Classic
Everyone thinks it's strange, but I've never been abroad in the winter. This November - as I may perhaps have mentioned before (!!) and I may perhaps mention a few dozen times more before I go - I'm going to Florida for two weeks.
It feels really naughty. It feels like cheating. Escaping from the season you were born into, Daphne! That isn't for the likes of you. Whatever next!
I was born into a grey, gloomy postwar Britain. Ridiculous though it sounds, that's where I still am, in my head.
In 1964 a series of documentaries began on British television with the title "Seven Up" - based on what the Jesuits said: Give me a child until he is seven years old and he is mine for life.
The clothes, the look of it are so very familiar to me from my childhood and yet - oh! it seems so very long ago.
It's always fascinated me, because the children in the documentary are the same age as I am: they were all born in 1956 (yes, I am that old). Here's a lad who was in a children's home, who doesn't like greens, and I don't blame him, because I bet the greens were cabbage which had been boiled for about a fortnight, because that's the kind of thing we ate in 1964.
I do hope that he managed to avoid matrimony with the tyrannical greens-feeding wife he so fears.
The film-makers went back to film the children every seven years. The next video shows the beginning of the documentary when they were all forty-nine: it starts with showing them when they were seven.
Accents in Britain have changed a bit since those days. What would have been called Standard English, or Received Pronunciation, or just plain Posh, is different now.
In this clip you'll see a little Posh Boy who says "My heart's desire is to see my Daddy". But he pronounces it "Deddy". That pronunciation, common in old British films such as the splendid Brief Encounter, has now almost completely gone.
I sound Posh to many people these days because I have a girls'-grammar-school-in-the-Seventies accent. But my accent's got nothing on some of this lot, believe me.
I always rather liked the Posh Boy whose heart's desire was to see his Deddy; but there were three public-school boys in the film who seemed to me to embody the class-ridden Britain of the times, and I loathed them, particularly John.
Of course it's not John's fault that I want to slap him - he's a product of his class and his times, as we all are.
I'm going to end this piece with a slightly longer video about John. Just when you - oh, all right, I - want to hit him repeatedly for his accent and his attitudes and his privilege and his expectations - - yes, he reminds me of why, all those years ago, the Communist thought that Communism might be a good thing - - he then starts talking about all the charity work he does in Bulgaria. And redeems himself somewhat. Though part of me hates that "rich-bastard graciously helps out the poor-folks" too. Damn! This is why I can never join any political party - nothing's ever clear-cut to me.
But one thing this programme shows is that if anyone thinks that Britain has changed, that the class system doesn't exist now - - well, they're wrong. All the children in this documentary are now fifty-two. They're the ones who are running the country.
Here's John. Are you more tolerant than I am? Or do you, too, want to hit him by the time he says "Trinity Hall"?
It feels really naughty. It feels like cheating. Escaping from the season you were born into, Daphne! That isn't for the likes of you. Whatever next!
I was born into a grey, gloomy postwar Britain. Ridiculous though it sounds, that's where I still am, in my head.
In 1964 a series of documentaries began on British television with the title "Seven Up" - based on what the Jesuits said: Give me a child until he is seven years old and he is mine for life.
The clothes, the look of it are so very familiar to me from my childhood and yet - oh! it seems so very long ago.
It's always fascinated me, because the children in the documentary are the same age as I am: they were all born in 1956 (yes, I am that old). Here's a lad who was in a children's home, who doesn't like greens, and I don't blame him, because I bet the greens were cabbage which had been boiled for about a fortnight, because that's the kind of thing we ate in 1964.
I do hope that he managed to avoid matrimony with the tyrannical greens-feeding wife he so fears.
The film-makers went back to film the children every seven years. The next video shows the beginning of the documentary when they were all forty-nine: it starts with showing them when they were seven.
Accents in Britain have changed a bit since those days. What would have been called Standard English, or Received Pronunciation, or just plain Posh, is different now.
In this clip you'll see a little Posh Boy who says "My heart's desire is to see my Daddy". But he pronounces it "Deddy". That pronunciation, common in old British films such as the splendid Brief Encounter, has now almost completely gone.
I sound Posh to many people these days because I have a girls'-grammar-school-in-the-Seventies accent. But my accent's got nothing on some of this lot, believe me.
I always rather liked the Posh Boy whose heart's desire was to see his Deddy; but there were three public-school boys in the film who seemed to me to embody the class-ridden Britain of the times, and I loathed them, particularly John.
