is such a braying, grating, nails down a blackboard shrieking twat with that bloody laugh that its a no go area for me. Yes, he's supposed to be annoying but if there was an Oscar for cuntishness......

the late and much lamented Vivian Stanshall. How much more English could anything or anyone possibly get?

...is Test Match Special. I love it, with its cake and cricket, mild double entendre, and gentle ribbing (missus!). More, BBC, more.

... I reckon Test Match Special is as English as it's possible to be.

Failing that, a Radio 4 documentary involving Stephen Fry drinking a pint of real ale while listening to Nick Drake in a National Trust country house wearing a pinstripe suit and cravat would be the next level.

losing. on penalties. Probably to the Germans.

water...

as the 2 cars were french and dutch, the director was born in south africa , the film was written by an American, the defining music which sets the ambiance was played by an American and the film was in part financed by the french.

That's not to say it's not English as our ability to collaborate, form alliance and draw in talent for everywhere belies our stereotypical image as little Englanders.

Also cricket wouldn't be what it is without someone to play against so surely the input of the India, West Indians and Ozzies is as important. The image of skinny lads in rags playing on rubble strewn waste ground in some suburb of India is as much an image of cricket as some perfect village green with plates laden with sausage rolls and stewed tea. Why is cricket more English than Formula one which we run , control build most of the cars etc?

If pushed I think if anything I'd go for pies: which apart from honourable mentions from English speaking pastry folding diaspora you rarely find in other parts of the world in quite the same way. France is pasty free zone, the Germans love a sausage but not a sausage roll l, Italians have pizza but you'll starve to death for a decent chicken Balti pie (yes I know!). And yes they may not be refined but their combination of simple ingredients presented in a tasty convienient way ,their spread as by porduct product of our early industrialisation and often eaten in the pub or on the terraces make them quintessentially English. (probably)

would be my choice.

Or Marmite.

playing the same piece of music every night a quarter to one...stupid, pointless, eccentric, lovely.

The Titfield Thunderbolt. And The Shipping Forecast..

and most of H.E. Bates' work for that matter. English as tuppence.

and all of Henry Williamson's early autobiographical works. English as a Mitford sister.

prior to 0 AD: Celts
early first millennium: Romans
Dark Ages: Germans and Danes
Pre-medieval: Vikings
Medieval: Normans
after 1603: Scottish Stuart monarchs
after 1714: German Hanoverian monarchs
prior to 1807: people stolen from Africa
after 1845: Irish emigrants
after 1948: people invited from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent
now: Poles

Can't beat it.

It seems to help to be not actually too English (I'm not sure there's much too this, but still).

Either

-have a foreign surname - Olivier, Gielgud, Betjeman;
- be born abroad - Joanna Lumley, Felicity Kendal, George Orwell (all born in India);
- be slighly exotic on your mother's side- Stephen Fry (Hungarian jewish), Helena Bonham Carter (Spanish/French Jewish, Orwell again (French Grandfather), Churchill (American)

Some of their best talent stayed. But you're bang on, I think. It never fails to gladden the heart but I'm not sure everytone saw it that way at the time. Why did something that must have been at least partly intended as propaganda end up walking such a tightrope? Is that somehow an English quality, then?

Metroland. A must see..

who wishes the winner well with a firm hand shake.

you know who.

The Man Who Fell to Earth. In Beckenham.

Because they're worth it.

at a pool of vomit in a city centre, preferably Harlow, but not exclusively so.

My lionheart...

It has to be? No?
I have never met anyone of any nationality, other than English, who can abide this thing.

about 1966 every time the World Cup comes around.

and musing how England will inevitably lose the Test

and their albums English Settlement, Mummer and The Big Express especially

...of these

about trains and/or the weather

instead of a mixer.

Is living next door to an Swede who speaks five different languages but looking down on him because you speak English better than he does!

Speaking as a Scot fascinated by Edwardian and inter-war England, may I respectfully suggest H V Morton? He went in search of England in a wee car, and then complained all the time about the number of other people driving around in wee cars, ruining England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Vollam_Morton

God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards

If this was posted on any number other forums, the majority of responses would involve desperate sneering, and frequent mentions of Chavs, potholes, Taybarns, "Nu-Labour" ruining everything and whetever else is deemed fashioanble to denounce about England today.

Instead, it's a veritable king-size buffet of joy.

Keep it up.

served by waitresses in Black with White aprons, in a mock-Tudor (or real Tudor) teashop(pe) on a Bank Holiday.

Paddling on a shingle beach with your trousers rolled-up.

... between

1. Anthony Powell's 12-volume novel "A Dance to the Music of Time"

2. Virginia Astley's album "From Gardens where we Feel Secure"

3. Bruce Robinson's "Withnail and I"

Being posh and from the South East of England.

Englishness is a nonsense idea that really only means one region of it. I mean PG Wodehouse, the definition of the English you say, but how exactly do his characters represent the people of Newcastle?

