British Comedy

Yesterday I only had one seminar in the morning so I had planned on devoting the rest of the day to writing my paper for Gothic Architecture. Naturally, that didn't happen. I didn't really do too much during the time I had set aside for writing. I joined several friends at Pembroke for lunch and then went down to the Union (after stopping to get ice cream at Benet's, of course...my loyalty card is filling up rather quickly) to purchase our group photo that was taken outside the Chapel before our first Formal Hall. The photo is wonderful and everyone looks great. I opted to have the photo framed as well. Later on I had a quick dinner at King's and rushed off to my course introduction for The British and Their Sports.

The introduction was more of a lecture than an introduction, but it was pretty interesting. I learned that schools referred to as "public schools" here are actually private schools, but are referred to as public because they are open to anyone (although the use of the phrase "public school" has gone out of fashion because the people in charge of these schools are embarrassed by the term and so are the rather wealthy students that attend the schools so these schools now refer to themselves as "independent schools"). What we would call public schools are "state schools" here. Our course introduction was meant to give us a little background before we have our field trip to Rugby today. Rugby is the town that is home to Rugby School which is one of the 9 original "public schools" in England (the 9 original schools are known as the Clarendon Schools and Eton is one of them). As you may have guessed, Rugby School is considered to be the place where the game of rugby originated. In addition to rugby, however, the boys at the school developed many other games, particularly racket games like squash. The boys who attended the school came from wealthy backgrounds and they used their money to build sporting facilities and to hire local companies to produce balls for them. The Gilbert rugby ball (featured several times in the movie Invictus) is still in use today and the Gilbert company is still located in Rugby. The boys never had any coaches or anyone to tell them how to run the teams. They did everything by themselves and they began the tradition of organized sports that we have at schools today.

After my course introduction, I headed to the Union for "British Comedy Night". Some of the PA's picked out their favorite comedy TV shows and we watched them. We watched Peep Show, Black Books and The Inbetweeners. The Inbetweeners was easily the funniest one, but the others did have their funny moments as well. What I did learn, however, was that British comedy is incredibly crude. I found that rather odd since I generally think of the British as being far more sophisticated than Americans. After we watched Peep Show, however, one kid asked the question everyone was thinking- "They show that on TV?" The PA's were surprised that something like that wouldn't be shown on television in America (okay, something like it might be shown on HBO). The Inbetweeners is my new favorite British comedy and I definitely need to find episodes of it online.

Cheers!