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The
Universal Pictures film The Riot Club set for release in September 2014 is a
film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh
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Laura Wade: ‘It’s the last time they can let their
hair down’
Laura Wade’s play
Posh ushered in the Tory government in 2010. Is the film version, The Riot
Club, here to bury the Bullingdon boys’ era of inequality? She explains why she
feels sorry for Cameron and co
Emine Saner
Laura Wade certainly has lucky timing. Her
play Posh opened in 2010, less than a month before the general election, and
the film version, renamed The Riot Club, has just come out in the runup to
another one. Centering on the despicable activities of the 10 members of an Oxford university
drinking club in the upstairs room of a country pub, it’s probably a reminder
that David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, all members of the
infamous Bullingdon club, could do without.
Wade began adapting the play for the screen
between the sell-out first run at the Royal
Court and its transfer to the West
End two years later (with impeccable timing again, a month after
the MP Nadine Dorries complained about the “arrogant posh boys” running the
country). “The 2010 production had the boys living under a Labour government
and feeling like their backs were up against the wall because of that,” says
Wade. “By 2012, that had to change – we had moved into a Tory government by
then, so it was more about the boys feeling that, despite the fact their people
were in power, they were still feeling disempowered or they lived in a world
that didn’t really understand them.”
When Posh opened, it was described as a
leftist call to arms, but Wade says she always felt that wasn’t quite accurate
– besides, she’s far too careful and nuanced to declare outright class war. “I
think that makes it sound rather soapboxy and I didn’t think it was,” she says.
“It was certainly something that aimed to ask questions about the behaviour of
wealthy and privileged people. I feel quite happy to be asking whether there
are certain ways of behaving with the privilege that your life has given you that
might be less helpful to the rest of society.” Also inescapable, and
uncomfortable, was the fact that, for all their revolting views - and
ultimately heinous acts that play out in that room of the country pub, the boys
were actually rather fun – their jokes were funny, they were clever and
charming. “I’ve had these boys living in my head for seven years now,” she says
with a laugh. “But it’s quite entertaining. There are lots of knob gags. It
helps that I have the sense of humour of an eight-year-old boy.”
Wade, whose name is always mentioned in
pieces on talented young female playwrights, started writing Posh in 2007, the
year that famous photograph of Bullingdon club members came out, showing
Cameron, Johnson and privileged others, all floppy hair and supreme confidence.
She was interested in the drinking societies, “because of the idea of a group
of young men who would know that they were likely, after college, to end up in
quite powerful positions. It was interesting to me that they had a real sense of
their own history, their family history and where they stood in terms of that
continuum. They are existing at a time when, in a sense, they and their
families are the least powerful they’ve ever been, so what was it like for the
boys of that generation? And it being a long way from my own experience [Wade
is state-school, non-Oxbridge educated], it was anthropologically interesting.
What makes people behave like that?”
What did she come up with? A sense of
entitlement, and the knowledge that the damage (in life, as in the play, venues
are trashed) could be magicked away with a big cheque? “It’s partly youth, and
that’s often the excuse given for it. But also the idea that’s expressed in the
film that college is the last time when they can really let their hair down
because they know that later on in life there will be people looking at them.
It felt that there was quite a lot of pressure on the boys, both academically
and from family and history. That’s not intended to excuse their behaviour, but
to explain it.”
The 2012 production came out after the
youth riots the previous summer. “What struck me during the last year was the
ton of bricks that came down on all the people who were involved,” Wade said at
the time. “It’s said that we all do silly things when we’re young, but some of
us get slapped in prison, and some of us don’t.”
When one character rants “I’m sick to
fucking death of poor people”, it seemed suitably dramatic back in 2010, but
now those in government have been accused, more with weary resignation, of
exactly that. “There seems to be a lot of political action over the past few
years that’s been about vilifying people who are unfortunate enough to need
benefits and things that are intended to stir up bad feeling among people.
Poverty ought to be considered a misfortune rather than a moral failing.”
The other striking thing is the misogyny –
the young men hire an escort and expect her to perform oral sex on them; when
she refuses they consider raping the pub landlord’s daughter. Again, back in
2010, it seemed shocking; now, in the midst of a so-called rape culture, it
seems horrifyingly prescient. “It seemed, when writing the characters, that
they had so little experience of women. That scene in the play, which continues
to exist in the film, where they’ve hired an escort, and she turns up and she’s
a real person, they don’t know how to handle it because they haven’t spent enough
formative time with women to really treat them as rounded human beings. There’s
that kind of casual misogyny that underpins quite a lot of what they do.” In a
broader sense she can see that politically: “Recent policy has disadvantaged
women disproportionately.”
