Cringe is coming to the UK (and it really is the you-kay) courtesy of enterprising Americans, eager to hollow out British culture, wear it as a skin-suit, and sell tickets to the spectacle. Of course, let’s not be too hard on our transatlantic cousins — cringe was already here, and our culture has been on the block looking for a foreign buyer for some time now. Anyone who doubts the centrality of cringe to British culture (and its desperate hopes of selling some tat to tourists) need only observe the humiliating meltdown that we had in relation to a couple of raucous RAF engineers carrying off part of a fibre-glass statue of Paddington Bear.
Everyone from the judiciary to the brainless British press descended into mawkish cartoon moralism over the incident, with the magistrate sobbing that the brutish louts had offended against “everything Paddington stood for”. Paddington was duly and swiftly reinstalled to his seat of honour (a park bench in Newbury) whilst gurning policeman stood around with the sort of glowing civic pride usually reserved for royal visits or especially impressive drug busts.
Britain is the land of cringe. From Paddington to Harry Potter, fictional children’s characters are our preferred cultural ambassadors, shouldering aside our great historic composers, novelists, writers, philosophers, generals and scientists. When actual British history does get a look in, it’s inevitably in cutesified, childish media, from the banal synthetic irreverence of Horrible Histories, to the cameo of Isaac Newton as an Indian (for some reason) in Dr Who. National identity is plagiarised into a caricature, and local history and culture is simply ignored or marginalised. Christianity, as baffled parents trying to explain the goddess Eastore to their children after completing an English Heritage Easter Adventure Trail could tell you, doesn’t get a look in, of course.
So, it’s only a natural next step that Universal Studios are proposing a giant theme park in Bedfordshire, stuffed full of such wonders as “Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure”, not to mention a hotel, shopping centre and numerous and euphemistically described “restaurants”. The Prime Minister is delighted at the plans, which will be “firmly putting the county on the global stage.” What can one say? British power has never been softer.
But it’s not the only American import putting Britain on the map. Not content with our beloved homegrown cringe, we’re importing the stuff from New York. Yes, America’s least funny late night comedy vehicle, Saturday Night Live, is being spun off to Britain. It’s uncertain if British comedians will be up for making clumsy progressive sermons, insulting Donald Trump’s appearance, and commenting incessantly on US politics, but one imagines they will do their best. If you liked The Mash Report — and surely someone did — then I suspect you’ll love this.
As if this was not more than sufficient, the hottest national debate is currently over — you guessed it — a fictional character. Britain has long been in the market for a moral panic centred on a white Andrew Tate fan, and lacking any plausible candidates, we have sensibly invented one. Leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch was recently, and furiously, grilled on why she refused to watch the Netflix show Adolescence. Interviewer Nick Ferrari fumed that her failure to engage with the latest hard hitting TV drama was a “dereliction of duty”. But never fear, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been forcing his teenage children to watch it with him – and has plans to force teenagers across the country to watch it too.
Far too many tourists experience British culture through this claustrophobic lens
Britain is one Dr Who Christmas special away from reaching irreversible and catastrophic levels of cringe, forever entombed in a world of American sweet shops, Harry Potter experiences and unspeakable, bowdlerised costume dramas. The British upper lip trembles dangerously, and a metaphysical Harry Potter looms over the nation like Gogmagog, preparing to utter the Unforgivable Curse — “Cringimus Maximus!”
It didn’t need to be this way. There is nothing wrong, inherently, with iconic children’s stories like Paddington, Wallace and Gromit, or Harry Potter, or even the films they’ve generated. They were written by people with a deep love and appreciation for their country and its culture, and they are lovable, because they mediate and transmit that culture to young audiences. Where it goes wrong, as with so much of modern, Marvel and Disney branded “geek culture” is that it represents arrested cultural development. Fans fixate on and fetishise these fictional universes, without attending to their deeper literary and historical roots. In the Harry Potter films, Hogwarts is stitched together from the fabric of great British medieval and Victorian architecture, with colleges, cathedrals and castles woven together to form a magnificent cinematic Gormenghast. There is nothing wrong with falling in love with this vision, but it is a tragedy that so many will never come to appreciate the full wonder that is behind it.
Far too many tourists experience British culture through this claustrophobic lens, posing for photos at the same few spots, never bothering to explore more deeply. When I lived in Cambridge, I would see tourists all huddling around the Mathematical Bridge, the Corpus Clock, or the front of King’s College. All worth seeing, but you’d never spot them venturing beyond the narrow tracks of their pre-packaged experience, wandering the back streets, or popping into medieval churches.
Once we have a Disneyland Bedfordshire, tourists can be spared the trouble of actually visiting our historical sites and can be delivered the pure fan service they’re after without the trouble of an actual living culture to get in the way.
British culture and history is actually, whisper it, fun
It’s a pity, not only because they’ll be missing out, but because British culture and history is actually, whisper it, fun. Hope in this direction arrives from the country that we really have a special relationship with — our friends in France. A very different kind of theme park is being plotted in Bicester, courtesy of Le Puy du Fou.
For those who don’t know, Le Puy du Fou is a flamboyant historical French theme park located in the Loire valley. Based around a real medieval castle, it is stuffed full of the glories of French culture, carried off with style and an eye to entertaining children. A young shepherdess fights off English knights besieging the castle. A replica of a Roman amphitheater offers gladiatorial bouts and chariot racing. Birds of prey are released in their hundreds and perch on the heads of visitors. Musketeers fence and gypsy girls dance flamenco. Visitors can retire to hotels themed on Gallo-Roman villas and Merovingian stilt houses, or retire to royal tents modelled on The Field of the Cloth of Gold.
It’s possible to encourage tourism, entertain families and open the door to national culture and history all at once, without turning your country into a cartoon of itself. Could Arthurian legend, King Alfred’s cakes, Roman legionaries and jolly cavaliers be coming to Oxfordshire to enliven our amnesiac civilisation? We desperately need the help — before cringe claims us all.
