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Thinking Allowed

The BBC Radio 4 soap, The Archers, which was set up after the second world war to provide public information to provide advice and guidance to rural communities and farmers, has recently featured a big story on fraud. It’s chance, although I wouldn’t bet on it, because, unlike some of the poker playing Archers’ characters who are involved in the current narrative, I’m not a betting person, but the current storyline coincides with Radio 4’s series on 'White-Collar Crime' on Thinking Allowed.

This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case

This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case. The main protagonist, businessman and wheeler dealer Matt Crawford, has a chequered past and has come up the hard way, unlike his clearly middle-class partner, Lillian, who is not involved in the case, except through her emotional relationship with him. Lillian is a member of the eponymous, largely affluent, Archer family of local farmers, who also mostly occupy the moral high ground, as well as owning much of it: she is also the widow of a wealthy man. Matt has struggled and, whilst on the right side of the law, was tolerated by the local land consortium, Borsetshire Land, but having transgressed, or at least been caught, he is marginalised. In spite of Lillian’s hopes for leniency, he has been sent to prison; ‘Take them down!’ said the judge and listeners were faced with the speed of sentencing and its finality, however well-off the offender.

Matt and his business partner at TWJ bank, Stephen Chalkman (Chalky), receive custodial sentences, and Lillian is left weeping loudly. Matt not only has the reassurance of her fidelity, but also that of earlier storylines, where characters with much more clearly working-class credentials have been reinstated into the community following release from prison. For example, Susan Carter was imprisoned as a result of protecting her brother, the infamous Clive Horrobin, armed robber and hostage-taker, at an armed raid on the Ambridge village shop. Susan currently manages the shop and post office and plays a key role in the community. However, such stories are haunted by class. Matt was never quite accepted; Susan is just the best of a rough family, a fragile step away from social exclusion.

Soaps often engage with social issues, usually with dramatic hyperbole but The Archers offers some more nuanced, complex coverage. The programme, which has a tradition of dealing with big issues: from racism, the rural economy and economic recession to dementia, family breakdown and sibling rivalry, does not limit itself to rural or agricultural matters. It deals with big issues (Woodward, 2009), such as class, family, kinship, place, diversity and inequality, which intersect in different ways, through the lens of personal experience.

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena like white-collar crime in complex ways. As the sociologist C.Wight Mills argued (The Sociological Imagination), this is what sociology does; it demonstrates the powerful interconnections between private troubles and public issues through the sociological imagination. This is an everyday story of the personal and the public and political which has wider resonance and demonstrates, albeit inadvertently, the power of thinking sociologically.

Find out more

• The Big Issues, by Kath Woodward, Routledge, 2009
• The Sociological Imagination, by C Wright Mills, Harmondsworth, Penguin (1970), 1st edition 1959
• Get The Archers podcast
• Serious Fraud Office help The Archers with their inquiries
• Join the discussion on white-collar crime

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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The facts appear all too depressingly familiar. The behaviour of Brits abroad used to be more of a national embarrassment during the silly season but now it is becoming more of an all year round problem.

Drinking in a bar

At home we seem to binge drink all-year round, if we are to believe the more sensational reports of the tabloid red tops. Britain now has binge drinking etched throughout its national rock. Now our binge drinking culture – not simply confined to holidays, football matches, and stag and hen parties - has become an export industry as wave upon wave of British tourists head for the Mediterranean and the urban centres of old and new Europe opened up by low-price air fares. The British binge drinking culture has even reached Dubai where a surge in British arrests has been reported since 2007.

Newspaper headlines tackle the problem with gusto and relish!

• 'Brits behaving badly: they came, they drank, they peed'
• 'Brit teenagers are the binge-drinking champions of Europe'
• 'Curse of the boozy Britons'
• 'Arrests up among British travelling abroad'
• 'Wish you weren‘t here, Greece tells tourists'

In late July this year the Foreign Office urged UK holidaymakers to curb their alcohol consumption and avoid the risks of travelling abroad. The campaign warned Brits that there was 'another side to paradise' and drew attention to the dangers they may encounter. For some it could be a night in the cells. For others it could mean hospital, or worse. This week, in Greece, a Greek woman was accused of setting fire to a British tourist after he allegedly pulled down his trousers in front of her. Drink less and you improve your prospects of not becoming a victim is the Foreign Office mantra.

I have friends who plan their holidays around those times when it is more likely that their historic cultural destination will not be invaded by drunken British tourists. I am always impressed on holiday in Italy, especially in Sardinia, how different cultures generate completely acceptable behaviour in young and old alike rather than the boorish British excess of rowdy drunkenness. Is it any wonder that our European neighbours are becoming increasingly more unwelcoming?

The Foreign Office campaign, aimed mainly at 18-30 holidaymakers, distributed leaflets and posters across the tourist hot spots of Europe, especially new destinations such as the Baltic States and Turkey, and the more familiar sun-seeking paradises of Spain and Greece.The leaflets urge holidaymakers to 'know their limits'. Flyers, beer mats and business cards reading ‘If you drink too much, things can get out of control’ have been handed out to British tourists on Greek islands as part of the campaign.

The Foreign Office has also funded English lessons for police officers in Greece, where 70 per cent of consulate cases involve British tourists who have got into difficulty, including in May this year, a group of men dressed in Nun habits who were arrested for baring their bottoms in Crete. According to Foreign Office data, 16 to 20-year olds represent a third of all Britons visiting Greece, but account for more than 70 per cent of Britain’s annual 800-900 consular cases there. Even tee-shirt companies have muscled in on the market.

