Hurrah for Blightly!

A Mexican wave from Tim Henman fans on centre court at Wimbledon

5 April 2012

Nothing like a good laugh to see you through gloomy February. And nothing like a baffled American with a supercharged sense of the ridiculous to detail the funny side of life in little old Britain.

Joe Queenan's six-week, stream-ofconsciousness romp across Blighty had me whooping aloud with hilarity, while (it has to be admitted) feeling more than slightly miffed at his presumption that Britain can be 'done' in less time than it takes to get an emergency plumber to mend your burst pipes.

Queenan is no stranger to Britain. His wife is English, and for 25 years he has jetted back and forth, taking tea with ancient rellies while watching The Two Ronnies and shivering in front of their one-bar Magicoal heaters.

There are things about Britain that delight him - Chelsea Pensioners, cows on the commons, Edward VII, Keith Richards - and things that appal him - Chelsea football supporters, cows on canvases, Edward VIII and Cliff Richard.

In Aberdeen, he stands, gobsmacked, in front of Sir Edwin Landseer's Flood In The Highlands, which he describes as 'quite possibly the worst painting in the world . . . inundated with doomed tykes, forlorn patriarchs, bereft maidens,

puzzled dogs and oblivious farm animals'.

Treading in the footsteps of Jane Eyre on the Yorkshire Moors, he thrashes about in mud, sinks into a bog and ruins his boots while a bunch of bikers

blast the desolate landscape with

their boom-box playing Johnny Mathis's Greatest Hits.

Glastonbury is 'The Town That The World Forgot But The Body Shop Didn't'. It is 'Mecca for outandout lunatics', thronging with weirdos with greying ponytails and lurid peasant dresses.

AND that's just the men. Queenan surveys the hippy trinket shops packed with incense burners, runic stones and crystals, and concludes: 'This is not my type of town. It's the kind of town where you are happy to see a battalion of soccer hooligans show up.'

In St Ives, Queenan observes that, with hundreds of wannabe artists parading about in berets and scarves, you can't tell whether they are painters or Che Guevara impersonators. Everybody in Cornwall wears fishermen's caps, except the fishermen.

As for British literature, Queenan has plenty to say on the subject, along the lines of: 'Great British literature breaks down into three broad groups - books that are very depressing, books in which nothing happens, and books that are incomprehensible.'

Lowest on the rung are the novels of Virginia Woolf, which are depressing, incomprehensible and in which nothing ever happens.

Shakespeare, he concedes, was a one-off, a visitor from another planet creating his own language: 'For hundreds of years, academics have been trying to prove that Shakespeare didn't write his own

plays because he didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge . . . it's all a class thing, it always is in Britain.'

Queenan prefers simple tourist activities to A-list attractions such as the Houses of Parliament, Tower of London and Tate Modern.

For him, the hair-prickling-ontheback-of-his-neck moment comes when he's munching a bacon butty among truck drivers at the Tea Hut on Blackheath.

The Tube has him scratching his head and describing it as 'a maze of ostensibly interconnected labyrinths enabling travellers to stagger three-quarters of a mile by foot so they can ride 300 yards up

Tottenham Court Road'.

From the outset, it is clear that Queenan's chief cultural point of reference is rock music.

He is at his most hilarious when ranting about pop icons. He cringes through Ben Elton's musical tribute to Queen, We Will Rock You, and comments: 'It is impossible to believe that something so

triumphantly cretinous could have been manufactured without some help from Andrew Lloyd Webber.'

Sir Paul McCartney comes in for a particularly side-splitting

drubbing: 'Saint and sinner, genius and cretin, hero and traitor, no figure in recent British history elicits such conflicting emotions...he is the one individual who embodies all the different strands of love and hate that typify the British people.' Mercilessly drubbed, too, is John Lennon, whose musical legacy is 'ludicrously overrated'.

Deciding to do a Beatles tour of Liverpool, Queenan is escorted by taxi driver Big Jim, who turns out to have been in a band called The Big Three and had John Lennon as

his best man. This section had me falling off my settee, even though I suspect that Queenan made up most of it.

And that's the problem. All this larkiness, wit and creative mock shock is just so American sit-com that you begin to wonder exactly how many of Queenan's

experiences are genuine.

Or, being the old hack pro he is, how many were planned in the knowledge that they would provide rib-tickling material.

But having said that, I loved this wildly funny book. I can cheerfully identify with Queenan's many dislikes, in particular faux

Dickensian pubs, historical re-enactment

societies, morris men, ye olde tea shoppes and, most of all, the classic British twit, who went to either Oxford or Cambridge and never stops going on about the fact.

It is all brilliant, hugely entertaining stuff. Shallow, yes, but as Queenan admits: 'I am a crass American. . . my concept of tourism involves getting in and out, quickly, taking in the sights and sounds with commando-like precision, and then having a damn fine curry.'