Possibly our finest export product of all time, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr put British culture at the top of the tree when they took the world by storm in the 1960s with their Liverpudlian accents and mop-like hair. Lennon outraged Americans by proclaiming the band to be bigger than Jesus, a statement that, ironically, lead to huge record sales as everyone rushed out to buy Beatles albums to burn. God got his own back on the band, though, by having Lennon gunned down in New York, morphing Harrison into a hippie bore and making Starr best remembered as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine. Saving most of his ire for McCartney, God created the Frog Chorus and Heather Mills, knowing that Paul could not weather the embarrassment of both.
Where you see these words outside a hotel you know that you are guaranteed two things. These things are a bed and a breakfast. What they will be like is anyone’s guess, but by law you will be obliged to say ‘Lovely, thanks’ when asked by the proprietor how you found either. Many B&Bs have modernised in recent years, with most installing indoor toilet facilities and ceasing the morning ceremony of slopping out. Others are said to have done some light dusting. Breakfast food will have carefully been selected from a vast array of local suppliers, though this is mostly because the eggs are cheapest at Asda, the bacon at Lidl and the sausages at Iceland (see iceland). Tinned plum tomatoes are a compulsory part of the breakfast, even though no one has used them in this way at home since 1974.
These distinctively attired guards at the Tower of London (see tower of london) have the official name of Yeomen Warders, but they are much better known as Beefeaters by the tourists who photograph them. The Yeomen live in the Tower grounds with their families and some are responsible for the welfare of the Tower’s ravens which, legend tells us, protect the landmark. The name Beefeater is thought to have come from the fact that their duties afforded them a generous amount of meat from the king’s table back in the fifteenth century, when they would have first been guarding the Tower. This link with meat lead to the name and likeness of a Beefeater to be used by a chain of grill restaurants, which serve steaks and fried chicken but are forbidden from serving raven.
What government ministers call ‘a binge-drinking crisis’ many of us simply call ‘Friday night’. For generations the British have lived with licensing laws that were designed to make sure World War I munitions workers didn’t roll up drunk each morning, which meant that we all drank steadily until about 10.30 pm and then tried to cram in another three pints before closing time at 11 pm. This bred a nation of drinkers who saw drunkenness as a guilty pleasure and downing pint after pint as two fingers up to the ruling classes. With the introduction of longer licensing hours, stronger beer, alcopops (see alcopops) and the chance to be on TV shows like Pissed People Throwing Up 2, the problem of binge drinking has become more visible. Back in the day, six pints of mild would make you want a nice sit down and possibly a pickled egg. But modern industrial-strength chemical lagers and energy drinks mean that those coming out of the pubs are wide awake and have energy to burn, which leads to fights. The artificial colours used in curry house favourites and kebab shop chilli sauce just add to drunken hyperactivity. The patron saint of binge drinkers is Kerry Katona. Legend says that if you see her face in the bottom of your glass then you will make it safely home and not be sick on your shoes.
There is no British food, from kippers to haggis (see haggis), which cannot be improved immeasurably by the addition of gravy. The basis of good gravy is Bisto gravy browning, though some lazy types do prefer the instant gravy mixes offered by the same manufacturer. Bisto did swear by its slogan ‘Aah, Bisto’ for some years, which was supposed to signify the olfactory joy of catching the scent of its gravy. This was later abandoned, however, when it became clear that the slogan was what school children were saying to one another when they had produced a particularly pleasing and pungent fart.
No picnic, car journey or bed and breakfast stay is truly complete without the blanket. This sometimes itchy sign of our defiance of all things European is our woollen riposte to that foreign invader the continental quilt, the very name of which implies a deep distrust. What other piece of knitwear could serve as lunch table, be used to warm a grandmother’s knees and provide your bedding? We certainly didn’t build an empire toting around something stuffed with goose feathers, and which required a ‘tog rating’, whatever that is.
Signifying our ability to simply get on with things under the most trying of circumstances, this term comes from our stoicism during the bombing raids of World War II, especially those in 1940/41. As a nation on and under fire we pulled together, watched each other’s back and, most importantly, made sure that everyone had a cup of tea on the go at all times. Filmmaker Humphrey Jennings directed a short film at the time called London Can Take It, encouraging unity and a general ‘Is that the best you’ve got/you call those bombs?’ attitude from the populace (see stiff upper lip). The call for the Blitz Spirit is often made in times of crisis, such as the July 2005 London bombing campaign, though some believe that this community ideal cannot be properly attained without the mass ingestion of powdered egg.
Very much the official BBC view of how children should be seen, Blue Peter has been an institution of British broadcasting since 1958. The show has always represented an idealised middle-class view of childhood, with its repertoire of craft activities, good works, animal husbandry and nature study. This all went along jolly nicely until the ITV network started to show Magpie in 1968, a programme that, if some middle-class parents were to be believed (see class), was tantamount to Satanism. Magpie presenters just lolled around in a stupor, urging viewers to attack the Blue Peter garden, plant Sherbet Dib-Dabs on the BBC show’s presenters and make them senselessly rig competitions to decide the names of pets. But it was Blue Peter’s optimistic altruism that dealt the show’s ethics one of its greatest blows when in 1981 it broadcast a short film about cerebral-palsy sufferer Joey Deacon. Within days, Joey mania had spread across the country, with children imitating Deacon’s guttural attempts at speech and labelling anyone weak or different as a ‘Joey’. The slang term persists to this day.