Of course it's not John's fault that I want to slap him - he's a product of his class and his times, as we all are.
I'm going to end this piece with a slightly longer video about John. Just when you - oh, all right, I - want to hit him repeatedly for his accent and his attitudes and his privilege and his expectations - - yes, he reminds me of why, all those years ago, the Communist thought that Communism might be a good thing - - he then starts talking about all the charity work he does in Bulgaria. And redeems himself somewhat. Though part of me hates that "rich-bastard graciously helps out the poor-folks" too. Damn! This is why I can never join any political party - nothing's ever clear-cut to me.
But one thing this programme shows is that if anyone thinks that Britain has changed, that the class system doesn't exist now - - well, they're wrong. All the children in this documentary are now fifty-two. They're the ones who are running the country.
Here's John. Are you more tolerant than I am? Or do you, too, want to hit him by the time he says "Trinity Hall"?
posted by Daphne at 9:19 am
11 Comments:
I love the 2nd clip when we first meet the kids, aged 7, at the zoo where one future yob is throwing things at the polar bear and the future little Lord Fauntleroy rushes forward and orders him to "stop it at once."
He's clearly at the age and social standing where he firmly believes that anything he says will be obeyed - and hasn't has any experience of someone at yob level.
I wish the edit hadn't been done just then as I'm sure m'Lord got a right mouthful if not physically, then verbally. As you say, classic !!
He's hideously haughty as a child but, like you say, he was brought up to be like that I suppose. He seemed to mellow with age, which is something.
The wife reminded me of 'Duck Face' from Four Weddings...
As well as saying 'deddy' he says 'gewld' (such as, 'one wears a gewld ring') which I found annoying.
I think the 'received' pronunciation was certainly a lot less 'received' at 49 than it was at 7. It's odd that a 'cut glass' accent so often puts one's back up when in reality, the person concerned might be 'a jolly good egg' - innit!
Was this the one in which the third public schoolboy didn't make it to Oxbridge and ended up at Durham? I remember watching him as a student and thinking it had improved him enormously ;-)
Julie
Mate, I remeber this is it still been produced ??
Funnily enough, I rather liked him. He turned out to be a perfectly nice person in the end, despite the social class he was born into. He seems to have missed out on a lot of the arrogance of his peers.
I wonder if I'm a tad less irritated by him because I was born in 1953 - three years earlier than you? The class distinction for children for me and my friends was just something that was, and I don't remember hating anyone for their accent - though I might have been extremely envious of their lifestyle.
Now I want to see what happened to some of the other kids in the series!
I am intrigued by the changes in accents over time. Most of our extended family moved down under in the late 1960s and my aunts and uncles here have retained their Yorkshire accents from that time - quite different to the ones I hear from people in Yorkshire now. I can only describe the old accents as unashamedly broad Yorkshire and yet quite dignified. They speak a kind of English honed by listening to the "wireless" rather than using phrases picked up off Coronation St and Eastenders. (Innit?)
Speaking to my mum [lifelong UK resident] on the phone recently she used several phrases I'd never heard her use before - things like chavs and things going pear shaped. I told her she'd been watching too much of The Bill.
Those trousers are a bit alarming.
He's right about Tony Blair.
I found this absolutely fascinating. We saw the early series of this but not the later ones - great to see.
Thank god our country doesn't have this entrenched class system with its accents and all the interclass nonsense that goes with it.
"Thank god our country doesn't have this entrenched class system with its accents and all the interclass nonsense that goes with it."
Wow. What country is that then? I can't think of any. It can't be the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, Suriname, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark (though sometimes Denmark comes close), Argentina, West Xylophone, Yemen or Zimbabwe...
Well I ain't posh going to a Secondary Modern and all that and I'm older still (1951). Working class me! But I was walking around a local Tesco's just this morning purposefully listening to snippets of conversation amongst the shoppers and I have to say that in many cases I had a lot of trouble identifying the language they were speaking as my own - and I AM talking about native English. In fact, those I encountered who were clearly immigrants I could understand perfectly.
Spoken language should be a fluid, ever changing thing but a worrying number of younger people appear to have a very restricted vocabulary and have regressed the language towards grunts and short sentences voiced as a single word.
I recall the Seven-Up working class kids could at least be understood and even at that age probably had a bigger vocabulary than many of todays 20 somethings. And this is a tragc loss.
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