brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

non-uk ilxors, pls feel free to offer your fond reminiscences of how the foreign office gave britain a 'cool' image in your part of the world

It was mostly about the Spice Girls iirc

and the glut of 'keep calm and ...' teatowels, mugs, posters etc etc

Some of the work was probably fairly successful tbh though i dread to think how much money was wasted buying Banksy prints for British Council offices around the world.

I should probably start collecting material for a thread on the international branding of Britain / adoption of signifiers of 'British cool' around the world.

xp that was later, post-2000

Yeah Keep Calm etc is was a post-financial crisis thing really.

Whole Keep Calm and Drink Tea aesthetic seems to have 'sold' both figuratively and literally much better to rest of world than cool Britain type stuff.

https://versobooks-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/000009/888/9781784780760-a5563c0e68445ac280534d2d538aed6f.jpg

KC&CO seems much more organic than the push to export 'cool', though is arguably appropriate messaging for a country that wants to be seen as stable, on one hand, and too unattractive for people to want to come here, on the other.

“Seventeen years of hurt ­never stopped us dreaming,” he said. “Labour’s coming home.”

Tony Blair is an asshole, but just purely as craft, this is fairly good.

Britpop was definitely cool for me when I began listening to music late 90's - early 00's. That Blur Best Of with the stylized pictures of them on the cover, and a bunch of songs that seemed to actually be about the world of today. Yeah, it was cool.

KC&CO is a story of its own..

In 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books Ltd. in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sorting through a box of used books bought at auction when he uncovered one of the original "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. The couple framed it and hung it up by the cash register; it attracted so much interest that Manley began to produce and sell copies.[13] Other companies followed suit, and the design rapidly began to be used as the theme for a wide range of products.

In August 2011, it was reported that a UK-based company called Keep Calm and Carry On Ltd[17] had registered the slogan as a community trade mark in the EU, CTM No: 009455619 and also in the United States No: 4066622.[18][19] after failing to obtain registration of the slogan as a trademark in the United Kingdom.[20] They issued a take-down request against a seller of Keep Calm and Carry On products.[21][22] Questions have been raised as to whether the registration could be challenged, as the slogan had been widely used before registration and is not recognisable as indicating trade origin.[19] An application has been submitted by British intellectual property advisor and UK trademarking service Trade Mark Direct, to cancel the registration on the grounds that the words are too widely used for one person to own the exclusive rights,[23] but the request for cancellation was rejected and the trade mark is still protected in all EU countries. The company subsequently tried to register the slogan as its trademark in both the United States[24] and Canada.[20][25]

Basically, the original shop can continue selling posters with "Keep Calm and Carry On" on, but anything else is now owned by the jump-on trademarking company.

Keep Calm and Seek Rent

Tony Blair is an asshole, but just purely as craft, this is fairly good.

No it isn't, it's meretricious shite, as per usual. Of course, the camera panning backing to Baddiel and Skinner's faces after Southgate had trundled that penalty towards the German gooalkeeper was the highlight of 1996 for the rest of the UK.

Of course, the camera panning backing to Baddiel and Skinner's faces after Southgate had trundled that penalty towards the German gooalkeeper was the highlight of 1996 for the rest of the UK.

wait, what?

Non-english UK-ards don't tend to cheer for the England team, stevie.

*squints*

is this about... football?

Of course it is, it's Blair, what do you expect?

Theresa May probably deserves a microscopic amount of credit for being the first PM in my adult life not to even pretend to like football (excluding perhaps Gordon Brown who genuinely does I think).

I'm all for giving microscopic amounts of credit to Tories who don't bother focus grouping everything they are supposed to like. But still - to the gulags with them, but credit for not pretending you like the Arctic fucking Monkies or something.

You have to separate art and the artist.

Major 'liked' football?

I thought he was more of a warm beer + cricket ultra.

Let's blame Harold Wilson for piggybacking on the England World Cup win.

... and the Beatles.

Wilson always kept a photo of the Huddersfield Town triple title winning team of the 20's in his wallet.

Next to his pipe and baccy. Good if it's true, you never know with Wilson though.

Well, at least the public is aware the true PM loves Arsenal.

