The Envy of the Rest of the World

On the whole England is a pretty nice place to live. In our neighbourhood we have an active Neighbourhood Watch scheme that gives us chance to get to know each other and get to know our local cops, which can be a handy thing. As a retired guy, I’ve got time on my hands and have become something of a mister fix-it in our street. Mainly I get asked to fix electronic stuff like computers that don’t want to do email anymore or tuning TV sets and VCR’s when the digital switchover happened. Well, it keeps me out of trouble.

One of the things we enjoy at home and in the car is the BBC’s Radio 4. The station has a lot in common with NPR in the States: news, discussion, documentaries and drama. It has comedy too, but, with a couple of exceptions, it’s not very funny. A particular joy for me is the frequent opportunity to shout at the radio when the news presenters ask stupid questions or the interviewees, mostly politicians, give stupid answers.

One oddity that British interviewees on Radio 4 share with Texans is claiming that everything here is bigger or better than anywhere else. I first began to tune in to this phenomenon back in the ‘90’s when two or three times a week, for reasons that I can’t remember now, some politician or other would state categorically that London’s Heathrow airport was the biggest or busiest in the world. It wasn’t, of course. Both Atlanta and Chicago O’Hare handled more passengers and Dallas-Fort Worth and Hong Kong’s new airport covered more geography. Somebody must have written in to Radio 4 to point out the oft repeated error because after a couple of years, interviewees started qualifying the claim with more and more complicated statistics, like Heathrow had more take-offs and landings than any other two-runway international airport. Finally the consensus settled on The Most International Flights. For all I know this could have been true at the time. I don’t think it’s true anymore, but I could be wrong again.

Whenever there is a political scandal or something goes seriously off course with the government, the standard answer is that “the British parliament is The Envy of the Rest of the World!” One time a junior government minister in the Transport Department was being interviewed on the morning news, the Today Program, about a story related to the growing problem of brake failures on big trucks and causing accidents on the motorways. The guy actually said that everyone knows that British lorries have the best brakes in the world.

I think there must be a secret training school for politicians, probably hidden away in the Welsh hills, where they all have to go for a two-week course in stock answers for interviews on Radio 4; something roughly similar, I imagine, to the old KGB secret language schools where Soviet spies learned to speak English with an American accent. The final exam is most likely a mock Radio 4 interview about break failures.