“Terrified Theresa May giving New Year’s messages” is my favourite sub-genre of terrified Theresa May public appearances. There’s something about the combination of the soft focus of the Cabinet Room mixed with her nervous, darting eyes that gives it a real Queen’s- speech-meets-hostage-video vibe. I’m sad that the Christmas tree and low lighting from last year has gone, though – it made it feel like a lost Wham! video of the B-side of Last Christmas, which is probably the highest praise you can give a political broadcast.
The thing that stood out about this year’s episode was her promise that there would be “renewed confidence and pride” in Britain in 2018. I’ll be honest: I don’t see that happening in reality, unless she’s talking about a gritty ITV police drama called “Confidence and Pride” (he’s DI John Confidence, she’s Supt Reeta Pride – he’s moody and ugly, she’s young and attractive, but they end up sleeping together because that’s TV) that gets renewed for a second series.
However, for the sake of argument, I’ve dredged up as many things as I could think that could provide some scant amount of pride this year.
DIY medicine
Sure, with 17,000 operations suddenly cancelled this winter, we don’t have a lot of pride for the people who run the NHS just at the moment – if anything we have national opposite-of-pride (or shame). But your heart will swell with pride at the plucky Brits with a have-a-go attitude, doing their own medical procedures armed with nothing but a cold compress and a worrying lack of knowledge about keeping medical implements sterilised.
I can see them all now: Ethel, 89, from Great Yarmouth, performing her own hip replacement using a wooden spoon; Jonty, 22, from Middlesbrough, fixing his dislocated shoulder with a washing line and a tractor; and Graham and Marsha, 45 and 48, from Cheltenham, trying to rid themselves of liver disease by singing the national anthem at each other’s belly buttons. It won’t work of course, but like the way you feel pride at England even when they lose on penalties, you’ll feel pride at Arthur from Milton Keynes even when he gets full-blown appendicitis from trying to cure it with a pint of Worcestershire sauce.
Angry quibbling
2017 was a classic year for the British rage-quibble. We had a Cadbury’s Easter egg quibble, we had a Big Ben bong quibble, we had a blue passport quibble and a “stop making fun of our blue passport quibble” quibble – and that was even without the annual poppy quibble, a great British tradition where everyone argues about how early and how big people on TV should wear their poppies (the answer: six months before Remembrance Day, and big enough to cover Craig Revel Horwood’s face at all times).
Of course, angry quibbling is not just fun, but it also serves an important purpose – distracting everyone in the country from very real problems that are so big that the government can’t begin to understand how to fix them (the threat of Brexit, the ghettoisation of poor people in unsafe council flats, Bake Off moving to Channel 4). That is why I predict 2018 is the year angry quibbling will kick up a gear. I anticipate arguments on Daily Politics over whether it’s pronounced “vase” or “vase”; Telegraph editorials on whether wasps are just angry bees; and an entire Question Time on which piece of cutlery you’d choose if you could only use one for the rest of your life (the answer: fork. Sharp enough to cut, concave enough to scoop. Do not talk to me about sporks, the devil’s cutlery).
The royal family
Look, we’ve still got a royal family. That has to count for something, right? I do feel oddly proud of Britain for keeping its royal family alive for so long, especially after most other countries in the world have given up on theirs. It’s a bit like Tamagotchis: everyone else binned their virtual pets ages ago but we’re still hanging on, checking up on ours every few minutes and carefully feeding the Queen £45m whenever she gets hungry.
Feeling intense pride in the royal family can seem hard, because their only two job requirements are continuing to live and not expressing controversial opinions. But then, at least most of them aren’t actively embarrassing the country, and that’s really the best we can hope for at this point. And even those who are have found new and exciting ways to do it.
Before I saw the brooch Princess Michael wore to meet Meghan Markle, I didn’t realise it was possible for jewellery to be that racist – truly, it’s breaking new ground in the field of “bigot chic”. I predict she’ll manage to don a transphobic fascinator at Ascot this year, and a maxi dress that somehow manages to offend the war dead.
Really, we have to take what pride we can get right now. Beggars can’t be choosers – or, for that matter, visible near a royal wedding.
Ploughing on
There are a few other things we can be proud of as a country – crumpets, Harry Kane, the long-running joke we as a nation play on Jools Holland to make him do Hootenanny every New Years’ Eve and then refuse to watch it – but really, the thing that we do best is to just muddle on through.
Over the past few years, it has felt like the world is about to end several times. I’ve searched for “one-bed nuclear bunker” on Zoopla more times than I should have. But Britain does keep on keeping on. Make no mistake, that’s not necessarily a good thing – a lot of this muddling through involves whitewashing the past, not facing up to the horrors of empire and repressing knowledge of the sins of our ancestors for the benefit of the status quo. But it does also bring hope for getting through what will inevitably be a horrible year, involving more public outrage, more anger, more despair, more senseless violence and, if the first five days has been anything to go by, at least 400% more Toby Young.
Every generation thinks the end of the world is nigh at some point. We will get through this: probably meaner, sadder and angrier than we were at the start, but still intact. So keep yourself healthy. Don’t panic. Bingewatch a few hours of Confidence and Pride. You deserve it.
• Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer
