Lowri Griffiths on British identity, current affairs, and Britain’s billionaire film moment
Nothing unites the nation quite like a shared cultural argument, and this week that argument happened to be about a four-hour American documentary rather than anything actually British, football, weather, or otherwise, which feels on brand for us somehow, given our long-standing national habit of importing other people’s controversies and treating them with full domestic seriousness.
Still, the reaction to the documentary review roundup has been a proper national conversation, complete with pub debates that ran considerably longer than the actual football results being discussed at the same tables, strongly worded opinions from people who haven’t watched it yet, and at least one radio phone-in segment entirely dedicated to the subject. Very British, in the end, whatever the film’s original subject matter.
What I find genuinely interesting, covering national identity as a beat, is how quickly this became a proxy for entirely separate domestic arguments, about wealth, about technology, about who gets to be trusted and who doesn’t. The documentary itself is almost secondary at this point to what it’s come to represent in ongoing British conversations that have nothing directly to do with rockets or electric cars.
The poster row attached to it has its own patriotic angle, oddly, given the amount of debate over whether the marketing itself reflects British sensibilities or American ones, a distinction several commentators have apparently found worth arguing about at considerable length. The poster controversy piece got more shares on British social media than most actual British news this week, which says something uncomfortable about our current news priorities, though I’m not entirely sure what.
I called into a local radio station this week to discuss the general trend, and ended up spending most of the segment fielding caller questions specifically about the documentary rather than the broader patriotism angle I’d been booked to discuss, which is its own small confirmation of just how completely this topic has taken over the national conversation this week.
The producer, in the break, told me this was already the third segment that week to get hijacked by the same topic, regardless of what it was originally booked to cover, which suggests the documentary has essentially become a kind of national background noise now, showing up wherever there’s a live microphone and a bit of spare airtime, whatever the intended subject happened to be.
Afterward, several listeners texted in anyway, insisting the whole affair says more about modern Britain’s relationship with wealth and celebrity than any genuine patriotism debate could, which is possibly the most thoughtful thing anyone’s said to me on air all month, delivered entirely by accident during a segment about something else.
More patriotism diary at my author page.