We are never far from a distressing story about migration. Nor, slightly less importantly, are we ever far from some noisy controversy over the showing, or not showing, of some old sitcom, now felt to be inappropriate or even offensive. I only pair these stories here because they both take me back to an encounter I had with a Syrian refugee in a park in Belgrade five years ago; it’s a memory that always puts a smile on my face.
I was working for BBC radio covering that great tide of humanity moving from Syria, and elsewhere, to western Europe. On this warm September morning the park, which is next to the bus station, was packed with people. Most were on their way to Germany. Some were the kind of people you wouldn’t mess with; when you looked at them, they shot looks back telling you to look elsewhere. Fair enough.
Other family groups could have been passing the time in a park in Chorley, Chiswick or Chislehurst. Sandwiches and crisps were being shared; flasks were passed around; nits were combed out of children’s hair. Out of one of these groups a lad leapt up to talk to me. Another asked me which football team I supported.
“West Brom,” I told him. “You?”
“Chelsea,” he said, before adding: “West Brom are shit.”
This young man was called Youssef. His group, ranging in age from babes in arms to the extremely old, had come from Aleppo on boats and buses via Greece and Macedonia. Now they were waiting for a bus into Hungary to get them to Budapest for a train to Munich.
Youssef came on the radio with me and told us about himself. I put it to him that if all the decent young men, such as him and his friend, left Syria, there was no hope for the place. He shrugged and said: “If I stay I will have to kill people, or I will be killed myself.” I didn’t really have an answer to that. But it was the next thing he said that really floored me. They had gone back to their group while I got on with something else, before returning to tap me on the shoulder and ask: “Have you seen Mind Your Language?”
Of all the questions in all the world, I hadn’t seen this one coming. Mind Your Language, you may remember, was an ITV sitcom from the late 1970s. In it, Barry Evans played a teacher of English as a foreign language. His students, from Germany, Italy, France, Spain, India and so on represented just about every crass national stereotype you could imagine. It hasn’t aged well; it won’t be repeated any time soon. But Youssef and his mates had seen it on YouTube and loved it. “Oh blimey!” they kept laughing and shouting, mimicking the catchphrase of one of the Mind Your Language students.
A short while later, we heard from the BBC that the Hungarians had decided to close their border with Serbia. This was obviously something of a calamity for my Syrian friends, who had come an awful long way to be stopped now. Realising that something was up, a dozen of them gathered around as Youssef asked me what I knew. The anxious eyes of the elders stared at me while I broke the bad news to him. Then all heads all turned to Youssef for his translation. Knowing he was about to devastate them, he looked desperate. Then he smiled at me and said the most appropriate two words he could think of: “Oh blimey.”
I don’t know what any of this says about human migration or the political incorrectness of last-century comedy, but it will long remain for me the darkest example ever of black humour.
Youssef somehow made it to Germany, I later found out, and is now getting on well. He’s still a Chelsea fan and, I imagine, occasionally turns to old episodes of Mind Your Language to amuse himself.
