There was an outstanding programme on TV tonight called 100% English. Shown on Channel 4 it took a group of people and gave them cutting edge DNA tests to reveal where they would have originally come from in the world – something that can’t really be ascertained by family trees even if you manage to trace your history back many generations.
Apparently this technology is very new, and can give a global picture of where your ancestors would have come together from, in percentages (i.e. 21% Middle-Asia, 45% Southern Europe, etc) and then gave a second breakdown of where in Europe the European side of the family would have originated from before coming to England.
This alone would have made for reasonably interesting TV, but what made this absolutely gripping was that of the ten or so members of the public that took the test, all were either blatantly racist, all nationalists, and many actually insane. All considered themselves, with some pride, “100% English�. For example, there was a rather scary middle aged and middle class woman who wanted the English to be seen as a separate race, and to be treated as such. She was talking about 1066 and the Battle Of Hastings, etc, and some nonsense about how – in a round about way – the English were a master race. If she sounded like a demented version of Hitler, what made it scarier was she was being interviewed whilst strolling around a quaint country garden looking as harmless as anything.
So all these people were interviewed, and only one of them was likable (an impressionable 18 year old entering the army who thought that some aspects of Englishness were being lost to immigration and although short-sighted and misinformed wasn’t in the same category as the rest), the others being truly loathsome, bewildering and – as I say – pretty scary.
Most of all though, they were frustrating. There was a stand-up comedian, and I use the term ‘comedian’ because it’s the term they used in the programme, called Danny Blue. He was filmed performing at a St Georges Day bash at a club in Essex. The people turning up for this were absolutely stereotypical. They all had shaved heads. All were basically BNP. Some fantastically awful girls turned up in a stretched Hummer limo with St George flags painted on the side, whilst inside the club Danny Blue was naked and performing The Balloon Dance on stage.
The film said he invented the balloon dance (in which three men stand on a stage naked holding balloons whilst doing a dance and using the balloons to cover their modesty in certain ways) but he didn’t – it was Malcolm Hardy who invented it with Chris Lynam and Martin Soan. Anyway, he was then interviewed in said white stretched limo outside and amongst other things said that Ian Wright (the ex-England footballer) couldn’t be English because he was black, and that to be English, in his mind, you’d have to have twelve generations of your family being born in England. Twelve! Nice and random.
So if you consider yourself English but eight generations ago in about 1790 or whenever one of your family came from France, you’re not English. Not in Danny Blue’s eyes. So bad luck there.
So all these people were interviewed, all held this rather farcical (at best) and utterly racist (at worst) view of England and the rest of the world, and then they were given their results.
The woman who wanted England to be seen as a separate race turned out to me, mainly, from Romany Gypsy stock. To read her face as this was revealed to her was wonderful. The film then revealed she had threatened legal action if this was shown, so well done Channel 4 there.
Danny Blue was a Russian.
I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. He was completely shocked and did then concede that Ian Wright was English after all. And you only needed “three, no four� generations of your family to come from England to be considered English, not twelve. Still wrong, but an improvement of sorts.
The young army lad, who I liked, completely changed his view and accepted that any nation is made up of immigrants.
The odd thing about nationalism, not patriotism, is that anyone should be that fussed about being English. Nice place at it’s best, pretty depressing place at it’s worst, I can’t see how anyone could be annoyed at having a bit of French blood in their ancestry, or any country for that matter. Surely the more variation the better? I always bang on about how I’m a bit Scottish whenever I’m north of the border. Why would an English person completely deny the possibly of having some Scottish blood? Why would anyone furiously deny they had some African blood, as a large percentage of white Europeans do?
I suppose people always look for things to cling onto, and what to feel as if they belong, but if you’re trying to cling onto an idea of ‘Englishness’, whatever that might entail, then you’ve got your head in the sand. What is Englishness now?
Whatever, this was great TV and was presented with a deft touch and tremendous skill by Andrew Graham-Dixon. He had the job of trying to make these racists feel comfortable enough to expand on their wrong theories whilst disagreeing with everything they said.
Ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where the residents of Springfield decide to kick out all the illegal immigrants before Lisa points out that America was made great by immigration and that they were all immigrants themselves? It’s genius. Tonight’s programme was equally rewarding.
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