5 Other Fabrics to Celebrate like the Flag

Some people say that they should bring back the death penalty because if there's another Jack the Ripper, he should be hung. And I really have to object to that on the grounds of being pedantic here, because the word should actually be Flag the Ripper. He's only Jack The Ripper if he's hung at sea.

A little joke to be appreciated by the flag fuckers there, a market I'd love to break into.

This week Conservative MP James Wild asked the BBC's Director General Tim Davie how many Union Flags were shown in the graphics inside the BBC's annual performance report. Then revealed, much to the shock of...maybe if we're being generous the organisers of last night at the proms but realistically no one, that it was in fact zero. There were zero pictures of the Union Flag in the BBC's performance report.

So while James Wild MP, or Wild James as I imagine he's called at parties, is bringing this to the attention of the masses, I thought I would implore him to raise the case of other omissions from the BBC Annual Review, so here are

5 Other Fabrics Overlooked by the BBC Review

1. Thomas the Tank Engine Duvet Covers

Did you know the BBC report does not contain a single image of a Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover (inc. related pillow set). Now this may surprise you to learn but back in the period of 1989-1999 when I was a child, we had Thomas the Tank Engine duvet covers almost every other week, with the rest of the time being taken up with Winnie The Pooh. Since 2008, so all my adult life, I have never once slept beneath a Thomas the Tank Engine Duvet cover. Now my choices are limited to white, yellow and with flowers. And it's not until someone points this out that you realise how few Thomas the Tank Engine duvet covers you've slept under recently. When the number of qualified Fat Controllers in this country starts to fall, I think we'll know what's to blame.

2. Y-Fronts

In recent years boxer shorts and hipster pants have become the cradle of choice for the British scrotum but at what cost? The support offered by the Y-Front has all but disappeared from British culture as a result of a direct cultural attack from America. Not one superhero in the MCU wears Y-Fronts, which was once a staple of the genre. And what's more in this day and age of Covid, it's always a decent idea to wear undergarments you can quickly whip off in an alley behind Sainsbury's and wear as a plausible face mask when you nip out having forgotten yours.

3. Hawaiian Shirts

Red, White and Blue? Well it's a start I guess, but Hawaiian shirts are the ultimate accessory no man should be without. Stand out from the crowd - not a crowd of your own friends, you may find you have quite few, but crowds in general. The term peacocking refers to a man trying to impress a lady, but these days it usually just means chinos and a haircut that you saw on The Only Way Is Essex. That's not how peacocks do it. Display your range of colours. Worried your child might get lost on a beach? Not if they're wearing a hawaiian shirt you won't be. Power cut? While everyone else is searching for candles you're lighting up the room with your own luminescent glow.

4. Hot Towels in planes and Indian restaurants

At the end of a delicious curry there's nothing quite so satisfying as sucking on a slice of orange and dabbing your head with a hot towel. I love a curry but I would honestly say it's one of the best bits. The food is over. The little hoover that looks like a blackboard rubber has been run across the table and sucked up any stray bits of rice. The table cloth is carefully picked up, folded and taken away to reveal a second table cloth that was underneath the whole time! Is this table cloth one that will only know the embrace of the hot towels and the bill or will it one day be sullied by Jalfrezi sauce too? Nobody knows. Maybe there is no table, maybe it's just an increasing arrangement of intricately folded table cloths supporting themselves. Then the hot towels come over. All individually wrapped in planet killing plastic. How are they wrapped up? They can't be single use. Which means that they must be sent back somewhere to be resoaked and wrapped again. Like poking a bruise, cricket or the female orgasm the process is a baffling mystery to us all, but the euphoria is unreal. Also they're on planes but the food is shit so they're less good.

5. The Safety Curtain

When it comes to disasters in the theatre - and I'm talking disasters in the literal sense here not Thriller the Michael Jackson musical - the insurance firm Direct Line has calculated that almost all risks of disasters: fires, intruders, terrorist acts, murders, floods and the like, occur in theatres approximately one minute into the interval and last approximately 30 seconds, and so having a defensive shield made of extra strong asbestos that can be lowered down, just for those crucial seconds has probably saved the lives of so many of our great actors. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Joe Pasqualie and Helen Mirren are all still here today because of the power of the safety curtain. Of course fringe venues can go fuck themselves. It's not even a legal requirement for those to have doors, seats or any kind of window or air conditioning below 80 decibels. But our West End stars are safe for that crucial 30 seconds every night.

And now back to flags:

The clip of James Wild MP talking to the BBC DG is well worth watching, it's basically a guy convinced he's cottoned onto the one insightful point that's going to bring down the Beeb making that point to a guy who doesn't even really know why it's a question. It's like arguing the government should be disbanded because the Chilcott report into the Iraq war doesn't feature any cat gifs.

And Wild James (PM?) says that his constituents would expect to see "more than one" union flag in an industry report, which is really surprising. I can honestly say that I don't know how many company's accounts, staffing contracts, health and safety audits or risk assessments have a Union Flag in them, but like Tony Davie predicting where the question was going...I could take a guess.

