Best of British – a blessing or a curse

So I’m sat here working, and Adele’s new song is on the radio, it’s currently number one in every country you can imagine, and for good reason - it, and the album it’s from, ‘21’ is great IMHO (see how ‘down with the kids’ I am there too? IMHO… Cool eh?).

There’s been a load of media coverage for Adele - ‘Best of British’, ‘flying the flag for Britain’ and all the other things our nation attaches to anything good, before dropping it when something bad happens – just like when Andy Murray does well, he changes, for the week of the match at least, from being Scottish, to being British, because it gives us all hope… for a bit.

So here’s the point I’m trying to make; do people outside of Britain care at all that something is British? Does it mean what it used to? Is it worth anything?

Years ago, in the 50’s and that, if something was American we’d have all wet our pants and bought it. Now we associate ‘American’ with overweight, interfering and fake.

Years ago, in the 90’s and that, if something was Chinese we’d think it was hammered out of a drinks can, but now we recognise that China is an incredibly powerful resource, and capable of producing some of the finest goods available.

Years ago, I think, people thought British stood for robustness, quality and an engineering prowess simply unmatched by the rest of the world… But do they any more? Are we still that good at anything? I mean, are we better than anybody else at anything any more?

Tweet us if you’ve read this and you think we are. We’ll add it to our Cool Wall. Hey maybe that’s it… It’s not Adele, not even music, it’s not engineering and it’s not manufacturing… it’s Top Gear – we ARE better, we’re better at arsing about with public money for the entertainment of the masses.

Problem solved, question answered… Thanks for your help.

Posted by Nick Hart