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From other sports or sport in general 2 page


20422 The arts


> British films Here are some of the most successful and/or respected British films of the 1980s and 1990s: Chariots of Fire (1981) Gregory's Girl (1981) Gandhi(1982) A Letter to Brezhnev (1985) My Beautiful Launderette (1985) A Room with a View (1985) A Fish Called Wanda (1988) Shirley Valentine (1989) Henry V (1989) Howard's End (1992) The Crying Game (1992) Much Ado About Nothing (1993) Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) The Full Monty (1997) Netting Hill (1999)    

> Some well-known arts venues The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford is the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). All the other venues mentioned here are in London. Theatres include the Old Vie (the home of the National Theatre Company), the Mermaid, the Royal Court and the Barbican (where the RSC also performs). For opera and ballet, there is the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Coliseum, where the Sadler's Wells Company performs. The South Bank area has several concert halls (notably the Royal Festival Hall) and the National Theatre.

In contrast, the cinema in Britain is often regarded as not quite part of 'the arts' at all - it is simply entertainment. Partly for this reason, Britain is unique among the large European countries in giving almost no financial help to its film industry. Therefore, although cinema-going is a regular habit for a much larger number of people than is theatre-going, British film directors often have to go to Hollywood because the resources they need are not available in Britain. As a result, comparatively few films of quality are made in the country. This is not because expertise in film making does not exist. It does. American productions often use studios and technical facilities in Britain. Moreover, some of the films which Britain does manage to make become highly respected around the world (t> British films). But even these films often make a financial loss. Music Classical music in Britain is a minority interest. Few classical musi­cians, whether British or foreign, become well known to the general public. When they do, it is usually because of circumstances which have nothing to do with their music. For example, the Italian tenor Pavarotti became famous in the country when an aria sung by him was used by the BBC to introduce its 1990 football World Cup coverage. Despite this low profile, thousands of British people are dedicated musicians and many public libraries have a well-stocked music section. Several British orchestras, soloists, singers, choirs, opera companies and ballet companies, and also certain annual musical events, have international reputations. In the 1960s, British artists had a great influence on the develop­ment of music in the modern, or 'pop' idiom. The Beatles and other British groups were responsible for several innovations which were then adopted by popular musicians in the USA and the rest of the world. These included the writing of words and music by the per­formers themselves, and more active audience participation. The words of their songs also helped to liberate the pop idiom from its


 




Literature 205


former limitation to the topics of love and teenage affection. Other British artists in groups such as Pink Floyd and Cream played a major part in making the musical structure of pop music similarly more sophisticated. Since the 1960s, popular music in Britain has been an enormous and profitable industry. The Beatles were awarded the honour (see chapter 7) of MBE (Member of the British Empire) for their services to British exports. Within Britain the total sales of the various kinds of musical recording are more than 200 million every year - and the vast majority of them are of popular music. Many worldwide trends have come out of Britain and British 'pop' artists have been active in attempting to cross the boundaries between popular music, folk music and classical music. Literature Although the British are comparatively uninterested in formal educa­tion, and although they watch a lot of television, they are nonetheless enthusiastic readers. Many people in the literary world say that British literature lost its way at the end of the twentieth century The last British author to win the Nobel Prize for literature was William Golding, in 1983. Many others disagree with this opinion. But what is not in doubt is that a lot of the exciting new literature written in English and pub­lished in Britain in recent years has been written by people from outside Britain. The Booker Prize is the most important prize in Britain for a work of fiction. Starting with Salman Rushdie in 1981, nine of its next fourteen winners were writers from former British colonies such as Canada, India, Ireland and Nigeria. Although many of the best 'serious' British writers manage to be popular as well as profound, the vast majority of the books that are read in Britain could not be classified as 'serious' literature. Britain is the home of what might be called 'middlebrow' literature. (That is, mid-way between serious, or 'highbrow' literature and popular, or 'pulp' fiction.) For example, the distinctly British genre of detective fiction (the work of writers like Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell) is regarded as entertainment rather than literature — but it is entertain­ment for intelligent readers. There are many British authors, mostly female (for example, Norah Lofts and Rummer Godden), who write novels which are sometimes classified as 'romances' but which are actually deeper and more serious than that term often implies. They are neither popular 'blockbusters' nor the sort of books which are reviewed in the serious literary press. And yet they continue to be read, year after year after year, by hundreds of thousands of people. In 1993 more than half of the hundred most-borrowed books from Britain's public libraries were romantic novels. Many were of the middlebrow type. The rest were more simplistic stories about romance (she is young and pretty, he is tall, dark and handsome

