Word: englishness
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...these entertainments find satiric fun in the inequities and absurdities of the English class system. But it is not so much fun to those in the lower castes. At mid-century, critics of the system saw class as a dungeon from which few escaped into the empyrean of recognized achievement: Oxford and Cambridge, the law and politics, banking and the higher arts. Then, in 1962-63, came a few hints that Britain might be opening up. The country was enjoying a pop-arts renaissance, spurred mostly by children of the working and lower-middle classes, in music (the Beatles...
...Hewitt, executive producer of World in Action, didn't think so. On the commentary for 42, Apted recalls the genesis of the program: that Hewitt "wanted to examine the English class system, by which society or the class into which you were born really determined the opportunities you had in life." (Apted, 22 at the time, might have demurred - he was a lower-middle-class kid who got a scholarship to read history and the law at Cambridge - but he doesn't say if he did.) "We wanted to get a good cross-section of English society... the idea being...
...long-running television series with only seven episodes; a social document that, with its next installment in 2012, will have spanned a half-century; a research project with no pretense to scientific method but a compelling sense of stretching the particulars of these few people into generalizations about the English character; and a family reunion with people we've never met but know more about than we do about our extended families, or most of the people we work with. Here too is the show that, for better or worse, created a genre - reality TV - and raised it to sociological...
...happens that, in the past two months, my TIME.com work has been awash in Englishness: not just in the Up films but in the humor of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the royal satire of the new film The Queen. I also participated in a South Bank Show about Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit who, although they are made of plasticine (and one, a dog, says nary a word), speak eloquently to the English traits of gamely soldiering on through life's trials, many of them self-inflicted...
...that when he joins Parliament, "I wouldn't allow any strikes.") Prodded to analyze how he's changed in seven years, John sagely replies, "One grows so slowly that one never notices." And when asked if he thinks England will change, he says, "Not very much. England is too English, if you see what I mean." It's the answer the series wants to hear...