For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the American Revolution. This has a lot to do with the fact that I am a proud native Virginian, just as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson. I was raised less than two hours away from the site of Henry’s fiery “liberty or death” speech, and less than an hour from the site of Cornwallis’s surrender to Washington at Yorktown. I grew up spending summer days walking the streets of Colonial Williamsburg. Even at a young age I was enthralled by the history of the commonwealth and our nation’s struggle for independence.
Which is why I have found myself in the midst of an internal struggle; a real and true obsession with the culture of our late oppressors, the British, versus my inborn urge to remain fiercely American, even when choosing my daily diversions. The truth is, I’ve spent my life appreciating the entertainment exports from across the pond, but only lately have I found myself debating the merits of two cultures who so long ago battled over certain inalienable rights.
First of all, I was raised on a steady diet of Disney; the live action films as well as the animated classics. The best of these, for the most part coming from the 1950s and 1960s, strongly showcase Britain’s acting and voice talents. While most of these films were produced in Britain purely as a tax dodge, they served as my introduction to the varied accents and cadences of the Queen’s English. These sounds became as familiar to me as the lazy mid-Atlantic drawl of my family gatherings and Great Bridge peers. To this day, I could listen to David Tomlinson sing-speak the phone book for hours on end and be perfectly content.
Many of my favorite books as a child were also decidedly British. Authors like A.A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling, and C.S. Lewis introduced me to traditions like tea and Boxing Day, of which I almost immediately became jealous. Stories like The Secret Garden made me wish my family lived on the moors, because obviously everyone who lived there had wild animals for pets and huge houses with secret rooms. While in general I can’t stand rainy weather for more than a day or two at a time, stories like these made it seem like there could be no better place I could possibly dream of living.
As a teenager, I discovered plenty of other British staples: Dickens, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Monty Python, and Dylan Thomas (God bless the Welsh), and many, many other British artisans, but I was not yet ready to admit my problem. I could appreciate these artists guilt-free because they are praised universally. My problem was about to compound significantly through the medium of television.
I never really followed television (other than Nick at Nite reruns and Seinfeld) until I fell in love with The West Wing and subsequently found myself in a downward spiral of keeping up with numerous shows of varying quality. This problem became even worse once I purchased a TiVo, subscribed to Netflix, and discovered ways to access TV shows over the internet. It was here that my problems began in earnest.
Netflix led to the start of a love affair with the BBC. By the time I had to cancel my subscription because of the dent graduate school put in my viewing time, I would estimate that BBC shows took up more than half of my queue. It started with The Office, then MI-5 (or Spooks), and eventually I made it around to Doctor Who.
“New” Who has acted as a gateway drug to “Classic” Who – essentially 25 years worth of television to catch up with. And not all of Doctor Who is award-winning television, either. A lot of it is really quite far from it. And while I’ve always been a science fiction fan, the sheer British-ness of Doctor Who is what really makes me love it. The dry humor, the historical perspective, and the locations all come together for this piece of purely British art that makes my little heart pitter-patter with Anglo-Saxon joy.
Following British television like Doctor Who has only made my Anglophilia worse. It’s sparked an interest in other British shows, British actors, British authors, and on and on and on. I spend time looking up British slang on the web to understand Skins. I bemoan the value of the dollar against the pound, mostly because I can’t afford to shop on amazon.co.uk. When I’m feeling blue, I fix a cup of tea and hope the local PBS affiliate is playing a rerun of As Time Goes By. And the more I watch, the more the guilt increases. I can just hear the Father of Our Country rolling over in his grave, a mere four hours north of here.
The fact is, there’s no turning back at this point. This problem is one that will stay with me forever. So while I continue to make my annual pilgrimages to the commonwealth’s historical sites, read books about the Revolution, and feel a huge sense of pride any time I get to tell someone I’m from Virginia, I’ll have to learn to reconcile my love of country with my love of those gorgeous accents, jokes about the prime minister, and tea.