> The arts and television There are now only a quarter of the number of cinema seats in Britain as there were in 1965. This decline is generally assumed to be the result of the popularity of television. In fact, television has taken an increasingly important supporting role in the arts. The making of some high-quality British films has only been possible because of the financial help of Channel 4. The BBC regu­larly commissions new works of music for the proms. Television drama and comedy help to keep hundreds of actors in work. Moreover, television can actually help to promote other art forms. When a book is dramatized on tele­vision, its sales often rocket. The most spectacular example of this occurred in the late 1960s. The Forsyte Sago, a series of novels by John Gals­worthy, had been out of print for several decades. When an adaptation . was shown on the BBC, half a million copies of the books were sold!

> Mountains of books! For the really scholarly reader, the British Library (a department of the British Museum) has more than 10 million volumes, occupying 320 kilometres of shelf space. At present, the library is obliged to house a copy of every book published in the country. This obligation, however, will probably disappear in the future. It is just too difficult to organize. By 1993, its collection was expanding at the rate of 150 centi­metres of books per hour. It possesses more than 6,000 different editions of Shakespeare's plays and more than 100 different editions of most novels by Charles Dickens. The result of all this is that it can take up to two days to find a particular book!

 


206 22 The arts


> A child could do that! British people often complain about modem abstract painting by saying, 'It doesn't look very special to me. A child of four could do that’. Well, in 1993 a child of four did do it. One of the paintings offered to the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts for its annual exhibition was a work called Rhythm of the Trees. The Acad­emy's experts liked it and included it in the exhibition. Only later did they discover that its creator, Carly Johnson, was four years old (the title was her grandfather's idea). The news of this discovery was greatly enjoyed by the whole of Britain. Everybody loves it when experts are made to look like fools, especially when they are experts about something that most people don't understand. It did not occur to many people to think that perhaps a child genius had been discovered. Somebody else must have liked Carly's painting too - it sold for £295.

with a very firm jaw; whatever happens during the story, they end up in each other's arms - forever). The British publisher which sells more books than any other is Mills & Boon, whose books are exclus­ively of this type. It is more than 200 years since poetry stopped being the normal mode of literary self-expression. And yet, poetry at the end of the twentieth century is surprisingly, and increasingly, popular in Britain. Books of poetry sell in comparatively large numbers. Their sales are not nearly as large as sales of novels, but they are large enough for a few small publishers to survive entirely on publishing poetry. Many poets are asked to do readings of their work on radio and at arts festivals. Many of these poets are not academics and their writing is accessible to non-specialists. Perhaps the 'pop' idiom and the easy availability of sound recording have made more people comfortable with spoken verse then they were fifty years ago. The fine arts Painting and sculpture are not as widely popular as music is in Britain. There is a general feeling that you have to be a specialist to appreciate them, especially if they are contemporary. Small private art galleries, where people might look at paintings with a view to buying them, are rare. Nevertheless, London is one of the main centres of the international collector's world. The two major auction houses of Sotheby's and Christie's are world-famous. Until the 1980s, the country's major museums and galleries charged nothing for admission. Most of them now do so, although sometimes payment is voluntary. This has caused a lot of complaint that a great tradition of free education has been lost.

 



Questions and suggestions 207


Museums and art galleries The major museums in London are the British Museum (the national collection of antiquities), the Vic­toria and Albert Museum, which houses the world's largest display of the decorative arts, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. There are numerous other small, specialist museums in London and throughout the rest of the country, usually with an emphasis on history and British 'heritage' There has been a move to make museums come alive with appro­priate sounds and even smells. Art galleries in London which house permanent collections include the National Gallery, the

adjoining National Portrait Gallery, and theTate Britain, which is the nation's gallery of British art from 1500 to the present day. These galleries also hold special temporary exhibitions. The Hayward Gallery and the Royal Academy put on a series of shows, some of which are extremely popular. The Royal Academy is famous for its annual Summer Exhibition. Outside London there is the Burrell Collection near Glasgow and the Tate Galleries in Liverpool and St Ives. Most major towns and cities have their own museums and art galleries.

 


 


QUESTIONS

1 How does the British government justify its policy of low spending on the arts? Does the government in your country subsidize the arts and encourage artistic endeavor in schools and elsewhere?

2 What evidence can you find in this chapter to support the view that the arts are of interest to a small minority of British people only? What evidence can you find to support the opposite view - that interest in the arts is widespread? How is it that there can be an element of truth in both of these opinions?