With this film, and Downton Abbey having
just begun its fifth series, what does she think the enduring appeal of the
upper classes is? “I think we’re fascinated by the idea of aristocracy,
particularly now when the structure of society has changed. I feel like Downton
is working up to the point where they all have to move out of the house, and it
goes over to the National Trust. I think it seems to appeal on a number of
different levels. It’s about a world that doesn’t exist any more but we imagine
ourselves into, whether we imagine ourselves as a below-stairs maid or one of
the daughters of the family.”
Against this class nostalgia, the wealth
gap widens, inequality seems ever more entrenched, and there doesn’t seem to be
a huge swell of anger about it. “No, it’s surprising, isn’t it?” says Wade.
“It’s surprising that people aren’t more up in arms about inequality. Maybe
it’s because everybody is so busy trying to keep their own head above water.”
Still, she seems at pains to find sympathy
for her characters. Isn’t that hard when, in the real world, the power networks
she writes about having worked so well, those young men of the dining clubs are
now presiding over public-sector reform, benefit cuts, the bedroom tax? “It
always, for me, comes down to empathy and how much you are able to understand
how other people with less privileged backgrounds get on,” she says. “If you
don’t have that experience yourself, what are you doing to find out about it? I
think the piece suggests that the boys in the club don’t understand, or take
the time to try to find out. It’s important for me not to blame anyone – we
don’t choose what background we come from, what school we go to – but it’s how
you choose to behave and use the lucky cards you’ve been dealt at birth
Posh Britain: will
they always lord it over us?
In new film The Riot Club, based loosely on the antics of the notorious
Bullingdon boys, a gaggle of toffs trash restaurants for larks. Who are these
people, how did they turn out like this – and what does it tell us about
privilege today?
Stuart
Jeffries
The posh,
like the poor only more noisily, are always with us. Consider the new film The
Riot Club. It is, you’d think, a devastating critique of Britain’s ruling
classes, an adaptation of state-school-educated dramatist Laura Wade’s 2010
play Posh, which, by dramatising the wretched roistering of a restaurant-ruining
university dining society closely resembling the real-life Bullingdon Club to
which so many of our current rulers belonged, skewered the sense of entitlement
to power of a privileged, wealthy, public school and Oxbridge elite. The play,
at least, was timely: it was staged just as that elite was about to become the
government and put its collective foot more firmly on the throat of the poor
than previous administrations.
When
Michael Billington reviewed Posh in 2010, he complained it was too implacable.
“[Wade’s] argument would be even stronger if it admitted that, even within the
ranks of the bluebloods, there were occasional spasms of doubt and decency.”
But what made Posh bad drama for Billington made it good politics (certainly if
you’re of a socialist persuasion): why dramatise the decency of the posh when
we, if only figuratively, should be strangling George Osborne with Boris
Johnson’s entrails?
But in that
shift from stage to screen the implacableness of that rage got lost. Instead of
evisceration, celebration. Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard reporting from
the Toronto
film festival, wrote: “[I]t scores an own goal; it comes on dressed as a
cheerleader for the left, then can’t help but defect.” The headline? “The PM
should love it.”
What happened?
The drama got co-opted by posh. It wasn’t just because the film is produced by
David Cameron’s one-time roommate and fellow Etonian Peter Czernin, though
you’d think that didn’t help. Czernin, incidentally, is a member of the Howard
de Walden family. His mother, Hazel, Baroness de Walden, is holder of the
400-year-old baronetcy created by Elizabeth I in 1597 for Thomas Howard for his
role in defeating the Spanish armada. In 2012, the family’s worth was estimated
to be £2.2bn, and family members, including Czernin, benefited from
multimillion dividends on the De Walden Estates properties in central London. Is Peter Czernin
posh? Certainly factors such as going to Eton, being able trace your
illustrious ancestors back to Tudor times, fattening your bank balance with the
proceeds of rents from your family’s central London property portfolio and having David
Cameron for a chum, don’t disqualify him.
