner? There’s a Black Swan for you.

Hang on, I’ve got to check my hotornot score.

7.9. Not Bad.

Anyway, as I was saying, channel hopping may not be a bad thing. I was doing it last night, and came across some fascinating juxtapositions. I started watching a show called The 7 sins of England which posited a theory that the drunkenness and rascism that blights England right now is nothing new. This wasn’t any news to an Irishman like myself, we were being bludgeoned to death by English thugs centuries before they went on cheap flights to Bratislava. Even though the show which juxtaposed (I like that word) quotes from the past about working-class English loutishness with erm, scenes of contemporary English loutishness was well done enough, it seemed to miss a fundamental point, which is that the violence of the English working-class was utilised for hundreds of years to build a massive empire, only to be turned in upon the country itself over the last 60 years.

It might come as news to those colonel blimp types who’ve been complaining that those hostages in Iran were soft that the English working classes are still ‘ard. They’re well fuckin’ ‘ard. And some of them aren’t shy about showing it. One yob said the difference between English people and the rest of humanity is that they speak their minds more freely. Qué?

While the ads were on (one of those 7 sins is consumerism, ironically enough) I turned over, first to RTE1 where Paul Durkan was talking about his own drink problem, which oddly enough led to him writing poetry rather than smashin’ peoples fuckin’ ‘eads in. Then I surfed over to BBC2 where another legacy of Britain’s imperial past was being discussed.

It’s always amazed me that the Brits seem to think the problems in Northern Ireland are the fault of “The Irish” as if they had nothing to do with it. One home secretary described the principality as a bloody awful country, and he was right, but it was a bloody awful country they created by forcing so many Scottish mountain thugs to live there. They served their British masters well by building the ships they needed to conquer the world, but as soon as the empire was under threat they were ready to give the 6 counties back in return for an abandonment of our neutrality. We’ve since sold that to George Bush, but that’s by the by.

It didn’t stop the unionists from tattooing union jacks to their heads or shouting abuse at the pope (Nice man? Are u serious, TB?) for most of the time since, even after a Guardian poll showed most people in Britain didn’t want the north in their country any more.

Right now, though, it seems the unionists have finally realised which way the wind is blowing and that the anachronism known as the UK is finally going the way of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. It’s really unrealistic to imagine a rump state of northern Ireland clinging on to the UK with a tiny loyalist minority while Scotalnd tries to break it’s umbilicus with England.

Nevertheless, it’s going to be causing England a few problems for a while, looking for half a billion quid to get it back on it’s feet, much to the consternation of Paxman.

Me, I just shrug my shoulders and wonder why they got involved in Ulster in the first place, as with Iraq today.

Tennyson once said that he wished Ireland could move into the Atlantic. Well, Al, much as I like the Lotus Eaters I think we’re a bit unfortunate to live next to the most rapacious thugs on Earth as well. That their anger is now turned in upon themselves is a matter of huge relief to me.