 

3 Which areas of the arts seem to be particularly appreciated and valued in Britain and which seem to be ignored or under-valued? In what ways does the appreciation of the different aspects of the arts vary in your country?

4 The British are very conscious of the distinction between high art or 'culture' and light 'enter­tainment'. In what area of the arts have they succeeded in establishing a widely acceptedandapproved compromise which appeals to a broad range of people from different social back­grounds and with varying levels of education?


 


SUGGESTIONS

• Most of the major museums publish guides to their collections, pointing out their most highly-prized exhibits, which are often illustrated in the guides.

• Any biography of any of the major British theatrical figures of this century, such as Sir Laurence Olivier (there is one published by Fontana, written by Donald Spoto) would reveal a lot about the history of the theatre in Britain and about British theatre in general.



Holidays and special occasions


 


Britain is a country governed by routine. It has fewer public holidays than any other country in Europe and fewer than North America. (Northern Ireland has two extra ones, however). Even New Year's Day was not an official public holiday in England and Wales until quite recently (but so many people gave themselves a holiday anyway that it was thought it might as well become official!). There are almost no semi-official holidays either. Most official holidays occur either just before or just after a weekend, so that the practice of making a 'bridge' is almost unknown. Moreover, there are no tradi­tional extra local holidays in particular places. Although the origin of the word 'holiday' is 'holy day', not all public holidays (usually known as 'bank holidays') are connected with religious celebrations.

The British also seem to do comparatively badly with regard to annual holidays. These are not as long as they are in many other countries. Although the average employee gets four weeks' paid holiday a year, in no town or city in the country would a visitor ever get the impression that the place had 'shut down' for the summer break. (In fact, about 40% of the population do not go away any­where for their holidays.)

Traditional seaside holidays

The British upper class started the fashion for seaside holidays in the late eighteenth century. The middle classes soon followed them and

when they were given the opportunity (around the beginning of the twentieth century), so did the working classes. It soon became normal for families to spend a week or two every year at one of the seaside resort towns which sprang up to cater for this new mass market. The most well-known of these are close to the larger towns and cities (> Holiday resorts in England).

These seaside towns quickly developed certain characteristics that are now regarded as typical of the 'traditional' English holiday resort. They have some hotels where richer people stay, but most families stay at boarding houses. These are small family businesses, offering either 'bed and breakfast' or, more rarely, 'full board' (meaning that all meals are provided). Some streets in seaside resorts are full of nothing but boarding houses. The food in these, and in local restaur­ants, is cheap and conventional with an emphasis on fish and chips.


209 > Rock There is one kind of sweet associated with holiday resorts. This is 'rock', a hard thick stick of sugar. Each resort has the letters of its name appearing throughout the stick, so that one hears of'Brighton Rock', 'Blackpool Rock' and so on.

Stereotypically, daytime entertainment in sunny weather centres around the beach, where the children make sandcastles, buy ice-creams and sometimes go for donkey rides. Older adults often do not bother to go swimming. They are happy just to sit in their deck chairs and occasionally go for a paddle with their skirts or trouser-legs hitched up. The water is always cold and, despite efforts to clean it up, sometimes very dirty. But for adults who swim, some resorts have wooden huts on or near the beach, known as 'beach cabins', 'beach huts' or 'bathing huts', in which people can change into their swimming costumes. Swimming and sunbathing without any cloth­ing is rare. All resorts have various other kinds of attraction, including more-or-less permanent funfairs. For the evenings, and when it is raining, there are amusement arcades, bingo halls, dance halls, discos, theatres, bowling alleys and so on, many of these situated on the pier. This unique British architec­tural structure is a platform extending out into the sea. The large resorts have decorations which light up at night. The 'Blackpool illuminations', for example, are famous. Another traditional holiday destination, which was very popular in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, is the holiday camp, where visitors stay in chalets in self-contained villages with all food and entertainment organized for them. Butlin's and Pontin's, the compan­ies which own most of these, are well-known names in Britain. The enforced good-humour, strict meal-times and events such as 'knobbly knees' competitions and beauty contests that were charac­teristic of these camps have now given way to a more relaxed atmosphere.


 




23 Holidays and special occasions


> Seaside postcards Humorous postcards like the one below can still be bought at seaside resorts. The joke always has an element of sexual innuendo in it. The traditional seaside holiday in the first half of the twentieth century represented a relaxing of Victorian restrictions on overt reference to sex. These days, of course, no such restrictions exist, so these postcards are mainly enjoyed in a spirit of nostalgia for the past.


