operas have been prime conveyors of ideas about the major varieties of English identity for decades. Unsurprisingly the North and South dominate: London has EastEnders, Yorkshire Emmerdale, Manchester Coronation Street. It’s perhaps just as well that the Midlands no longer has a major evening TV soap to its name – let’s face it, the woolly-hat-wearing simpleton Benny in Crossroads wasn’t doing the region’s image any good. These days, of course, reality shows are as integral to our sense of identity as soaps and, in so far as they are geographically defined, the North and South again rule the roost: Desperate Scousewives, The Only Way Is Essex, Educating Essex, Educating Yorkshire, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Finishing School for Girls, Geordie Shore … Industry myth has it that a novice producer from the Black Country suggested The Only Way Is Wolverhampton but before the ITV2 commissioners could green-light the project their sides split and they literally died laughing. The Midlands, it would seem, just doesn’t have the necessary clout to carry a reality show.
When, against massive odds, one of the Midlands’ many beauty spots does make it onto TV, its actual location is often obscured. For instance, a recent episode of BBC2’s Town with Nicholas Crane was devoted to Ludlow, the Shropshire idyll celebrated by John Betjeman as ‘probably the loveliest town in England’. It was described in the opening moments as ‘landlocked’ – the key attribute of the Midlands, after all – but the term ‘Midlands’ was never actually deployed in the programme: the BBC probably thought that kind of dirty language inappropriate for the show’s genteel target audience. Instead Ludlow was described as being ‘on the Welsh border’, which is true, although if a similar programme about Sheffield failed to mention that it was in the North but stated instead that it was ‘on the border of the Midlands’ it would cause uproar among the locals. Viewers might have come away thinking Ludlow lovely but the association wouldn’t readily have been made with the broader idea of the Midlands. And that’s a real problem for the area.
A friend of mine with a deep knowledge of the broadcasting industry thinks the BBC’s neglect of the Midlands is structural. ‘The Beeb is set up in a way that is institutionally biased against the Midlands!’ he laughs. ‘It’s spent a lot of money in recent years to get more regional television in, so it now has all these designated regions: there’s London, the West and Wales (centred on Bristol), Manchester and the North, Scotland and Northern Ireland. And all of these blocs have pots of money earmarked for them, but the Midlands doesn’t fall into any of the remits. Hence it’s almost impossible to get anything commissioned there.’
Perhaps it would be a kindness simply to abolish the Midlands. That’s precisely what one academic map did recently. Tellingly, that map was created in Sheffield and displayed in Manchester, cities that are both – as if you didn’t already know it; and how could you not, given that region’s genius for self-promotion? – in the North of England.
Ah, the North, where they eat dinner at midday as God (and Geoffrey Boycott) intended, say ‘bath’ not ‘baarth’, speak their minds freely and plainly without recourse to any circumlocutory Southern waffle, where lager is a girls’ drink, blah-di-blah. You certainly know where you are with the characterful North. It’s not much of a place to live – ask all those BBC types who have been dragging their feet over their recent enforced relocation to Salford, the MediaCity development being one of the most flagrant bits of social engineering in recent English history – but you have to admit that, as a piece of branding, ‘The North’ has real genius, starting with the fearsome granite firmness of the name itself. The words ‘I’m a Northerner’ pack so much punch and communicate a ton of attitude. No wonder people from cities as radically different as Manchester and Newcastle are happy to share an overarching, aggregated ‘Northern’ identity. The Midlands, by contrast, has never really gone in for that sort of branding. Around Birmingham, the tourist-board people like to talk about the region as ‘The Heart of England’. But try saying ‘I’m a Heart of Englander’ and it just sounds naff. It might work as a piece of signposting for tourists but it’ll never catch on where it really counts, among Midlanders. As a clever acquaintance suggests: ‘The Midlands is less a discrete geographical category and more a state of mind. Roundabouts. Retail parks.’ If that’s the case, that’s hardly going to pull in the tourists, or provide the locals with a proud sense of belonging. The linguistic associations of the word ‘Midlands’ itself are no better: fair-to-middling, caught in the middle, middle management, midlife crisis. An alliteration-loving friend recently relocated to Northants. ‘I’m growing fond of the Midlands,’ he texted me. ‘Must be middle age setting in.’ See? Midlands/middle age. The connections made at the verbal level are nothing short of lethal.
* * *
The following Saturday we get in the car to head for Mansfield and the Northern propaganda begins even before we’re out of London. The motorway signpost at Archway roundabout immediately announces ‘THE NORTH’ in block capitals – if you take the M1, you must be going to the North, it tells you. Note that it doesn’t just say ‘North’ – a direction – but The North, a destination. The message is repeated, in the same bold typography, all the way up the motorway, next to each and every place name. Watford? ‘The NORTH.’ Luton? ‘The NORTH.’ Only when you get to the edge of Milton Keynes – where the region actually begins: there’s no advance warning – does ‘The MIDLANDS’ finally get a mention. And then, as suddenly as it appeared, the word vanishes again, so that the names of all the major towns and cities of the East Midlands – Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham – are unerringly accompanied by the words ‘The NORTH’. No wonder a lot of Southerners think the North begins as soon as you leave London: that’s what the road signs tell you.
I’m not put off, though. We’ve come to discover what it means to be a Midlander and we’re darn well going to find out, good or bad.
Neil Young’s ‘Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere’ is playing on the car stereo as we finally cross the border into Northamptonshire. I give a loud cheer.
‘Is Dad all right?’ Hector asks his mother, who raises a quizzical eyebrow in my direction.
‘I was cheering,’ I explain, ‘to indicate that we are home. Well, I am home. We are in the Midlands, my ancient homeland. We are now surrounded’ – I wave an arm airily to left and right, trying not to lose control of the car as I do so – ‘by my tribespeople.’
That quizzical Parisian eyebrow stays raised. ‘I didn’t realise you had such a sense of cultural belonging. We’ve been married thirteen years and you’ve never mentioned your tribespeople before,’ my wife says.
‘Let’s just say I’m rediscovering who I really am,’ I sniff.
* * *
‘What is civilisation?’ asked the great art historian Kenneth Clark (not to be confused with the great Midland politician Ken Clarke) in the opening moments of his famous 1960s BBC arts series Civilisation. ‘I don’t know … But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.’ Clark, standing with Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris peering over his left shoulder, wasn’t taking much of a chance when he made this statement. But would he have been able to say the same if he’d been plonked in the middle of Mansfield market square one Saturday afternoon in autumn?
Probably not. Mansfield has recently been subjected to a gruelling bout of ‘regeneration’, with results that are largely indistinguishable from ruination. Most of the big commercial operations have relocated to the retail parks dotted around the ring road, leaving much of the town centre boarded up. Pubs (‘Gerrem in!’ is an essential item of local dialect), pawnbrokers and betting shops dominate the historic market square, which is so run-down that even the Poundshop has closed down, or so it appears. (There’s a Pound World that’s still open around the corner, mind, not to mention Savers, another budget store.) The most characterful shop here is Eden Mobility: mobility scooters are enormously popular in Mansfield. If you don’t watch where you’re going, you’re likely to get mown down by one in the market square.
Not that Mansfield is without history: it actually received its royal charter as far back