Glass of white wine for the ladies

"Al Murray's Happy Hour" on Saturday night reinforced my view that it is the funniest thing on TV at the moment.  He must have felt too, as he sang "Killer Queen" with Madness, that life doesn't get much sweeter than this.

It's fascinating watching him play with his pub landlord character, particularly from a class perspective.  I remember him as an outgoing but not particularly loud fellow-historian a year below me at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.  Apparently he went to private school and is a direct descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray and has a British diplomat grandfather.  His audience (which seems to be a mix of middle class students and working class - taxi driver, betting office clerk, postman, pub of the week employees)  must surely know that the xenophobic Essex working class persona is a total fake, and yet laugh along, are not insulted by this very middle class, even upper middle class, person's parody of a working class stereotype, partly I suppose in the way that Alf Garnett/Jonny Speight allowed taboo subjects and suppressed prejudices to be expressed and then by covertly laughing at them, de-fanging them.

It is very very British and most of all in that it allows us to laugh at ourselves.  It got me laughing at myself, last week, when queuing for the check in at Narita airport.  I was being very British, joining a long queue on the assumption that if there was a queue I was doomed to join it, only to find, when I got to the end, that it was the Economy Class queue and there was in fact an Upper Class non-queue I could have not joined.

As I was unnecessarily queuing, a man started to double queue next to me, almost edging in front of me.  I stiffened, gave sidelong glares (see Kate Fox, Watching the English, for more detail on this behaviour) and eventually said "Would you like to go in front of me?" (again, so British of me in my polite sarcasm).  He shrugged and said "no, no".  There was something about the "non" of the "no" that made me squint at his passport.  French.  The Pub Landlord bellowed in my ear "Rules is rules.  If we didn't have rules, where would we be? France!"

Other apercus from the Pub Landlord:
On the British when it's sunny: "Out come the shorts of hope, the pale legs of experience, the sandals of folly"
On being a single male Brit: "There's nothing sadder than taping Eurotrash.  There's no such thing as an ironic w**k."