When Louis de Bernières, the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin was asked to define what Englishness meant to him, he said "that street I was brought up on in Surrey. To be honest, the rest of it doesn't mean a thing to me".

especially when like this

and this

Soupy twist

you haven't mentioned

and say...

and finally the voice of many a Bristish generations childhood

"There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who
have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale,
its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its
castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms
and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and
shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards
and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other
country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none
that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and
white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its
sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune
repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and
chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and
gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant
Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South
Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there
are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big
and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim
New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New
England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland
of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in
three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so
diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the
strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England
does."
The History of Mr Polly by H.G.Wells

Does anyone who is not English use that idiom? The rest of us say "seated".

Just taken delivery via Amazon Vine - all I have to do is review it. Currently listening to Kenneth Williams doing a Rambling Syd Rumpo number about cobblers.

Whackity Whaclity Splod. Ooooh!

Mr Jones

with butter and Marmite.

Not 'regional' accent and not 'posh' accent, nor 'working class' accent but that literally inimitable nice middle class girl from the south accent that applies from the West Country to East Anglia and which defines itself by absence...

is the answer Stanley Unwin?

http://www.stanleyunwin.com/

behind two old dears at Litlington Tea Gardens on a summer afternoon.
They are chatting with the young man serving them at the hatch. On informing him of their recent trip to Holland to see the bulb fields he flicked his eyes up to meet mine, gave the very slightest suggestion of a smile and returned to serving them.

Specifically Betty's in Harrogate. Fat rascals all round..

And the one in Marlborough where the public school children take their parents when they come to visit...the waitress uniforms are a joy.

So according to the massive, being English means, more than anything else:

a) Posh/"Old" Middle Class/Home Counties pursuits, locations, or individuals that made a career out of pretending to be rakish, dotty, fusty, bookish or any combination thereof = 12

b) Countryside/Pastoral/Anti-Urban pursuits, pipe dreams or arcadian delusions even though we're one of the most urbanised nations in the cosmos = 9

c) Sport (usually failure at, cricket, or both) = 8

d) Sh*t food = 7

e) Parochial, Whimsical, sentimental films from over 50 years ago that say more about life in Switzerland in the cretaceous period than they do about the England of the past century = 4

f)Killing the Bosch = 3

Not where I come from, ya soft Southern puffs! Pfff - Honestly! I don't know what it is that's stopping you all from seeing the wood for the trees. Maybe you've been listening to The Kinks and Nick Drake too much, but I know that the foremost Englishman of our age has just one word for you:

I thought Stackridge's new song "Waiting for You (and England to Return) was wonderfully English. I made an animation to go with it,

The song is beautiful, hope you think the animation fits well with it
Spud

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower, -
Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

An Ealing classic - steam trains, vicars and bygone days...

on old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings.

Alistair Sim and the original St Trinians movies ?
Anything Ealing really.
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and the whole Hammer Horror thing.
Alec Guiness. Sir Alec to you of course.
Monty Python, and the BBC in general.
Village greens. Old pubs. Old pubs by rivers and canals.
Branston pickle. HP Sauce (don't care who owns it now).
Lamb and mint sauce.
Roast beef and yorkshire pud. A ploughman's lunch.
Wet summers. And a drought. Cold wet slushy winters. Almost never cold, dry, crisp and even.

in the field in a dank, dreich early season cricket match at the end of April when it's so cold that any kind of contact of your hands with a cricket ball stings like buggery, and even at two in the afternoon the outfield is still jewelled with dew. So much so that there are enormous piles of sawdust at each end of the pitch, portions of which are liberally sprinkled on the bowlers' run ups.

As a player in the field, the only thing to really look forward to is the promise of hot soup at teat time to thaw you out. If you're batting you get to sit in a nice warm changing room, until later, when it will only be worse.

You don't get that in the colonies, which is why English cricket is peculiarly character building, so they say.

WH Auden and Benjamin Britten combine talents to make a sound poem celebrating the night mail train - and invent rap in the process!

Wonderful stuff:

WH Auden and Benjamin Britten combine talents to make a sound poem celebrating the night mail train - and invent rap in the process!

Wonderful stuff:

No one on earth has the ability to capture the very essence of England as Morrissey can. That very ability to find beauty in the nature of the 'slate grey victorian skies' and all other aspects which make us want to holiday abroad, but only for a while you understand. We all need fish and chips and a nice mug of tea.......(except Morrissey who would probably settle for a nice quorn substitute).

"I am just going outside and may be some time."

Brave as a lion but brilliantly vague and allusive. These days he’d be on his blackberry whimpering to a therapist or selling the story to Heat magazine. So much we’ve lost.

Illuminatus's post above made me think of this. There is nothing more British - whether English, Scots or Welsh - than coming in out of the rain, preferably followed by sitting in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit. It doesn't matter if you're coming in out of the rain after a walk across some moorland, or you're coming in out of the rain from a dreadful slog around the shops, or coming in out of the rain in the middle of the night after several hours dancing at a club.