Greece’s conservative government vowed to clean up resorts last year, saying much drink-related misconduct was due to profit-hungry bar owners supplying tourists with drinks adulterated with industrial alcohol. This export industry works both ways. The downside to a thriving local economy fueled by British tourist currency is the problems which often come with drunken behaviour, and the cost of coping with it, which according to one authoritative source now is as high as £100bn a year.

A range of European capitals have also suffered during 2009. Historic monuments seem to attract some of the worst activity. On August 6^th the Mayor of the Latvian capital of Riga added his name to a long list of exasperated civic leaders, when he said, after a group of British tourists urinated against the city’s Monument of Freedom: ‘stag parties urinating against the country’s most revered national monument was particularly offensive’.

This episode is yet another example of the way some British tourists show disrespect to other cultures. The Monument to Freedom commemorates Latvian dead in the struggle for independence and is a symbol of resistance during Soviet rule. ‘It’s sacred to Latvians’, explained the Mayor, ‘even the Soviets daren’t touch it.’ And if that is good enough for the Soviets, no enemy to alcoholic excess themselves, it should be good enough for the rest of us. Riga is just one destination in new Europe opened up by cheap flights to old Europe. Most of the tourists who visit east European capitols are British. The exasperated mayor of Riga concluded: ‘If we had other tourists, then British visitors who **** about all of the time would not be as noticeable.’

The latest Foreign Office data published in 2008 shows the scale of the problem. As tourist destinations widen so too does the problem of British drinking behaviour. Arrests in Spain and Greece for binge drinking are rapidly increasing. In France, British arrests rose by over 42 per cent in a single year and in Spain there was a 33 per cent increase.

What are the reasons for these increasing tends? No doubt they are culturally and socially rooted, and complex. The Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) published research this year suggesting the problem is a domestic one. We are simply exporting abroad a British phenomenon. In the last 10 years binge drinking in the UK among girls, for example, has increased so much that the UK now ranks second to Denmark in the girl binge drinking European league table. IAS estimate the cost of British drinking behaviour abroad now exceeds 125 billion Euros a year.

Another survey by the health charity Developing Patient Partnerships (DPP) revealed over a quarter of Britons drank alcohol with the sole intention of ‘getting drunk’, and the proportion doubled for those in the 18-24 year old age group. The IAS report recommends raising taxation, and raising the price of alcohol, curbing the power of supermarkets to sell strong alcohol cheaply, ending happy hours, placing greater investment in public education and increasing voluntary partnerships to ensure a greater understanding and respect for overseas cultures. In the UK alone, Government figures suggest that between 5 and 9 million UK children are living in families damaged by alcohol while nearly 10,000 UK deaths occur each year to bystanders and passengers from drink-driving.

Of course, Britain is not alone of course in having a drink problem. Alcohol misuse is a problem in many states in the European Union. But I do not see groups of European nationals indulging in group alcoholic excess while holidaying in Britain. Alcohol fuelled anti-social behaviour seems increasingly attached to British tourism. The victims can be the perpetrators but more often than not it is the host community that has to bear the full impact.

Find out more: Alcohol and human health

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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I often listen to sport on the radio in the car; my preference is for Test Match Special, when it’s on, but I do listen to football.

I am not alone in this; the average UK motorist apparently listens to football on the radio three times a month. 21% do so  every week and over 6% do so every day, which is two million people all tuning in to football daily as they drive. However, sport, at least not in all its forms, may not necessarily be good for your health. Listening to football commentary on the radio while you are driving could be dangerous and lead to accidents, according to a report commissioned by esure, the car insurance company. 

The research, carried out by the University of Leicester and published in a report called Football Focus, received media attention on 27 May 27, the day of the Champions League Final.

Football is emotional; there’s no doubt about that. Sport elicits powerful commitment and the thought of fans extending the exuberance and distress of the terraces to their driving practices is alarming.

Young man in a car, with raised fist.
[image © copyright Photos.com]

This research suggests that the behaviour of fans is very different from casual listeners, who do not adjust their behaviour behind the wheel in such extreme ways (tail-gating, erratic acceleration and sudden lane changes). I have, for a long time wondered about the embodied responses of spectatorship, for example in being a spectator at the game, especially, in the case of boxing, which I have written about in my book, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity, the i of the tiger (published by Routledge), where being at the fight is a very different experience from the more sanitised spectatorship of pay-for-view television.

However, I have also noted the physical reactions of the sporting follower who is listening at a distance, especially in the case of football with its distinctive style of commentary. I have felt disquiet as the rising crescendo of commentary increases my heart rate and seems to implicate the embodied listener in the waves of emotion evoked in the reporting of the game, even  when I care little for the outcome and my team is not involved at all. 

Sport is sensational, not only in the sense of media hyperbole - it appeals to and implicates all the senses of everyone involved.

The voice of the commentary could itself be a part of the total experience of sport. The research distinguishes between the fan and the uncommitted listener, but I think that there may be something more in the synthesis of the embodied experience that is particular to sport and specific to some sports, especially the genre of football commentary. It is clear that anxiety and exhilaration might lead to other embodied practices, such as accelerating.

This research demonstrates that it is not only sport, on the pitch, and spectatorship, at the ground, that is embodied; so too is the empathy and identification that people have with sport. As I demonstrate in another book, Embodied Sporting Practices (published by Palgrave Macmillan), sport is not only all about bodies, about embodied sporting practices (that is, what sort of physical activities make up what we call sport) it is also about the interaction between everyone involved, including those listening in their cars.  The research also indicates that sport is sensational, not only in the sense of media hyperbole - it appeals to and implicates all the senses of everyone involved.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts