Britain: it's a complicated place. Take the name, for example: am I talking about the nation, whose full name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Am I talking about the land, which could be the island of Great Britain (the big one with England, Scotland and Wales in it), or the British Isles as a whole, which is a bunch of island that would also include both Irelands and the Channel Islands?
Confusing, right? No wonder so many Americans always get it wrong when talking about the place. It's also no wonder, then, that a lot of people not from the British Isles have no interest or capacity to learn about the differences between its peoples and regions. It's probably hard enough for an American or European to remember which one Wales is, let alone the West Country, Ulster or the Midlands.
Those differences can be very important to the people who live there, though. And while some centuries-old relationships and rivalries are pretty well-known internationally--you don't need me explaining Braveheart to you--others might be less obvious to outsiders. Few more so than the north.
England might look like one country on the map, but for around 1000 years now--as long as it's been England, basically--it's been a country divided. There's the north, and everyone south of the north. I won't bore you with the full history here, you can study that in your own time if you're interested, just know that from the Viking age through to the legacies of Thatcher and Brexit, England has not been as united as it might appear from the outside.
Countries always have their differences, but what I've always found interesting about England’s divide is the way that so much of what has been defined as English culture, so much of what has represented the country in its most popular media around the world, revolves around the South, especially London. I'm going to wildly generalise here, but from Dickens to Notting Hill, the streets and accents of England as depicted on the screen tend to be those from the South.
When the north must be portrayed, it's usually as a downtrodden caricature (see: The Full Monty or Billy Elliot), or in service of a fantasy universe's hardiest and most workmanlike peoples (see: the Starks). Imagine my surprise, then, when I first discovered then spent all weekend playing Thank Goodness You're Here, a game Riley already covered because it's "hilarious and helpful", but which I also found of huge interest because it's a game that isn't just set in the north (and developed by a small studio based in Yorkshire), it's a celebration of it.
Thank Goodness You're Here takes the piss out of itself at every given opportunity, but at the same time there's so much love for the culture and setting that I think it's the most defining thing about the game, even more than its brilliant writing and cast of unforgettable weirdos.
The fictional town of Barnsworth feels like a place in the best way, in the way all great video game places do, by being simultaneously small yet huge, intimate but expansive, a place where you know everybody and every street corner but are still always finding new things. And it's a place that's unashamedly of the north. If you've played the game and wondered why there are dialect options even though the game is set in England, that's why. Why the intro shows a region stuck in the 1950s even though it's the modern era; why it's so proud of its pies.
It's great! My own English family is from Birmingham and I used to live just outside Brighton–which is as south as it gets–so I feel like a bit of an outsider writing this, but my wife's family is from Hull, and they roared with laughter at just about every part of the game I showed them last week, from the voice acting to the architecture to the Peans commercial. The idea that a video game would pitch itself like this was as welcome as it was surprising to them. And seeing their reaction as locals (or at least in their case former locals) made me wish more "Western" games could be this distinctly regional (with a shoutout here to another recent example of this, A Highland Song).
I actually meant to publish this piece earlier in the week, but then events transpired and a blog about a quaint northern town suddenly seemed a bit ill-timed; this was not a great moment to be exploring a game that was so enthusiastically proud of everything great about the place while the world was seeing the absolute worst of it. At my lowest point I was wondering which of Thank Goodness You're Here's otherwise cheerful residents could I picture firebombing a library in a fit of anti-immigration rage.
Thankfully common sense and human decency have prevailed; as destructive as a minority of hateful bigots have been, good and normal people have banded together across England--but especially in the north, where the initial attacks made the headlines--and with a series of counter-protests shown the country and the world that fascists belong in only one place: the bin.
So I got to publish this little blog about how much I love a lovely little town after all. And only had to add one caveat: if anyone in Barnsworth was going to be a fascist, it would probably be this guy:
