Welcome back to engVid with me, Benjamin. Today I'm going to be telling you, sharing
with you a few of our more outlandish traditions here in the UK. For a very small island we've
got lots of weird and wacky things going on. So, I'm going to be trying to explain what
some of these are. What's this video good for? This is understanding the sort of culture,
getting underneath the skin of it, and really exploring the culture and traditions of the
UK. Okay, let's go.
The "Last Night of the Proms". Not everyone is a fan of this. The Proms is a long line
of concerts that go on in the Royal Albert Hall in London just near Hyde Park every summer.
The last night is obviously the last of those concerts. And lots of people wave their Union
Jacks and sing along to slightly jingoist-... Jingoistic, which means a funny sense of pride
in one's nation. Patriotic songs, like: "Rule Britannia", etc.
"The Monster Raving Loony Party". So whereas this is very traditional and very straight
down the line, this is pretty left side, pretty... pretty out there. "Monster Raving Loony Party"
was started by a member at the aristocracy called "The Screaming Lord Sutch", he was
some sort of Earl of Harrow or something like this. Some of his manifestos: "Vote for insanity".
Now, whereas the main political parties orientate themselves in terms of left, right, or center
according to their political beliefs, Screaming Lord Sutch said that his political position
was: "Sitting, facing forward". Okay? I used short hand in my annotation at the board,
here: "Pol" short for "Political". But he has achieved some success. These are three
policies that they came up with that have all been adopted in the UK. First of all,
we have a vote for anyone aged 18 or above. Before that I believe it was 21. "Pet passports",
we now have pass... Dogs can have a passport and travel abroad. And we do have all-day
pubs. So, it was probably a bit of a joke to start with: "Let's have all-day pubs",
because they're only open in the evening 30 years ago, and now you can go in from 11 o'clock.
Not to be endorsed whole-heartedly, though, all-day drinking. Right.
"Baked Beans Museum", yes, we do have a museum for baked beans. It's in Port Talbot, number...
Port Talbot in Wales, and it's ranked number 4 out of 15 attractions in Port Talbot.
"The Ugly Face Competition", yes, we have an annual competition for gurning, going...
Pulling weird faces. It happens in September in Cumbria which is in the northwest of the
United Kingdom.
"Morris dancing", this looks a little bit like this. Okay? I wave handkerchiefs, and
I would have bells down here on my feet. So waving your handkerchief, okay? This has been
a tradition in the UK since 1448, that's the first recorded date of Morris dancing. I witnessed
it more recently. In Suffolk there's a village there called Middleton, every Boxing Day they
have a precession of the wren. It's quite strange. Basically they put sort of... They
black themselves out and there is a sort of march of a dead wren to celebrate some sort
of mid-winter pagan festival.
"The boat race", this is an annual event that happens in the middle of April. It's the...
Is it 8-man team or 8-lady team? From Oxford and Cambridge. It goes from I believe Hammersmith
Bridge to Putney Bridge, and the winner of the team, they get to throw the person who's
been steering, the cox, into the river. Okay? So that happens every year. If you're watching
this from Holland, I believe you're quite adept, you're quite good at doing similar
activities yourselves.
Now, I know Britain are doing quite well in Olympics these days, but back in the 1970s,
we struggled, and there was a couple of people who were sat outside a pub in Derbyshire,
which in the middle of the country, it's in the Midlands and they were like: "Aw, we're
not winning anything at the Olympics. We've got, you know... All our teams are doing terribly.
Let's invent a sport we can actually win at." So they invented "toe wrestling". The problem
was that in 1976 a Canadian came along and won the competition. They were so upset by
this that they decided to call the whole thing off for a few years; they went into a sulk.
But I'm pleased to say that toe wrestling is now back on, and if you go out to Derbyshire
maybe you can find it yourselves.
"Bog snorkelling", so this is a very English kind of idea or British idea, the idea that
you would go swimming through a kind of nasty, muddy, long puddle. Bog, mud, okay? Dirt.
Snorkel going up so that you can breathe whilst you are under water. This was invented in
Wales in 1976. And if you have a look at the pictures of bog snorkelling, you'll see that
people wear fancy dress, all sorts of unusual costumes. There was one that I particularly
liked where... Obviously the person is swimming like this, but they had a boat on top of them.
So all that you could see as the person was going along was this boat going along the
water. Now, you're not allowed to use swimming strokes, and no breast stroke, no front crawl,
no back stroke, you kind of just have to sort of push your way through. And it's 60 yards,
you go there and then you go back. Sounds quite fun, give it a go. Right.
The next in our sort of calendar of strange events: "Guy Fawkes night". So this commemorates,
this remembers when Guido Fawkes, the Catholic revolutionary-shall we say?-tried to explode
the Houses of Parliament with his gun-powder plot in 1605. Now, at the beginning of November-well-remembered,
Benjamin-we make a model of Guy Fawkes. Okay? And we put him on a bonfire and we set fire
to him, and we say: "Remember, remember the 5th of November, gun powder, treason, and
plot. And we never will forget", dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. So it's quite strange. There's always an odd
feeling as you see this person, this effigy being burnt. Right.
Some vocab. What I thought I'd do is provide a few different ways of saying: "Weird". You
could say: "Unusual". Okay? So we have "usual" means ordinary, I put the prefix in, it means
not ordinary. "Quirky", this is more for sort of conversational English, the word "quirky",
but it means, again, weird. Slightly eccentric. "Odd", I wouldn't want to be called odd by
someone. It's a little bit insensitive. "The odd one out" means the one you would... The
one that is different. "Odd", different. "Bizarre", "bizarre" means strange. "Oh, that's so bizarre,
it's so kind of... That's unusual. It's different". "Un peu bizarre", so we use that word in French,
too. "Creepy", this has a slightly dark connotation. If something's creepy, it makes you... You
get a bad feeling about it. "Curious", okay? So there's a play on the west end at the moment
called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. "Curious" means unusual. "Eccentric",
so this would be a good word to describe the Monster Raving Loony Party. They're very left
field, very... They're very, very unusual. "Far-out", this is an American composite word,
"far-out", again, it means weird, strange. "Kooky", this is not a word you would use
in your writing. Again, meaning weird. "Magical", this is a sort of a polite way of saying that
someone is odd. They're magical. Okay? Their head's in the clouds maybe slightly. "Mysterious",
and we've got the noun, "mystery". Okay? We want to know, we want to wonder, we want to
imagine what it is. "Mysterious". Okay? So what does "mysterious" mean? It means having
something unknown about it. Okay? We don't fully understand. "An oddball", "an oddball"
is probably slightly more familiar than "odd", it's slightly more affectionate, slightly
nicer, but it still means very strange. "Outlandish", this is a good word, this is a word that you
could use in a piece of writing. "Outlandish", again, it means strange. Okay? Maybe think
of out of the land, it's kind of pretty far, far out. "Peculiar", "peculiar", okay? This
is another good formal word, here. And, again, it means strange.
Hope you've enjoyed. Why not have a go at the quiz now? I'm sure it'll be a little bit
of fun for you. And do come and visit our wonderful and strange island, and maybe attend
one of these. I'm sure it'll be fun. Until next time.