Nor is The
Riot Club’s dismal political switcheroo explained by the fact that its stars
come from posh acting dynasties, though that probably doesn’t help either. One
of the leads in the film is Max Irons, son of Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons
(still celebrated for playing Oxbridge arse-kisser Charles Ryder in the 1981 TV
adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). Max attended the Dragon
School in Oxford (boarding fees per term: £8,980; day fees per term: £6,230),
as did so many other thespians – Tom Hiddlestone, Emma Watson, Hugh Laurie –
whom one wouldn’t balk at calling posh. Another lead is Freddie Fox, son of
Edward Fox and Joanna David, who attended and was expelled from Bryanston
(boarding fees per term: £11,162). Freddie, 25, incidentally, told the Radio
Times that he has taken to speaking with a Mancunian accent while working on
the Manchester-based TV series Cucumber: “I decided I was going to stay in the
accent until the job’s done. Of course, my parents hate it.”
But what
the preponderance of posh in The Riot Club throws into relief is the complaint,
now made almost weekly, that aspiring actors from disadvantaged backgrounds
can’t get a break. Dame Judi Dench has disclosed that she receives begging
letters from kids who can’t afford the cost of drama school training. David
Morrissey makes a similar complaint, arguing that creative industries have an
“intern culture” that is failing people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
In this
sense, acting is a microcosm of Britain,
one of the world’s most sclerotic, class-bound societies. Only 7% of Britain’s school-age population attend private
schools, but half the cabinet – including Cameron (Eton), Clegg (Wesminster)
and Osborne (St Paul’s)
– went to private schools. Politics and acting are just two professions fast
becoming what they weren’t – exclusive fiefs of daddy-bankrolled spawn.
Dench and
Morrissey have a good point. One way of addressing it would be if we stopped
making films about posh people starring posh people and produced by posh
people. Aspirant actors from disadvantaged backgrounds might get a toe-hold.
What was
most loathsome about The Riot Club is different from the foregoing. It’s the
betrayal of the rage that made the play worth seeing in the first place. In the
New Statesman recently, Cambridge
student Conrad Landin recalled taking part in a focus group as the film’s
makers tried to get a student perspective on the subject. He recalled the
film’s director Lone Scherfig asking them: “But aren’t these the people you’d
secretly quite like to be?” “‘No,’ I replied, aghast. ‘No,’ said several of the
other Cambridge
students in the room.” But that’s the narrative lie of posh: we hate them because
we want to be them, not because we want to eliminate them as a precondition to
becoming ourselves. Filled with Nietzschean ressentiment, teeming with
self-loathing, we project on to the Other (the Posh) what we aren’t and never
will be. Or, as Wade put it in an Observer interview: “We love watching rich
people behave badly. It has a sort of grisly fascination.” If that’s true, and
I doubt it, we have to kill that love: otherwise, if we watch stuff like The
Riot Club we bend the knee to a lucrative global industry that has a dual
function. Internationally, selling posh abroad (think: Downton Abbey, The Kings
Speech, The Queen) has helped reduce the balance of payments deficit that
resulted when the industries in which the working classes toiled were eliminated
by the Conservative governments of the 1980s. And domestically? Selling posh
helps reduces us to voyeurs of a pimped-up grotesquerie of toffs behaving
badly. Think: Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Made in Chelsea and now
The Riot Club.
The Riot
Club, then, recreates Brideshead’s deferential culture of fondness for posh at
the moment when we least need it. Why? Because the fledgling meritocracy of
postwar Britain
is getting slaughtered as the posh reassert control. Like many other rotten
things in this United
Kingdom, it started with Tony Blair. When
Blair, educated at Fettes – Scotland’s
poshest private school – was elected at the 1997 general election, he broke the
run of state-educated prime ministers. His predecessors – Major (Rutlish
grammar), Thatcher (Kesteven and Grantham girls), Callaghan (Portsmouth
Northern secondary), Wilson (Royds Hall grammar), Heath (Chatham House grammar)
– were state-school kids. In The Time Machine, HG Wells divided society into
the Uppers and Downers. For a while, between 1964 and 1997, the Downers started
to get the upper hand. Things can only get better, sang D: Ream as Blair was
elected in 1997. Arguably things have got worse – unless you’re posh.
Now the
Uppers are back in power – a cabinet teeming with Etonians, the standing
disgrace that is a posh clown as London’s
mayor. But this posh return to office is unsustainable: if the government, like
the police, fails to look like the society that it is supposed to serve, then
alienation from it and its claims to authority follows. This is a specifically
British problem, and one that, the safe money says, drove the movement for
Scottish independence.
