TEACHING LANGUAGE, TEACHING CULTURE

As I was trawling the Internet five minutes before a lesson recently in the hope of finding some suitably pre-prepared material to fill the forthcoming hour, I came across one of those teaching tips that are somehow useful. “Remember, we are not just teaching language,” it breezed, “we are teaching culture.” With this in mind, I have decided to teach some of my private students about British culture using the medium of film. I am planning to show them an excerpt of a movie, without sound, and demand that they write a script according to what they think is happening and what the characters are saying in the scene.

Too many foreigners unfortunately only have access to what they think Britain represents through that film The Queen, Mr Bean repeats, Benny Hill and films with Hugh Grant in them, such as Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral. I don’t know about my compatriots, but I’ve never met any real Briton like the charmingly bumbling Hugh Grant, and if I had, I certainly wouldn’t be shouting about it, let alone making films about him. So, after much thought, and taking into account my limited film collection, I have come upon the seminal vehicle through which to show a true slice of what it is to be British – Bruce Robinson’s 1986 classic, Withnail and I.

I’ve already started my indoctrination program by pre-teaching a class on “Taboo Language”, an entertaining lesson that detailed the meaning and usage of the F-word, several of the B-words and even the C-word, all absolutely necessary in order to understand the plot and comedic potency of the motion picture in question. Unfortunately the material omitted the pejorative expression, “shag sack”, which Withnail uses in reference to Danny the drug dealer when they are bickering about who can take the most drugs and still “run a mile”, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

For those who haven’t seen the cult classic, Withnail and I is the semi-autobiographical story of two out-of-work, destitute actors, the eponymous Withnail and the narrator Marwood. Set in London in the late 1960’s, it follows the two unemployed thespians as they spend their time and what little money they have drinking and dabbling in recreational drugs whilst living in slum conditions and trying to survive the bitter cold of an English autumn. Their health failing due to overindulgence, eventually they decide to spend a weekend recuperating in the country at a house owned by Withnail’s rich uncle, Monty, and of course the trip is plagued by all kinds of drunken japes, misunderstandings and other stuff Shakespeare was good at.

In order to extract the maximum cultural value from the exercise, I have decided to show them an excerpt from the film where Withnail and Marwood have been given five pounds each by Monty to buy some Wellington boots (very British), but instead they plan to lie to Monty that they couldn't find any and retire to the local boozer instead (even more British). As “time” is called in the King Henry pub, giving revelers twenty minutes to finish their drinks and leave, Withnail orders “a pair of quadruple whiskeys and another pair of pints”, a request I’m sure will have my generally alcohol-free students looking blankly at the screen and wondering if they just heard right. After this, they leave the pub and, in a state of inebriation Withnail describes as “utterly arseholed”, they make for a teashop to eat cake, “to soak up the alcohol”, another uniquely British concept.

Quintessentially English, the teashop provides a powerful glimpse of the generation gap, and the two drunkards’ mildly anti-social antics expose the widespread habit in the United Kingdom of complaining privately about unruly behaviour, yet not actually confronting it, perhaps wisely nowadays given the number of people who have taken to the Dickensian practice of walking around carrying knives in their hosiery.

When Withnail loudly demands “the finest wines available to humanity”, the proprietor of the teashop finally takes a stand and tells his assistant to call the Police - another quaint British custom – do that in many countries and they simply wouldn’t come, or if they did, they’d probably shoot, beat or at least arrest everybody in the environs. Having insisted that they’re millionaires and that they plan to buy the teashop and sack the woman calling the Police, Monty arrives outside in his limousine and Withnail and Marwood make their exit, leaving the bewildered senior citizens peering curiously through the net curtains, in a poignant concluding reflection on English manners.

British culture – that’ll learn ‘em.

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