Name: Cultural cringe.
Age: 72.
Appearance: Red of face, downcast of eye.
Is it a disease? A sort of syndrome perhaps, first named by the Australian writer AA Phillips in 1950, but diagnosed long before that.
What are the symptoms? Crippling feelings of inferiority and provincialism, when comparing the art, drama and literature of one’s own culture to some perceived superior other.
Do you have to be Australian to suffer from it? No, you can also be from Birmingham.
Birmingham? But it has more miles of canal than Venus! I think you mean Venice.
Exactly. And it’s got Peaky Blinders. Yes, and it was Steven Knight, the creator of that BBC show, who recently suggested Birmingham had a problem with cultural cringe.
In what context? Although he was proud to set the show in the city, he did so in direct opposition to a sort of general national embarrassment regarding locality.
What did he say? “I did think very consciously about what we don’t do in Birmingham,” he told the Radio Times, “and in fact, England as a whole.”
What don’t we do? What we don’t do, he said, “is mythologise our own environment and be bold about it.”
He’s got me there. I hardly ever do that. “You know,” he went on, “that sort of cultural cringe that often happens with the English not writing songs about Huddersfield or Bolton or Birmingham, whereas in America you get songs about virtually every big city.”
Is he saying we need to write more songs about English towns? Perhaps he’s just asking creative people to appreciate the mythological potential of different places.
By the Time I Get to Felixstowe, that sort of thing? I’m not sure that’s exactly what he meant.
Epsom Prison Blues? Blaby it’s Cold Outside? Do you have a lot of these?
Quite a few, yeah. Bacup Little Susie? Viva Lochwinnoch? That last one is in Scotland. Can we return to the idea of cultural cringe?
Fine. Frankly, I’m a bit concerned about where all this bold mythologising will lead. You mean that romanticising provincial England is not the same as feeling culturally invested in it?
No, I’m just worried tourists visiting Birmingham will be dismayed by the lack of peaked caps and organised crime. Or, maybe pleasantly surprised. Visitors numbers increased by 26% between 2013, when Peaky Blinders first aired, and 2018.
Do say: “Be proud of Brum’s glorious gangster past.”
Don’t say: “Even though the show is filmed in Dudley, Manchester and Liverpool.”