One
laughable attempt to circumvent this problem is for our rulers to pretend to be
what they are not. It’s what Slavoj Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal. What
does that mean? It means Cameron presenting himself as blokey Dave in his polo
shirt, doing the dishes; it means George Osborne telling us we’re all in this
together (quite so: when you’ve been evicted because of the bedroom tax, or
come back from being ritually humiliated at the jobcentre, don’t you head off
to Corfu to cheer yourself up, chilling on the yacht of a Russian billionaire
chum?).
But what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne disavow
so vehemently (and their vehemence merely confirms what they disavow) is that
they are posh. That’s why, quite possibly, the photograph of Cameron posing
with his Bullingdon Club mates when he was an Oxford undergraduate was airbrushed from
media databases. The photographers, Oxford-based company Gillman and Soame,
made the “policy decision”, after the picture appeared in national newspapers,
not to allow any school photographs they own to be published. They denied then
that they had been pressurised to withdraw the picture by the Conservative
party, but some were sceptical. Columnist Peter Hitchens, for instance, told
Newsnight: “I think it tells us something about David Cameron that he doesn’t
much want us to know, that he is not the ordinary bloke that he claims to be.
That he is actually much grander and much more aristocratic than he has made
out.”
So what is posh? I know, I know – I can’t
believe I got this far through the article without defining my terms either.
But posh is hard to define, especially when we’re in a hall of mirrors in which
the posh disavow what they are and the goalposts of posh move so fast. Consider
the Queen. She’s posh, right? Well, yes, but less posh than she was. In her
1950 Christmas broadcast, for instance, when she said “had” it rhymed with
“bed”. Thirty years later, according to researchers at Australia’s Macquarie University
, her vowels had moved downmarket (or as the Mirror put it: “Er Madge don’t
talk so posh any more”).
Posh is also more difficult to define once
you realise that the term is relative. “Oh golly, oh gosh, come and lie on the
couch with a nice bit of posh from Burnham-on-Crouch,” sang Ian Dury on
Billericay Dickie. Really? Can you be posh and from Burnham-on-Crouch??
But real posh is something else. The
Guardian’s Etonian film critic Derek Malcolm got close to it once when told me
that his old school had conferred on him an “effortless sense of superiority”.
That, I suspect, is part of what it is to be posh: certainly my lifelong sense
of inferiority marks me out as Downer not Upper, non-U not U.
And then there is another definitional
problem. The posh don’t like the word posh. “Posh?” exclaims Templer
reprovingly to his wife in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, his
12-volume anatomising of 20th-century English posh. “Sweetie, what an awful word.
Please never use it in my presence again.”
And then there is the grubby industry of
wannabe-posh style fascists who make their pennies from unconvincingly
stipulating what posh is and how to become it. Apparently, you should never,
ever, say toilet. “In high society, the T word is worse than the F word,”
explained self-styled adjudicator of posh William Hanson. “Avoid using it at
all costs or prepare for social relegation. Lavatory is the smartest word.”
But this sort of elitist cobblers doesn’t
get to the heart of posh.
One founding text of postwar posh is a
paper called U and Non-U by professor of linguistics Alan Ross, published in
Encounter in 1955. Ross argued that the upper classes were no longer better
educated, richer, or cleaner than those not of their class. What distinguished
the upper classes from the rest was the way they spoke.
U-speakers said sorry, not pardon, argued
Ross, listened to the wireless not radio, and deployed table napkins not
serviettes. Rubbish, retorted Evelyn Waugh in Noblesse Oblige: “There is
practically no human activity or form of expression which at one time or
another in one place or another I have not heard confidently condemned as
plebeian, for generations of the English have used the epithets as general
pejoratives to describe anything which gets on their nerves.” In his 2004 book,
Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain, Ferdinand Mount took issue
with Waugh: “It is not simply the fluidity of language which has washed away
this whole disgraceful topic. What has gone is the will to erect, maintain and
police such distinctions … the upper class no longer dares enforce its code.”
It doesn’t need to. It can rule effectively
by affecting to be what it is not. Indeed so much of what it is to be posh has
been erased as the old elite has reasserted its hold on the British throat. The
posh may not smell better, think better, be richer, speak differently from the
rest of us. They have erased their apparent distinctions while reinforcing
their real ones, a very British version of Leo Strauss’s noble lie.