The cup of tea and biscuit could be a joint and a round of toast, or it could be a stiff malt and the old church warden, but I can think of nothing that signifies Anglo-Britishness more than the blessed relief of coming in out of the rain.

"From Home to Home" by Fairfield Parlour

Has anyone else heard this? One of the most "English" records ever made, I think.

The Goon Show?

Everything about it would only ever exist in England - two surreal wackos and one straight man (except in the first series of course, with the fourth goon whose name I always forget), BBC, Mr Greenslave, gentle jazz (from the Yanks, admittedly), mustache twirling villains, sterling punning, even more sterling sound-effect work, cricket. A personal favourite passage:

Gryppe-Pipethin: What's that sound?
Seagoon: Just a cricket.
Gryppe-Pipethin: How can they see to bat in the dark?
Seagoon: Shh! Someone's just climbed over that wall!
Gryppe-Pipethin: A Six! Bravo sir, well played!

Ach, it's all in the delivery.

The Affable Trier Who Never Gives Up
The English Rose Who Believes In Him no Matter What
The Social Climbing Snob With The Strong Moral Compass
The Hard Working Drone Who Understands The Way of The World

Low budget, flimsy stories & smut

A brace of English things, no? One side a mini play for today set in suburbia, the other a wistful dreamscape musing on life's simplicity

A VERY English moment...

Nice bit o' kipper and Jack the Ripper, etc, etc.

Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes - understated bravery, related to Shakespeare and Jane Austen, "World's Greatest Living Adventurer". Hacked off his own frost-bitten fingers in the tool shed while his wife brought him a cup of tea. He is idealised "Englishness" incarnate.
The recent Mark Lawson interview isn't available (here's a partial transcript: http://bit.ly/9IONMp), but here he is being interviewed on "Top Gear":

I feel I should put a word in for Humphrey Barclay - The Major in Fawlty Towers, a fine example of dear old England with its cricket, bafflement and casual racism.

Captain Manewaring \ Arthur Lowe with his pompousness, not just in Dad's Army but an episode of 'Galton n Simpson Playhouse' where he is stuck in a cable car with other Europeans. Yes, its Hancocks 'The Lift' revisited but he's marvellous. The German is the evil fottball commentator from 'Escape To Victory' *takes off comedy nerd hat*

(English that is). Sorry.

...and I'm a dyed in the wool Dub!! :-)

...On Reflection. I absolutely adore this...

A friend has a BBC transcription disc of this concert and what a superb recording it is.

of something essentially british / english #save6music. long live quality radio in all its forms.

And England Rugby League teams of the 50's & 60's.

Sunday Love Songs.

'love the show' etc.

BTW, I know it's cruel but...

deserves an award if you ask me, in the "dip in and out of" category. Been brightening up my coffee breaks all week.

It has all the ingredients of a classic Word thread, lots of laugh'n tittery, liberal doses of nostalgia, a bit of niggle followed by handshakes, recipe tips (must try crumpets and marmite) then some moments of pure surreal. Brain faggots??? Maybe I misread that but it sounds better my way.

Although IMDB tells me that the director was born in South Africa, so I suppose that counts it out...

"Thank you, Captain Yates... I'd rather have a pint."

drying by a two bar fire.

...as shown in "Kes".
"It's the fair-haired, slightly balding Charlton to kick off":

"'Ee wants bleedin' milkin'!"

We've done crumpets, but no mention so far of that other quintessentially English tea accompaniment, the scone.

With cream and strawberry jam of course.

But how to say it?

Marmite

..... What other country on earth could create such a beautifully vulgar turn of phrase as a compliment.

The compilation and sharing of lists on any given subject.
Or is that just me?
(Probably not)

It's the things I miss living in Virginia

A decent bacon sarnie, usually with brown sauce
"Swallows and Amazons" has a quintessential Englishness. As has the Lake District.
"I'm sorry, I haven't a clue" or "The News Quiz". Or Radio 4, really.
A pint of bitter. In a pub.
Prime Minister's Questions.
The Morris Minor.
The BBC - whatever its faults, it is something to be admired and loved.
The FA Cup.
Marmite. And Bovril
Viz
Treating celebrities with just the right amount of...'respect' that they deserve.

When I think about England, or Britain, when I get homesick, it's usually these things.

Despite the theme music this has to be one of the most English things ever to have appeared on TV. Step forward Fred Dineage & Jack Hargreaves.

Can't believe I forgot about this young Elizabethan...

Writing as a Welsh nationalist anglophile I thought some of the English readers here might like a look at this for another, dare I say perhaps more objective perspective on the nature of 'Englishness':

http://stwnsh.com/6l

Cofion / Regards

DeanDwl

Nothing could be more ENGLISH than "THE AVENGERS" STEED and EMMA PEEL episodes in the 1967 colour season; try "FROM VENUS WITH LOVE" or "A FUNNY THING HAPPENED TO ME ON THE WAY TO THE STATION..."

Never seen this anywhere else in the world.
Very odd. Never understood the concept.

but I found parts of Bellamy's People really good and this might just answer our question.

that England is the only country in the world where xenophobia exists.