Modern holidays Both of the traditional types of holiday have become less popular in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The increase in car owner­ship has encouraged many people to take caravan holidays. But the greatest cause of the decline of the traditional holiday is foreign tourism. Before the 1960s, only the rich took holidays abroad. By 1971, the British were taking 7 million foreign holidays and by 1987, 20 million. These days, millions of British people take their cars across the channel every year and nearly half of all the nights spent on holidays away from home are spent abroad. Most foreign holidays are package holidays, in which transport and accommodation are booked and paid for through a travel agent. These holidays are often booked a long time in advance. In the middle of winter the television companies run programmes which give information about the packages being offered. People need cheering up at this time of the year! In many British homes it has become traditional to get the holiday brochures out and start talking about where to go in the summer on Boxing Day (>Calendar of special occasions). Spain is by far the most popular package-holiday destination. Half of all the holidays taken within Britain are now for three days or less. Every bank-holiday weekend there are long traffic jams along the routes to the most popular holiday areas. The traditional seaside resorts have survived by adjusting themselves to this trend. (Only the rich have second houses or cottages in the countryside to which they can escape at weekends.) But there are also many other types of holiday. Hiking in the country and sleeping at youth hostels has long been popular (see chapter 5) and so, among an enthusiastic minority, has pot-holing (the exploration of underground caves). There are also a wide range of 'activity' holidays available, giving full expres­sion to British individualism. You can, for example, take part in a 'murder weekend', and find yourself living out the plot of detective story. An increasing number of people now go on 'working' holidays, during which they might help to repair an ancient stone wall or take part in an archaeological dig. This is an echo of another traditional type of'holiday' - fruit picking. It used to be the habit of poor people from the east end of London, for example, to go to Kent at the end of the summer to help with the hop harvest (hops are used for making beer).

 


Christmas and New Year 211

Christmas and New Year

Christmas is the one occasion in modern Britain when a large number of customs are enthusiastically observed by most ordinary people within the family. The slow decrease in participation in organized religion (see chapter 13), and the fact that Christmas in modern times is as much a secular feast as a religious one, has had little effect on these traditions. Even people who consider themselves to be anti-religious quite happily wish each other a 'Happy Christmas' or a

'Merry Christmas'. They do not (as in some other countries) self­consciously wish each other a 'Happy New Year' instead.

Indeed, the 'commercialization' of Christmas has itself become part of tradition. Every November in Oxford Street (one of the main shopping streets in the centre of London), a famous personality cere­moniously switches on the 'Christmas lights' (decorations) thus

'officially' marking the start of the period of frantic Christmas shop­ping. And it certainly is frantic. Between that time and the middle of January, most shops do nearly half of their total business for the year (most have 'sales' in early January when prices are reduced). Most people buy presents for the other members of their household and also for other relatives, especially children. Some people also buy presents for their close friends. And to a wider circle of friends and relatives, and sometimes also to working associates and neighbours, they send Christmas cards (i> Christmas cards). Some people even send such greetings to people whom they have not seen for many years, often using the excuse of this tradition to include a letter passing on the year's news.


  ^ Christmas cards Many people send cards at Christmas time depicting some aspect of the birth of Christ. Most people, however, do not. Christmas is an opportunity for the British to indulge their dreams about a van­ished rural past. You can see this on many typical Christmas cards. They often show scenes from either the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries and may be set in the countryside, very frequently covered with snow. (In fact, snow at Christmas is rare in most parts of Britain).

21223 Holidays and special occasions


> The Christmas party In thousands of companies through­out Britain, the last working afternoon before Christmas is the time of the annual office party, at which a lot of alcohol is often con­sumed. Sexual feelings, hidden throughout the year, come into the open. This is a problem for company bosses. By law, an employer is responsible for sexual harassment at work and may have to pay as much as £ 10,000 in compensation. The peak time for complaints of sexual harassment is in January - just after the annual office party. Many employers now insure themselves against claims for compensation at this time.

> Christmas dinner The traditional meal consists of stuffed roast turkey with roast pota­toes and some other vegetable (often Brussel sprouts). Other foods asso­ciated with Christmas are Christmas pudding, an extremely heavy sweet dish made of dried fruits (it is tradi­tional to pour brandy over it and then set it alight) and Christmas cake, an equally heavy fruit cake, with hard white icing on top.

