Book Review
English Lessons
By MATT WEILAND
An American journalist reports on her adventures navigating that exotic island nation: Britain.
THE ANGLO FILES
A Field Guide to the British
By Sarah Lyall
289 pp. W.W. Norton &
Company. $24.95
…Lyall organizes “The Anglo Files” around lean case studies of British institutions (Parliament, cricket, drink) and traits (love of liberty and animals, obsession with the weather). She recounts, for example, the 2003 battle on the Hebridean island of North Uist between hedgehog lovers and wading-bird enthusiasts over an invasion of hedgehogs, which eat the birds’ eggs. Lyall makes plain not just the passion of British animal lovers, but their organizational zeal: Scottish Natural Heritage, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, Uist Hedgehog Rescue and the Uist Wader Project fought for years before agreeing the alien hedgehogs should be airlifted back to the mainland rather than killed.
And Lyall’s report on the 1998 parliamentary debate over the Blair government’s proposal to rid the House of Lords of hereditary peers captures that body’s sketch-comedy lunacy: the “byzantine rules, archaic customs, superfluous pageantry and doddering legislators.” She makes fun of the aristocratic names (like the 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, otherwise known as Charles Henry John Benedict Crofton Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot)…
Throughout, Lyall expresses an amused bewilderment at British ways: the disinclination to fully rinse dishes, the willingness to picnic or play in even the ugliest weather, the “mixture of rudeness and politeness” in personal relations, the genius for eccentricity. “Many of the unkind clichés about British dental care,” she writes, are “dead accurate.” In fact, in her telling, many of the clichés — unkind and less so — about British everything are true: their teeth are crooked, their homes are drafty, their men “harbor erotic fantasies about former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.”…
Better are her accounts of ordinary Englishmen: Vincent Bethell, a libertarian from Coventry so set in his beliefs that he refuses to wear clothes; an anonymous Londoner so exercised by the injustice of having his car wheel booted by the police that he takes to dressing up as a superhero called Angle-Grinder Man, after the type of saw he uses, vigilante style, to free other cars he feels to be unjustly penalized…
Two peoples, separated by a common language. British culture remains a source of fascination and entertainment. Could the US have given us Monty Python?
Steve
I think one of the Pythons was American, but I forget which one.
The Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam, whose animations on Monty Python’s Flying Circus prefigured the fantastications of his widely-admired movies (Brazil, &c.), appeared in a few of the Pythons’ sketches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam
“He has the distinction of being the only American-born Python, as the rest of the group are all native Britons.”
“Gilliam was a part of Monty Python’s Flying Circus from its formation, at first credited as an animator (his name was listed separately after the other five in the closing credits), later as a full member. His cartoons linked the show’s sketches together, and defined the group’s visual language in other media (such as LP and book covers, and the title sequences of their films).
“Besides doing the animations, he also appeared in several sketches, though he rarely had any main roles and did considerably less acting in the sketches. Instead, he usually played parts that no one else wanted to play (generally because they required a lot of make-up or uncomfortable costumes, such as a recurring knight in armour who would end sketches by walking on and hitting one of the other characters over the head with a plucked chicken) and took a number of small roles in the films, including Patsy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the jailer in Life of Brian.
“Terry Gilliam started his career as an animator and strip cartoonist; one of his early photographic strips for Help! featured future Python cast-member John Cleese. Moving to England, he animated features for Do Not Adjust Your Set, which also featured future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.
“Gilliam’s surreal animations for Monty Python have a distinctive style. He mixed his own art, characterized by soft gradients and odd, bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era.”