Not
Just the Title of the Show
Last
Saturday BBC1 broadcast the first episode of “I Love My Country,”
a Britain-themed quiz show hosted by Gabby Logan, with Frank Skinner
and Mickey Flanagan. Two teams, led by Skinner and Flanagan and
cheered on by a studio audience inexplicably wearing novelty wigs,
have to prove their patriotic credentials by answering stupid
questions loosely related to a drunk BBC commissioner’s idea of
Britain. The winning team is presented with the ‘I Love My Country’
souvenir plate. I’m not making this up.
Sophisticated
it ain't. At one point contestants have to guess the weight of the
Mayor of High Wycombe, in imperial measurements, naturally. (The
Mayor appears in person for this purpose.) Sexist jokes are met with
roars of laughter and applause. Flanagan wins a standing ovation from
the audience for identifying that P _ T_ _ B _ _ _ _ _ _ was spelling
out Peterborough. He then has to indicate its location by placing a
Yorkshire pudding on a giant map of Britain. Afterwards Skinner has
to find Lickey End (cor blimey.)
It's
kind of inventive though, in its way. The musical interludes from
Jamelia and the house band are particularly good. At one point they
play three classic British tunes and the contestants have to guess
the celebrity to which they refer. (For the record: The Who – My
Generation, The Artic Monkeys – I Bet That You Look Good on the
Dancefloor, and Motorhead – Ace of Spades. That was Bruce Forsyth.
No, me neither.)
Mostly
the show reads like another piece of Saturday night junk telly for
all the family – complete with a sing along to The Beatles’ ‘All
You Need is Love’ – and it largely conforms to the conventions of
the genre. Skinner and Flanagan have some fake-spontaneous banter
with the other guests, and Skinner makes several ‘jokes’ about
the surname of Casualty actress
Charlotte Salt. (They are, if anything, worse than you might be
imagining.)
The
BBC have quite self-consciously tried to present an inclusive notion
of what Britain is, decorating the studio with banal symbols like
Stonehenge (think This Is Spinal Tap), and celebrating Notting Hill
Carnival as a British tradition. The overall tone though is represented more aptly by
the opening credits, when a squealy electric guitar solo picks out
the melody of 'God Save The Queen' before seguing in to generic rock
while black cabs, sticks of rock, fish and chips, lions rampant and
London buses float over a red, white and blue background. It's Our
Britain, as the Sun would have it.
[http://politicalscrapbook.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/the-sun-our-britain.jpg]
When you think about the crappy symbolism of monarchical-nationalism
suddenly the I Love My Country commemorative plate makes a lot of
sense.
At
one point Flanagan stands up straight and gives a mock salute when
mentioning Kate Middleton, but that's the only, brief, hint of
subversion, to which the producer's cut doesn't draw attention.
Mostly though this is the BBC blowing with the wind, happily playing
its role as regime broadcaster, following on from their recent
reality show on scroungers, 'We All Pay Your Benefits', with Nick and
Margaret.
Logan
begins by announcing: “Welcome to ‘I Love My Country,’ not just
the title of the show but a statement of fact. Tonight we’ll be
putting our teams’ Britishness to the test.” She closes in a hail
of rapturous applause from the studio audience, thanking all the
participants as the theme music plays. “They all love their
country,” she says, by way of praise, “and so do I.”