People also buy Christmas trees (a tradition imported from Germany in the nineteenth century). Almost every household has a tree decorated in a different way (in many cases, with coloured lights). Most people also put up other decorations around the house. Exactly what these are varies a great deal, but certain symbols of Christmas, such as bits of the holly and mistletoe plants, are very common, and the Christmas cards which the household has received are usually displayed. A 'crib', which is a model depicting the birth of Christ, also sometimes forms part of the Christmas decorations. In December, as Christmas gets closer, carols (usually, but not always, with a religious theme) are sung in churches and schools, often at special concerts, and also, though less often than in the past, by groups of people who go from house to house collecting money for charitable causes. The role of Father Christmas (or Santa Claus) and the customs associated with the giving of gifts vary from family to family. Most households with children tell them that Father Christmas comes down the chimney on the night of Christmas Eve (even though most houses no longer have a working chimney!). Many children lay out a Christmas stocking at the foot of their beds, which they expect to see filled when they wake up on Christmas morning. Most families put wrapped presents around or on the Christmas tree and these are opened at some time on Christmas Day. Other activities on Christmas Day may include the eating of Christmas dinner (> Christmas dinner) and listening to the Queen's Christmas message. This ten-minute television broadcast is normally the only time in the year when the monarch speaks directly to 'her' people on television. (When, in 1993, a national newspaper pub­lished the text other speech a few days beforehand, it was a national scandal.) The general feeling is that Christmas is a time for families. Many of the gatherings in houses on Christmas Day and Boxing Day consist of extended families (more than just parents and children). For many families, Christmas is the only time that they are all together (so it is often a time of conflict rather than harmony, in fact). Parties on New Year's Eve, on the other hand, are usually for friends. Most people attend a gathering at this time and 'see in' the new year with a group of other people, often drinking a large amount of alcohol as they do so. In London, many go to the traditional celebration in Trafalgar Square (where there is an enormous Christmas tree which is an annual gift from the people of Norway). In Scotland, where the Calvinists disapproved of parties and celeb­rations connected with religious occasions (such as Christmas), New Year, called Hogmanay, is given particular importance - so much importance that, in Scotland only, 2 January (as well as New Year's Day) is also a public holiday (so that people have two days to recover from their New Year's Eve parties instead of just one!). Some British New Year customs, such as the singing of the song Auld Long Syne,

 


Other notable annual occasions 213



originated in Scotland. Another, less common, one is the custom of 'first footing', in which the first person to visit a house in the new year is supposed to arrive with tokens of certain important items for survival (such as a lump of coal for the fire). As a well-known Christmas carol reminds people, there are twelve days of Christmas. In fact, most people go back to work and school soon after New Year. Nobody pays much attention to the feast of the epiphany on 6 January (the twelfth day of Christmas), except that this is traditionally the day on which Christmas decorations are taken down. Some people say it is bad luck to keep them up after this date. Other notable annual occasions Easter is far less important than Christmas to most people in Britain. Although it involves a four-day 'weekend', there are very few customs and habits associated generally with it, other than the con­sumption of mountains of chocolate Easter eggs by children. Some people preserve the tradition of eating hot cross buns on Good Friday (> Calendar of special occasions). Quite a lot of people go away on holiday at this time. None of the other days of the year to which traditional customs are attached is a holiday, and not everybody takes part in these customs. In fact, many people in Britain live through occasions such as Shrove Tuesday, April Fools' Day or Hallowe'en (> Calendar of special occasions) without even knowing that they have happened. There is one other day which, although many people do not mark in any special way, is very difficult to ignore. This is 5 November, the day which celebrates a famous event in British history - the gunpowder plot. It is called Guy Fawkes' Day - or, more commonly, Bonfire Night. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a group of Catholics planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament while King James I was in there. Before they could achieve this, one of them, Guy Fawkes, was caught in the cellars under Parliament with the gunpowder. He and his fellow-conspirators were all killed.

Panto The Christmas and New Year holiday seasons bring with them a popular theatrical tradition. This is pantomine (often shortened to 'panto'), staged in hundreds of theatres and specifically designed to appeal to children. It usually involves the acting out of a well-known folk tale with plenty of opportunity for audience participation. There are certain established con­ventions of panto. For example, the cast includes a 'principal boy' (the young hero), who is always played by a woman, and a 'dame' (an older female character), who is always played by a man. The continuing popularity of panto is assisted by the fact that these leading roles are today frequently taken by well-known personalities from the worlds of television or sport.


21423 Holidays and special occasions


Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1859


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