Will the posh always be with us, degrading
our lives and diminishing our opportunities? Yes, unless we abolish private
schools. The postwar dream was otherwise: welfare state and education reforms
were designed to create a humane, fairer Britain that would provide a safety
net for the vulnerable and ladder to the aspirant. Now the safety net has been
snipped and the rungs of that ladder are increasingly reserved for the posh,
for the 7% who were given an unfair advantage, those whose education was paid
for by their parents. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The seven rules of being posh
After 25 years of
living in Britain,
US-born Tim Dowling believes he has finally worked out the class system. Here’s
what he has learned
Tim Dowling
Distant observers of the UK’s charming class system will
have many questions, especially regarding its inaccessible upper reaches. What
does posh mean? How does poshness work, exactly? Who does it include, and
exclude?
I can’t pretend to be an expert on the
subject, but after nearly a quarter of a century in Britain I’ve learned a few things.
What follows is more or less all of them.
1 There is no one kind of poshness. There
are actually seven distinct types: poshness of birth; poshness of wealth; of
accent; of education; also, the poshness of excellent taste, as well as the
poshness of eccentric and exuberant vulgarity; and, finally, the poshness of
assumed superiority. Some of these are inextricably linked, and some quite
naturally overlap, but almost no one is possessed of all seven.
2 As a term of description or abuse, “posh”
has an incredibly elastic definition. At one end of the scale you can accuse
someone of being posh for owning a dishwasher. At the other extreme you will
hear people saying, “The thing is, the Queen isn’t actually posh at all.”
3 Posh people aren’t usually snobs. They
just don’t have very much to resent.
4 The most virulent form of snobbery
operates entirely within the middle classes. This makes sense, because none of
them is properly posh, and yet virtually all of them have dishwashers. If you
are truly middle class, all you can see around you are other middle-class
people doing it wrong. When you satirise the middle class in literature or on
screen, they are both your target and your audience.
5 A brief or
occasional visitor to the upper reaches of Britain’s class system could be
forgiven for assuming that all posh people know each other. In fact he could be
wholly acquitted. They sort of all do.
6 Far and away the poshest thing you can do
is wilfully mispronounce your surname, as if the basic rules of vowels,
consonants and syllables simply didn’t apply to you, and then oblige strangers
to follow your lead.
7 The next-poshest thing you can do is have
a freezing bathroom.
The Bullingdon Club was founded over 200
years ago. Petre Mais claims it was founded in 1780 and was limited to 30 men,
and by 1875 it was considered "an old Oxford institution, with many good
traditions". Originally it was a hunting and cricket club, and Thomas
Assheton Smith II is recorded as having batted for the Bullingdon against the
Marylebone Cricket Club in 1796.
In 1805 cricket at Oxford University
"was confined to the old Bullingdon Club, which was expensive and
exclusive". This foundational sporting purpose is attested to in the
Club's symbol.
The Wisden Cricketer reports that the
Bullingdon is "ostensibly one of the two original Oxford University
cricket teams but it actually used cricket merely as a respectable front for
the mischievous, destructive or self-indulgent tendencies of its members".
By the late 19th century, the present emphasis on dining within the Club began
to emerge. However, Walter Long attests that in 1875 "Bullingdon Club
[cricket] matches were also of frequent occurrence, and many a good game was
played there with visiting clubs. The Bullingdon Club dinners were the occasion
of a great display of exuberant spirits, accompanied by a considerable
consumption of the good things of life, which often made the drive back to Oxford an experience of
exceptional nature". A report of 1876 relates that "cricket there was
secondary to the dinners, and the men were chiefly of an expensive class".
The New York Times told its readers in 1913 that "The Bullingdon
represents the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford;
it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership
represents the 'young bloods' of the university".
Today, the Bullingdon is still primarily a
dining club, although a vestige of the Club's sporting links survives in its
support of an annual point to point race. The Club President, known as the
General, presents the winner's cup, and the Club members meet at the race for a
champagne breakfast. The Club also meets for an annual Club dinner. Guests may
be invited to either of these events. There may also be smaller dinners during
the year to mark the initiation of new members. The club often books private
dining rooms under an assumed name, as most restaurateurs are wary of the
Club's reputation for causing considerable drunken damage during the course of
dinner.
A photograph of former Bullingdon Club
members wearing their club uniforms, including Prime Minister David Cameron and
Mayor of London Boris Johnson was revealed in 2007. The copyright owners have
since refused permission to use the picture.
