PUBS ON TV: Hands up, I forgot/ran out of time to take part in The Session last month. While I had noted Phil Cook‘s topic for May earlier in the month and thought “Oh great, that’s perfect for me!” I then promptly forgot about it until I started to see other people’s posts popping up today. So once again, strap yourself in for my stream-of-consciousness, seat of your pants contribution to The Session #147 – beer and pubs in art and fiction.
As I spend more time than is healthy thinking about beer and pubs, seeing them in film and on TV always makes me stop. I spend far too long trying to read pumpclips that are shown for no more than a second. When I first watched the Bank of Dave film (which is excellent and features a good amount of Def Leppard if memory serves) the main thing I shouted at the telly was “look how many handpulls there are on in that pub!” instead of focusing on whatever community meeting was taking place in the narrative.
I suspect I won’t be the only person to mention the central role of the pub in the work of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, also starring Nick Frost. These somewhat eccentric comedies have etched themselves in our minds because of their attention to detail of the mundanities and ritual of every day life. The Cornetto trilogy may have the frozen treat as its headline, but for me, the pub is the heart of all three films – Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and the World’s End. While The World’s End naturally settles into the boozer, since it is based on a pub crawl, there is little more iconic than Shaun suggesting his friends and family go to The Winchester, have a pint and wait for all this to blow over.
Hot Fuzz is less pub-centric than the other films, but the action still returns there time and again. I could not laugh harder at the scene where the newly arrived police officer man, Nicholas Angel, manages to clear the local hostelry by challenging its underage patrons.
“When’s your birthday?”
“22nd of February.”
“What year?”
“Every year.”
“GET OUT!”
I think the older films and TV shows are my favourite. I’ve spent a lot of time looking up the wines that are served by Basil Fawlty and marvelling at the popularity of a gin and orange in Torquay. OK, not beer related, but it’s still a bar environment. I could watch Citizen Smith forever just to look at the glasses on the bar, the beermats and all the other details that you see of the pub settings from the late 70s.
I can’t say I particularly like Last of the Summer Wine or Only Fools and Horses, but I’m in for the pub scenes. I even made my husband sit through Al Murray’s Time Gentlemen Please recently which, it has to be said, has aged pretty badly. It was only made in 2000 too. Beyond all the cringe, even that still takes me to my happy place of watching regulars get up to various hijinks. It makes me wonder whether people who don’t go to pubs ever watch such programmes and whether they realise that some of these narratives really are being played out, day after day, in the pubs of their own areas. The daily routines of true regulars who have their own chair and drink the same drink at the same time.
Now I’ve got to thinking, my brain’s thrown up Gary and Tony visiting The Crown for ceaseless pints of lager in Men Behaving Badly, the alcoholic landlord in at The Crow and Crown in Withnail & I, the pub quiz at The Two Brewers in Detectorists.
Yes, the pub is everywhere, particularly in British sitcoms. A natural home to observations on the gentle cadence (or downright bizarreness) of every day life. But not in Keeping up Appearances, I don’t think. The nearest you get there is cans of lager cracked in front of the telly. But I’m still interested to have a nosy at what Onslow is drinking.
Which TV sitcom pub would you want to drink in?
