Britpick Resource Post: Ranting
Ranting
It's been a while since I did a Britpick resource post, for which I apologise. Real life caught up with me, as it is wont to do. Anyway, for what it is worth, here is a Britpick resource post that explores the dark, hairy, pimply underbelly of British peevishness: the comedy rant.
I was going to make the subject of this discussion something like “British Comedy”, or “The Famous British Sense of Humour,” but, realising that this may set a somewhat unrealistic expectation that I might actually write something mildly amusing, I have plumped for a related title.
You see, dear reader and writer of fanfic, much British comedy is composed of well-crafted rants. This should be no surprise; moaning, carping, peeving, complaining, ranting and bitching are our favourite ways of expressing ourselves. The inner monologue of the average Brit, if you could hear it, would generally consist of a finely honed verbal assault on the latest perceived injustice heaped upon our innocent, stoic hero or heroine by the uncaring, indifferent outside world.
For this reason, if you are writing a scene from a British character’s point of view, peppering his or her thoughts with dark references to the vagaries of the weather, traffic, ruling classes, foreigners, potholes, football referees, the Northern Line, the price of beer, The Daily Mail, political correctness gone mad, the next-door neighbour’s cats, white van man, broken-down escalators on the tube, or imported asparagus, will lend your story an air of convincingly British peevishness.
A nebulous target that you can refer to as “them” lends your rant a certain authenticity. It doesn’t matter who “they” are, whether it is the government, European bureaucrats intent on ruining the British way of life, the local council, Network Rail, or some other unspecified group determined to wear down our heroes’ defences by persistent minor twattishness. Such specifics do not bother our heroes one jot.
If, at the same time, you can stuff their gloomy thoughts with bleak self-deprecation, and occasionally let them emerge through your character’s speech as well-crafted insults or sarcastic asides, so much the better.
In order to fully understand the underlying British psyche that gives rise to these dark ruminations, you would ideally need to suffer through a five-day camping trip of unremitting dreariness, in a windswept, treeless location along the North Sea coast such as Cromer or Skegness, accompanied only by the torrential rain, predatory seabirds, and the persistent sound of the restless, grey sea, scrunching on the stinking, litter-strewn seaweed, then booming as it cascades eagerly over the concrete sea-wall in some sort of oceanic attempt to overwhelm your puny tent with sludge-brown, silty, cold, dank sea-water.
In the evenings you trudge seven miles to the nearest pub, which is over-run by maurauding, pissed-up, bored, local teenagers, who see tourists as so much cannon-fodder. You order a pint of over-priced, tasteless lager and a plate of soggy chips, which inexplicably take the dimwitted barperson over an hour to prepare, possibly because they are too busy flirting with some other unappealing, pale-faced, pimply youth to pay you, the paying customer, their attention. You drown the chips in some vile, watered-down approximation of ketchup to disguise their utter flavourlessness, and drink another five pints of lager in a vain attempt to inure yourself to the prospect of the rain-soaked return trip to your tent. When you get back you find that someone’s pissed on the corner and your sleeping bag reeks of urine.
By the time you gratefully return to your too-small house with your carping children, bickering with your spouse all the way about the best route to avoid all the traffic on the M25, ending up in an immense traffic jam for four hours, with only half a bottle of chlorinated tap-water, a car full of blame and recriminations, and a broken polo mint between the five of you, you just can’t wait to return to work.
But that’s when the weather finally changes. And so, just as you board your faulty commuter train in your polyester Marks and Spencer suit, and spend 20 unscheduled stationary minutes on the platform at Clapham Junction, you can just about make out, if you crane your neck, through the sweat-stained underarm hairs of a scowling, silent fellow passenger, through the dried-up crusting of caked-on pollutants on the exterior of the train window, a sky of such miraculous, cerulean beauty that you could weep.
Stepping through the office door to be greeted by a cheery colleague who chirpily informs you that their holiday of a lifetime in the Maldives was so brilliant that they’re going again in two months' time, you don’t know whether to weep or to apply for a shotgun certificate. Rapidly reviewing the details of the bureaucratic procedure required to apply for shotgun ownership in the U.K., you decide instead upon the former option, and, sobbing, you bury your face into a cup of tea so that your glasses steam up.
Be grateful that this is not your lot in life.