A number of episodes over many decades have
become anecdotal evidence of the Club's behaviour. Infamously, on 12 May
1894 and again on 20 February 1927, after dinner, Bullingdon
members smashed almost all the glass of the lights and 468 windows in Peckwater
Quad of Christ Church, along with the blinds and doors of the building. As a result,
the Club was banned from meeting within 15 miles of Oxford.
While still Prince of Wales, Edward VIII
had a certain amount of difficulty in getting his parents' permission to join
the Bullingdon on account of the Club's reputation. He eventually obtained it
only on the understanding that he never join in what was then known as a
"Bullingdon blind", a euphemistic phrase for an evening of drink and
song. On hearing of his eventual attendance at one such evening, Queen Mary
sent him a telegram requesting that he remove his name from the Club.
Andrew Gimson, biographer of Boris Johnson,
reported about the club in the 1980s: "I don't think an evening would have
ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often
in cash. [...] A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller
man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the
Buller men."
Dinners in recent years, being relatively
low key, have not attracted press attention, though in 2005, following damage
to a 15th-century pub in Oxfordshire during a dinner, four members of the party
were arrested; the incident was widely reported. A further dinner was reported
in 2010 after damage to a country house. In February 2013, the Daily Mirror
reported that an initiation for a new member to the Club involved burning a £50
note in front of a beggar.
In the last few years, the Bullingdon has
been mentioned in the debates of the House of Commons in order to draw attention
to excessive behaviour across the British class spectrum, and to embarrass
those increasingly prominent Conservative Party politicians who are former
members of the Bullingdon. These most notably include David Cameron (UK Prime
Minister), George Osborne (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Boris Johnson
(Mayor of London). Hansard records eight references to the Bullingdon between
2001 and 2008. Johnson has since tried to distance himself from the club,
calling it "a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate
arrogance, toffishness and twittishness."
The
Bullingdon is not currently registered with the University of Oxford,
but members are drawn from among the members of the University. On several
occasions in the past, when the club was registered, the University proctors
have suspended it on account of the rowdiness of members' activities, including
suspensions in 1927 and 1956. John Betjeman wrote in 1938 that "quite
often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting". While
under suspension, the club has been known to meet in relative secrecy.
The club
was active in Oxford in 2008/9, although not currently registered with the
University, and the retiring proctors' oration recited an incident which, not
being on University premises, was outside their jurisdiction: "some
students had taken habitually to the drunken braying of ‘We are the Bullingdon’
at 3 a.m.
from a house not far from the Phoenix Cinema. But the transcript of what they
called the wife of the neighbour who went to ask them to be quiet was written
in language that is not usually printed". The members therefore received
an Anti-Social Behaviour Contract from the Thames Valley Police, threatening
the more common ASBO. The proctor concluded in March 2009: "So I am
pleased to say that, except perhaps at the highest level of national politics,
the Bullingdon Club this year has been quiescent."
The
Bullingdon is satirised as the Bollinger Club (Bollinger being a notable brand
of champagne) in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall (1928), where it has a
pivotal role in the plot: the mild-mannered hero is blamed for the Bollinger
Club's destructive rampage through his college and is sent down. Tom Driberg
claimed that the description of the Bollinger Club was a "mild account of
the night of any Bullingdon Club dinner in Christ Church.
Such a profusion of glass I never saw until the height of the Blitz. On such
nights, any undergraduate who was believed to have 'artistic' talents was an
automatic target."
Waugh mentions
the Bullingdon by name in Brideshead Revisited. In talking to Charles Ryder,
Anthony Blanche relates that the Bullingdon attempted to "put him in
Mercury" in Tom Quad one evening, Mercury being a large fountain in the
centre of the Quad. Blanche describes the members in their tails as looking
"like a lot of most disorderly footmen", and goes on to say: "Do
you know, I went round to call on Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my
evening's adventures might amuse him." This could indicate that Sebastian
was not a member of the Bullingdon, although in the 1981 TV adaptation, Lord
Sebastian Flyte vomits through the window of Charles Ryder's college room while
wearing the famous Bullingdon tails. The 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead
Revisited likewise clothes Flyte in the Club tails during this scene, as his
fellow revellers chant "Buller, Buller, Buller!" behind him.
