From Grimsby to Kristin Scott Thomas, bad-taste Britain has had a splendid week

National caricatures and stereotypes occupy a curious limbo between truth and fiction

Sacha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher attend the World premiere of 'Grimsby' in London (Anthony Harvey/Getty Images)

In 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart scored his first big hit as a writer of comic opera. In fact, with its spoken dialogue punctuated by formal numbers, Die Entführung aus dem Serail is more of what we would call a musical. It has, in addition to its corny Orientalist plot, a plum supporting role in the shape of the heroine’s maidservant Blonde.

Feisty, witty, mischievous, Blonde refuses to be shackled by any master or husband, whatever their religion. She is, as biographer and critic David Cairns writes, “the first notable member of the long line of spirited soubrettes who have enlivened German opera”. She also has another characteristic that plants her as firmly in the Enlightenment-era gallery of cultural stereotypes as the Muslim Pasha himself – whom, at the finale, Mozart cleverly turns into a paragon of tolerance. Blonde is English.

Indeed, when the palace overseer Osmin assumes that she ranks as a “slave”, Blonde gives him short shrift. “Girls are not goods that can be given away as presents,” she insists. “I am an Englishwoman, born to be free, and defy anyone who would attempt to coerce me!” Before the temporary swerve of the Victorian era, and its often-exaggerated reputation for prudishness, polite Continental society had firm ideas about the English – and especially their womenfolk. Rough, vulgar, boozy, even barbarous, they nonetheless enjoyed – and exploited – a degree of freedom that either thrilled or horrified cross-Channel observers.

In this nation of slatterns and trollops, even the conduct of gentlewomen showed alarming latitude. In his terrific book The English and their History, Robert Tombs reports that, compared with 18th-century Italy or France, “in England women were more independently active in social and cultural life – so at least was the usual shocked opinion of foreign visitors”.

National caricatures and stereotypes occupy a curious limbo between truth and fiction. Of course, the average cartoon-outlined citizen of France, Italy, Turkey or England never has existed, and never will. We’re all individuals, as Monty Python’s Brian sermonises. (“I’m not!” pipes up the rebel at the back.) Yet if others treat you as if you will act according to type, the cartoon begins to take on flesh. And if billions of tourist dollars fund quests for French gastronomy, Italian romance, Greek hospitality, Scandinavian equality – or, for that matter, English tipsy humour and eccentricity – then the stereotype puts money in the bank. It may even harden into a fact of diplomatic life.

In the long view of history, during the past few decades the English have reverted to traditional type. For many of their neighbours, Victorian rectitude vanished long ago. In its stead returned the raucous, drunken, wild tribe that travellers in the 17th and 18th centuries either deplored or praised. This bad-taste Britain (to be fair, only England generally fits the description) has had a splendid week.

Sacha Baron Cohen has launched his new film Grimsby, with its Hogarthian depiction of the Lincolnshire fishing port as a sump of squalor inhabited by gurning, grotesque inebriates and hooligans. But then, eight centuries ago, the Icelandic saga-writers also took a dim view of the place. Written around 1230, the Orkneyinga Saga tells us that when the future Earl Rognvald of Orkney came to Baron Cohen’s titular township, he found a place fit for Nobby: “Five weeks we’d waded through wetness and filth,/ mud wasn’t missing in the middle of Grimsby.” At least the Earl stuck around to spend the tourist hack-silver.

Over in Paris, meanwhile, the actress Kristin Scott Thomas chose to play the role of a bewigged salonnière from the age of Louis XVI when she scorned the calamities of the British female on both the fashion and – implicitly – the moral front. “French women would never get drunk on a Saturday in a miniskirt in November,” Madame la Comtesse de Scott Thomas instructs us.

The learned wit Madame de Staël, who in her youth had to dodge the fate worse than death of marrying William Pitt the Younger, could hardly have put it more succinctly. French intellectuals of her vintage helped to inscribe this country’s name in the European mind as the Land that Taste Forgot: its manners uncouth, its language graceless, its people boorish, its weather insufferable and, évidemment, its food inedible.