Rather than put you through this torture, allow me to give you a few glimpses into the grim, sweaty, hairy underbelly of the pessimistic British soul.
In many ways, the classic British tirade has evolved as a coping mechanism, a crutch, if you will, to shore up our faltering spirits in the face of the moist, grey indifference of post-war rationing and perpetual drizzle. As with many other aspects of British culture, there are unwritten rules associated with the development of a pithy rant. These rules are there to be broken, of course, but knowingly. So, for example, the most important rule regarding a well-honed whinge is never to direct it at the person who has pissed you off. Instead, you must deliver it to someone for whom it has only tangential importance, whether they are the person who has the misfortune to sit next to you on the train, your facebook friends, a bar full of random acquaintances, or a consumer watchdog program.
Any newspaper, broadcaster editor worth his or her salt knows the value of free copy. And what could possibly be more valuable than free copy that speaks to the readership, viewership or listenership’s favourite obsession, the rant? For this reason, buried within moist folds of any newspaper, and the dog-eared back end of any broadcaster’s schedule, you will find the letters page, the feedback program, and the consumer watchdog program. These wonderful instruments provide your Brit with the ideal platform from which to air his or her views, at great length, to like-minded people everywhere.
The actual contents of your character’s rant are irrelevant, but an unwritten law states that, for the sake of authenticity, feedback to such forums must be preceeded by the words “Why, oh why, oh why?”, and for extra points should include certain keywords and phrases such as “persist” “if it was good enough for X, it’s good enough for Y”, “lowest common denominator”, “pandering”, “gone mad”, and be signed by words “Disgusted, of Tunbridge Wells”.
For example: “Dear BBC. Why, oh why, oh why must you persist in your policy of only airing programs containing male nudity after the watershed? By sexualising the naked male form, you are merely pandering to the lowest common denominator! If it was good enough for Michaelangelo’s David, it’s good enough for the BBC. It’s political correctness gone mad! Yours sincerely, Disgusted, of Tunbridge Wells.”
Of course, you don’t need to use any of these catchphrases to fulfil the spirit of Disgusted’s pithy tirade. This real-life example from the 1953 Tunbridge Wells Advertiser uses none of the above keywords, but nevertheless made me laugh out loud:
Youth offenders
SIR - As a southerner, I would normally have been among the first to fight against S Raymond’s allegation of “southern rudeness”, but now I have had an object lesson.
In a Midlands town last week, I passed three juvenile train-spotters on a railway footbridge… each smiled and said, “Good afternoon, sir.”
In Tunbridge Wells a few days earlier, I had to pass through a gate on which three lads of about the same age were sitting. They did not get off, but regaled me with the greeting, “Wotcher, shorty.” As I walked off, I was hit in the back by a stone.
Disillusioned
September 16 1953
“I don’t believe it,” as Victor Meldrew would have said.
[For more information see this fond article from that bastion of the British Establishment, The Daily Telegraph,
or read Nigel Cawthorne’s book, available from Amazon.]
The modern-day British comedien, in homage to these crusty, Kent-based grumblers, delights in the national stereotype. The pithy tirades of national treasures such as Jack Dee, Jo Brand, Will Self, and Susan Calman form the backbone of British TV and radio. As gloomy as Eeyore, and twice as petulant, these lugubrious heroes and heroines of our modern age lubricate the rusty, decrepit wheels of everyday British life with their sarcastic witticisms and bon mots.
Once in every generation there arises a grumbler of complete perfection, a peerless, frothy-mouthed, bitter agent of disparagement whose vituperations resonate beyond these mere islands and into the very heavens. Such a person is the great Charlie Brooker. His rants are enough to bring grown men and women to their knees, weeping and flailing, waiting for his words to drop like rancorous jewels upon their unworthy heads. As a small sample of his work, look no further than his glorious poem about The Sun (the scurrilous British tabloid newspaper, not the star that makes life on this planet possible. Not that the average Brit would know, from the limited amount of it you actually get to see. But I digress). Sheer genius.
So next time you’re creating a story about our heroes, why not consider allowing placing one of them in a mildly irritating situation, and allow him or her to indulge in a finely crafted rant on the subject? It may not advance the plot, but it will fill your British readership with such fellow-feeling, such a sense of a trouble shared that it will endear you to them forever.