Forget The Tea: Delightful Debauchery In British Pop Culture
The raucous comedy Austenland, in theaters this week, pokes fun at Americans' reverence for what they have been taught to see as a gracious British heritage — muslin, bonnets, tea time at the stately home with the bluebloods, good manners.
As well it might. For most of the English 99-percenters I grew up with, heritage meant feet up in front of the telly, watching Top of the Pops.
No family I ever knew gathered in the drawing room at 4 o'clock for a pot of tea and cucumber sandwiches. That sort of thing is laid on — with a trowel — for foreign tourists at Claridges or in period costume dramas with a sharp eye for the export market. We drank our tea industrial-strength, from a supermarket teabag, in mugs with milk and sugar. And it's not Earl Grey we remember fondly, but the talking chimp who promoted those teabags on TV. He died recently, and a nation grieved.
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