The generation-long enmity of the Napoleonic Wars helped to seal the deal. In Paris, caricaturists shot back at the Bonaparte-baiting libels of the English prints with scenes of obese, guzzling rosbifs staggering around with their brazen, tarty wives.

For three centuries, players on both sides of the Channel have revelled in this to-and-fro of abusive stereotypes. The glory of this game is that allows participants to wield a bat – or maybe lob a boule – for the opposing team. You may even transfer for good, as Scott Thomas has done.

In London, publishers can still hope to make a small fortune with books that tell you why French women don’t get fat, why French children never misbehave and how a night out in France invariably consists of a small refined aperitif followed by a Michelin-starred meal. Evidence plays no part in the rules, so your slightly befuddled memories of that weekend in Marseille don’t apply. Only the clichés count.

Yet the clichés can make a difference. During the Renaissance, Italian arbiters governed elite taste across the rest of Europe. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier set the tone for high society in Elizabethan England as much as in Medici Florence. Once Louis XIV had established a broad cultural hegemony, French manners took over as the European standard. So they remained, with a few dips and blips, until well into the 20th century.

However, England – and then Great Britain – had a problem. Its growing status as a mercantile and military power never led to Continent-wide authority as a model of either high culture or everyday behaviour. Passing squalls of Anglomania – when taste-makers briefly fell for London coffee houses, landscape gardens or Regency-dandy styles – did little to alter the overall picture of a politico-economic giant that remained a cultural also-ran. Even prize exports such as Shakespeare might fail to find a receptive market. Voltaire, who had lived in England in the 1720s and championed its religious tolerance, first had kind words for the Bard. Later, he fiercely rejected the playwright’s alleged violence and vulgarity. “It was I,” he sighed, “who was the first to show the French some pearls that I had discovered in his enormous dung-hill.” Voltaire was aghast to see a Shakespeare cult spread among Parisian trendies. He feared that “the scaffolds and brothels of the English stage are taking over the theatre of Racine and the beautiful scenes of Corneille”.

Scaffolds and brothels: what’s not to like? That takes us to the nub of the matter. Rich but raucous, the English began to exult in their reputation for rule-busting crudity and savagery. Continental malcontents who chafed against the formality and finesse of their own elite culture could celebrate English wildness as the apogee of freedom. For every Kristin Scott Thomas, dismayed by a fake high street tan, France and many other countries bred a romantic Anglophile who looked across the Channel to find heroes of unfettered creativity. The Shakespeare-worshipping composer Hector Berlioz fell in love with and married Harriet Smithson (Irish-born, but of English parentage) after he saw her play Ophelia in Paris.

True, it helped the English mavericks if they quit their drizzly archipelago. From Lord Byron to David Bowie, many English icons of a pan-European culture have taken the expat path. But they remained products of a country often thought to exhibit a blatant disregard for the civilised niceties of social life. Geopolitics alone will not explain English exceptionalism. The syndrome began long before Bonaparte and persisted long after Hitler. Foreign accusations of blunt manners and lousy taste, often customised into badges of distinction, have helped it cascade down the centuries.

This Byron-to-Bowie notion of a country that breeds free-minded pioneers is the upside of the story that shows Bad-Taste Britain as the indigenous habitat of the chav and slob, the yob and oik. Of course, these phantom battles fought among spectres and symbols may have the slenderest of links to material conditions. For peoples colonised and plundered by the British or the French in their imperial pomp, cross-Channel spats about fashion or food would surely epitomise Freud’s idea of “the narcissism of small differences”. Still, the shadow domain of stereotypes did, and does, have real-world effects. Those teenage punks that you may still encounter from Galicia to Greece looked to Britain, or rather their fantasy of it, when they chose to party like it’s 1979.

Subcultural seedbeds probably need to stay rough around the edges. We should worry if snooty leading ladies stop sneering at their plebeian compatriots or gross-out comedians no longer consider North Sea ports as the automatic butts of mirth. For decades, the anxiously Francophile middle classes have lectured us that Britain would improve if Bristol resembled Bordeaux. All should stay true to themselves. In a world where cultural branding secures competitive advantage, distinctiveness attracts. Sameness repels. No one ever visited Britain to eat at Café Rouge or Côte.