Why do British media seem so cynical and bitter?

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Michael96 said:
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Greenfields:
And the Australians ?
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Always throwing another shrimp on the barbie (or asking Shelia to do it) 🙂
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Nah. We call them prawns. It’s the little ones that are shrimps. If you need to peel it, it’s a prawn. If you can eat it whole, it’s a shrimp.
 
Easy.

Have you tried pronouncing all those native Welsh city names when something happens there?

Impossible…
 
It’s just different tastes. A lot of what constitutes British humour is dry, sarcastic and self-depreciating.

As an aside, you have not watched a lot of Doctor Who if you think he’s supposed to be someone who doesn’t care about humanity.

I’ll be honest, I don’t tend to notice much anti-religion. As I have said previously on CAF, I would assume apathy rather than anti-religion.
 
Lou2U said:
It’s just different tastes. A lot of what constitutes British humour is dry, sarcastic and self-depreciating.
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And this definitely applies to ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide,’ as a big part of the target of the humor is Arthur Dent’s (and hence humanity’s, since as a painfully average British Everyman he is a stand-in for humanity) sense of self-importance in an uncaring universe.
 
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I take great comfort in God’s Final Message to His Creation, from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (the fourth book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy):

“We apologize for the inconvenience.”
 
Vonsalza said:
Easy.

Have you tried pronouncing all those native Welsh city names when something happens there?

Impossible…
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I left Wales very many years ago. But I was back there recently visiting family and I couldn’t work out why people couldn’t understand me. Then I realised it was the Aussie twang. So I had to consciously slip back into the ‘old’ South Wales accent as oposed to the New South Wales one.
 
After thinking about this a while I may have an answer.
  1. Most of the stuff I mentioned is from the 80s. Everyone was edgy back then. WH40K in particular wears its 80s edginess on its sleeve and cranks it up to the point of self-parody.
The 2005 new Dr who episode in question was the one where the TARDiS’s medical nano machines escape and start fusing gas masks to people’s heads and turning them into zombies. Excellently creepy, but the line I mentioned in the OP just killed the series as a whole for me.
  1. Melancholy has been a Germanic hallmark since the earliest written records of our barbarian ancestors. Look at Beowulf. It’s dripping with melancholy fatalism. It’s actually a fascinating tug-of-war between the Christian writer’s more hopeful comments and the pessimistic pagan story he’s trying to preserve. In light of that I guess I should be asking why Americans are the exception.
  2. There’s also the secularism. America is headed in that direction as well, and I can already feel the existential angst looming in the cultural shadows. Maybe I have a bad anecdotal experience since I work with anti-social IT industry types, and have spent a good part of my online socializing on Reddit (just deleted my account there to get away) where they’re monomaniacally obsessed with STEM and are even more cynical and nihilistic.
 
I love Brit Tele. I like to watch a lot of Masterpiece Classics, like Mr. Selfridge, Foyle’s War, Midsommer Murders, Indian Summers to name a few. I also love old British sitcoms like “Fawlty Towers.”

If you don’t like dry wit, I could understand why you might want to pass. I think the acting, at least the programs I watch is as good or better than a lot of American TV.

I am not seeing anti-religious bias, unless you are talking about the fact there is no religion at all. There is far more sex and violence on American TV, by leaps and bounds. I don’t run across nearly as much on British TV. I don’t pay, and wouldn’t pay a dime for American television. I am however, considering a subscription to Britbox.
 
The British are conformists, we take pride in being middle of the road but that’s really just a kind of conformism. Listen out when you hear two Brits arguing for common lines like “I think a lot of people would say …”. The fact that this is considered a compelling reason that something is to be believed tells you something about the British.

Newman called England the paradise of small men and the purgatory of big men. I think that means we pull the big men down, keep them in their place, and offer the little guy a fighting chance - “a sense of fair play”. That sounds like a good thing but it isn’t necessarily. It means that Brits find it very hard to pleased for somebody else’s achievement (there’s a great essay on this by William Hazlitt) - the exception to this rule is the “underdog”, who is always to be supported. For same reason, Brits also find it hard to take a compliment (ask anyone who has ever worked with a Brit) - the exception being when he has taken part as an amateur, then he is allowed to enjoy his achievement as an underdog.

The other thing is all the rules - so many rules! Foreigners are not generally expected to follow them but Brits are and it leaves us agonising over what’s the right thing to do in any given social situation.

So why are Brits so ironic? Because irony is subversive. There are so many rules that we have to follow, and they don’t all make sense, and some of them are quite harsh. We can’t rebel because we’re conformists, and also “most people would say” rebellion is a little extreme, and we certainly don’t do extreme. But irony is small, sometimes barely noticeable, and this is one of the few socially acceptable ways to express dissatisfaction.

As for atheism, my own personal view is that Protestantism played itself out in Britain and reached its natural conclusion, a sort of reductio ad absurdum.
 
Apparently the mods thought my joke was offensive and removed my post, even though it’s almost identical to what others have been posting.
 
Let’s face it, they just don’t have the Irish wit and personality. This is why they treated them so horribly.
 
Hey sorry for the late reply. I don’t see 40k as anti-Catholic although I can see how that impression comes across. The myriad Crusades undertaken by the Imperium and the Imperial Inquisition may carry out evil acts, but they are always entirely necessary for humanity to survive. I’m not overly familiar with the history of the real world crusades or the Spanish Inquisition but I’m sure that at the time it was considered necessary.
 
tomarin said:
[…] having almost within living memory been the most powerful and influential country on the planet with vast far-flung colonies and a huge navy yet having been downgraded significantly after World War II
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It’s not so much that we’ve had to give up being the most powerful country on the planet that annoys us. It’s more that we’ve had to hand that rôle on to the Americans of all people. 😉
 
I have been there and it is the longest name for a town in the whole world. Or at least used to be.
 
Thats right, it roughly translates as : “St Mary’s Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the Red Cave” .😉
 
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