The Union Flag has become an increasingly common symbol across British politics in recent years. Boris Johnson announces lockdowns in front of two of them, and his new press briefing room has four (I think that makes him more patriotic than someone with 3 but fucked if he ever comes up against someone with a string of bunting). Sir Keir Starmer, has announced intentions to win back voters - after he was shockingly exposed by the Daily Mail as the kind of fucker who owns a sanctuary for sick donkeys - by "wrapping the party in the flag" and a leaked report said the Labour party would "make use of the flag, veterans and dressing smartly."  

Now all of this has blown up around the BBC over the last week since housing secretary Robert Jenrick appeared on the news with a perfectly natural Union Jack and Portrait of the Queen hanging above his sofa.

Which is perfectly normal isn't it? I mean unless the dude was Alf Garnett it's hardly a normal thing - side note: people often say "you couldn't make it up" but in this case if the flag and Queen portrait had been written into an old British sitcom it probably wouldn't get repeated today or appear on Britbox, but that's a whole other issue.

The point is some people - traitors, commies, scum and that - don't have union flags beside their sofa and a portrait of the Queen. This was commented on by BBC Breakfast presenter Charlie Stayt, who made fun of the flag a bit. So naturally his co-host Naga Munchetty received widespread abuse on Twitter. Now who knows why Naga Munchetty received more abuse that Charlie. I'm not saying there might be a link between people who get really upset over a joke about a flag and racists, but that's because they're exactly the same people most of the time.

Look, the Union Flag sends out a message. The background of that zoom call is as carefully curated as all these book-shelves of Stephen Hawking and Oxford Classics books that have been shipping in to MPs homes to replace 50 Shades, Mills and Boon erotica and Oswald Mosley's memoirs. And there's nothing wrong with curating your zoom background, but in a world of politics obsessed with authenticity anything that feels like it might be done for show is going to get rightly called out. And you can't deny the Union Flag and a picture of the Queen is a choice, and it's a powerful symbol of Britishness while actually being fairly weak on substance. It's like the free T-Shirt I got from Macmillan Cancer Support, it looks good, it wins me brownie points in the eyes of certain people I might want to impress, but in itself it's a pretty meaningless distraction from the fact that I didn't donate to Comic Relief this year.

This isn't about patriotism by the way. I'm all for waving a flag around at the last night of the proms while singing about all the countries whose resources we pillaged and people's we enslaved. Ok, the "reasonable paragraph" hasn't got off to the best of starts but, no, people should be proud of where they are from, and having a pride or love for your national symbol is not an inherently bad thing (it does lead to some people's unwillingness to discuss some of the uncomfortable failings of this country which is a problem, but patriotism itself isn't really an issue).

What I'm complaining about it more the faux-shows of patriotism to score political points while doing very little. And trust me, I should know, I'm a leftie. Oh we are the best at half arsed slogans. There's a sticker someone stuck on a lamp post near where I live that says "No-one is illegal." To which I added my own important caveat "except Bank Robbers" bank robbers are illegal. Now the original point of that sticker (one about immigration) is a fair and valid one but the slogan itself is fairly meaningless. And that's what's happening here, figures right across the board of politics have adopted the Union Flag as a means of saying "Look how much I care about Britain" and a certain type of nationalist and patriotic people have gone "yeah, anyone without a flag is a traitor!" But the politician isn't actually doing anything to show they care for Britain. They're not making the world a better place. They're not making meaningful change. It's like a restaurant being accused of having a dirty kitchen and you go back in the next week and they've changed the colours of the napkins to red, white and blue. It's a pretty empty gesture that does nothing to put things right.

Meanwhile because it's the ultimate symbol of Britishness if anyone questions it, or asks them what they're doing to make Britain better they can be shut down as being "unpatriotic" as if that's a crime or as if liking the flag is the only way to be patriotic, when a better way might be to knock the futile gestures on the head and improve the country for everyone.  

When Boris Johnson makes those lockdown speeches in front of flags the subtext is partly that he's speaking for the country but also that criticising the content of those briefings is an attack on your country and not "pulling together". When Keir Starmer focuses on flags and "dressing smartly" it's about presenting an image but if there's nothing there to back it up, the image is fairly pointless. It's dumb political symbols not smart political policy, and as an aside, "dressing smartly" is an odd choice. Most politicians dress reasonably smartly anyway, and anyone who saw Dominic Cummings give evidence to a select committee in a smart shirt, or do his big garden press conference knows why he doesn't dress like that more often. He looks really weird.

It's also part of a wider thing right now. The last year has really seen us reckon with our past. Statues have been torn down, statues which themselves are symbols of British history. Heritage sites have put more honest and open accounts of some of the unpleasant things that happened in the country's past on little plaques and then been told by the government that it's an infringement on their free speech to be allowed to express whatever they know to be true. One of the smartest scientists the planet will ever produce (for he's not been born yet) Lt Commander Data in Star Trek: First Contact said "believing oneself to be perfect is often the product of a delusional mind," and questioning our past and our symbols is an important part of that. Fly the flag by all means, just don't let it become the thing that matters. Don't become America. David Mitchell once said on Mock The Week that the difference between Americans and the English is that Americans give a massive shit about their flag being burnt, while British people would react "You paid for it, so it's your flag, you're burning your own flag!" So lets stop focussing on the symbols and go away and google all the bad stuff that James Wild doesn't want us to notice the government is up to.

That said, I do think siding with these flag people is the best way to get The Goodies repeated on the BBC...so Rule Britannia