Major 'liked' football?

visual evidence:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/db/83/f9/db83f96fc5f7061d3ff0181f05b0fedb--john-major-bolton-wanderers.jpg

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/67018b3999594153bb002894c8846ae7/john-major-playing-with-two-footballs-at-ednburgh-b4m4h5.jpg

Once Wilson said something hackneyed and cringeworthy alluding to northern toughness and how people aren't born t'up north, they are forged like steel. And some wag retorted "I always thought there was something fake about you".*

*probably a half decent anecdote poorly recounted here.

Cool Britannia worked because kids in the US - and around the world, because US culture is international default culture - needed to distance themselves from the mainstream and have a rarified "sophisticated" secret language. I think that's been totally taken over by Japan at this point though.

Yep, and it's worth noting that the Japanese government is milking that for all it's worth in the same way as the UK did. The university recruitment / cultural export sector has essentially gone Full Pokemon.

I know which I prefer. I guess the cool sophistication of Ocean Colour Scene has its fans tho

https://s3.postimg.org/qvyuztynn/20160916_114356.jpg

Pika-choose Kanazawa University for a Pharmacology course ranked in the world's top 200...

The UK seems to be falling back on Big Ben and umbrellas again but the cultural capital of the BBC (Sherlock and Dr Who, in particular) is still strong.

kami as cartoon top trumps vs the ghosts of colonialism's mechanism

read some fucking Orwell for the great taste of liberal hegemony

If I spin back the dials, it was all about 1995 and finding copies of mixmag in a big bookstore in town and realizing there was a whole island full of attractive people listening to the coolest music in awesome nightclubs all the time.

I never thought britpop was cool and couldn't give any shits about England football but I was definitely convinced the UK scene for dance music was the best in the world. And IIRC art and fashion weren't doing shabby either. It seemed like the most exciting place to live as long as you didn't care for food.

The funny thing is all the important creative groundwork started under Major, or seems to have. In one possibly notable example, Tories spun off Channel Four, which wound up bankrolling Trainspotting.

oh boy Kasabian on the pub's unwanted sound system right now

Channel 4 started under Thatcher - and was infinitely more establishments shaking in its infant decade than by the time we got to the cosy public health warning of Trainspotting

those red triangle films c4 played in the 80's were like - ugh! subtitles, but yowza - full frontal nudity!

"Themroc" has never been off on our screens since.

pretty sure they showed Pasolini's Porcile in that segment. Good work

Yeah but us over here never bought tickets to those

I've just noticed they showed "Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets", which I never saw but am familiar with the soundtrack album.

it was as much about what they funded themselves anyway, a lot of silly crap but a lot of genuine Daily Express apoplexy things too.

i was too young for the red triangle series but can remember Alex Cox's moviedrome playing some good movies, well at least it introduced me to Burnett's To Sleep With Anger. They could do with having something similar these days (as long as Kermode isn't involved), but I won't hold my breath.

a welcoming home for people like Alan Clarke after the Been had bottled out

Moviedrome was BBC2 tho iirc

Beeb. Fucking spell check

moviedrome was a big formative influence for me, cox was a great host

mark cousins, then as now, drove me up the wall when he took over

oh yeah, that was bbc2. There doesn't seem to be any home for someone like Alan Clarke these days, alas.

Channel 4, early on, also had a season of about 20 Fassbinder films - maybe more - God knows how long it would have been before I got the chance to see them. Also "Berlin Alexanderplatz" shown episodically.

The outcry over the red triangle series had entirely the opposite effect than the objectors had intended; the opening film, the grisly surreal comedy Themroc, garnered over two million viewers (Whitehouse apparently among them, later saying of its broadcast "It's not good enough to slap on a warning symbol and then indulge in sadistic madness of this kind."). Later films (mostly those whose TV Times synopses sounded racy) gained viewerships of over three million, figures which dwarfed those of the other channels still broadcasting that late (which carried fare of very limited appeal and educational programming from the Open University). Some critics contended that the whole series was a cynical attempt to wilfully stir controversy, and in practice many viewers discovered that "softcore porn" against which campaigners had railed was in fact genuine art cinema (and not the titillation for which they'd stayed up late). With viewing figures latterly declining, and press opposition remaining strong, Channel 4 quietly discontinued the red triangle the year after it had been introduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4)