A fictional
Oxford dining society loosely inspired by clubs
like the Bullingdon forms the basis of Posh, by Laura Wade, a play staged in
April 2010 at the Royal Court Theatre,
London.
Membership of the club while a student is shown as giving admission to a secret
and corrupt network of influence in British politics later in life.
The TV
series Trinity, set in a "Trinity
College" in a
fictional English city, featured an elite "Dandelion Club" whose
members wore yellow waistcoats like those of the Bullingdon Club, and behaved
in a similar manner.
In February
2012 Colman's, the company whose mustard is used by the club for its initiation
rites, launched a TV advert in the UK featuring a comic minotaur character who
is dressed in the Bullingdon Club uniform of teal blue long-tailed frock coat
and mustard yellow waistcoat; and whose voice, mannerisms and blonde haircut
all parody those of former club member and London Mayor Boris Johnson.
The
Universal Pictures film The Riot Club set for release in September 2014 is a
film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh
The Riot Club, review:
'hilarious but lacking political bite'
A parody of the Oxford Bullingdon Club from the director of An Education
presents a lewdly behaved gathering of young British thesps, says Tim Robey
How do you
parody something that already seems beyond parody? Twice, in 1894 and 1927, The
Bullingdon Club - a hell-raising society of elite Oxford
University students whose past members
have included David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne - smashed every
window in Peckwater Quad of Christ
Church College.
You may not imagine there's much antisocial toffery left for fiction.
Laura
Wade's 2010 play, Posh, dealt with a still-reported Bullingdon habit of
trashing their dining establishments beyond recognition, and tossing a cheque
at the landlord on the way out. It now reaches the screen as The Riot Club,
starring a braying, lewdly behaved gathering of silver-spoon-reared young
British thesps.
Hearing the
word "legend!" exclaimed anachronistically by men in wigs, as the
eponymous club is founded in days of yore, supplies the first hint of the
Hogarthian tableau of terrible behaviour that Danish director Lone Scherfig
intends. She then plunges us into surely the most ridiculous account of Oxford freshers' week
initiation rites ever put on screen. In one hilarious scene, a character pops
the keys to his vomit-soiled sportscar through a charity shop's letterbox with
the words "Ashtray was full anyway."
Talk about
revisiting Brideshead: this is meant to be now, though only the use of mobile
phones as a plot device separates us from a lavish and lamplit Edwardian
debauch.
We soon get
to the key location where most of the play was set: The Bull's Head, a village
gastropub with fine-dining pretensions, far from Oxford because "we're banned from
anywhere closer". Here fresher hopefuls Alistair (The Hunger Games’s Sam
Claflin) and Miles (Max Irons, son of Jeremy) vie to impress the established
membership with their binge-drinking stamina, while the landlord (Gordon Brown,
no relation) bows and scrapes in their private room. The carousing, the
gobbling and the breakages just get louder, and when Harry (Douglas Booth)
summons a prostitute in the hope of a 10-man under-the-table servicing, a line
gets crossed.
Whereas on
stage the landlord's daughter (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay,
down-poshed) was the one eventually propositioned for a ludicrous amount of
money, Wade here brings in another fresher, the "bootstrappy
regional" sympathetically played by Holliday Grainger, to suffer this indignity.
Her arrival comes as a shock to Miles, her nominal new boyfriend, whose phone
has been wickedly hijacked to send a fake SOS text and beckon her along.
Wade's play
was an enjoyably scathing broadside against the niche grotesqueries of a
barely-existent social class. It lacked subtlety, really: you knew exactly what
position it was bound to strike, and the uncomprehending servility of the pub
minions felt a little easy and patronising. Still, there was a pungency to the
writing which has been heavily diluted here, along with its political bite.
Some of the
supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side
down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles. If director Scherfig
proved anything with Carey Mulligan in An Education, it's how to make the cream
of our acting talent come out looking even more promising than when they
entered. Claflin has a hard, bitter edge to him - he's a lone wolf, seeing what
he can get out of this bunch, seizing his chances to pounce.
Booth
affects a raffish nonchalance that's perfect for a character whose corruption
and predatory contempt for women are papered over by a veneer of charm. And
Irons, given range for a lot more doubt and self-awareness than Miles had on
stage, is hugely impressive, wobbling on a thin line throughout between being
seduced and horrified. This whole business could have been an emotional vacuum
- a sticky wicket, really. But they sock it about like opening batsmen who know
exactly what they're doing.
.webp)
