Britain - Culture Of Sport And The Arts
Sports
Britain is known to be the first country to organize sport as national activity. In the second half of the nineteen century it organized an exported a number of games, notably football, rugby football, hockey, lawn tennis, golf and cricket. The initial purpose behind organized sports was to provide an outlet for youthful energies at public schools. It was generally believed to have character - building qualities for future leaders! However, it was not long before local businessmen began to organize football and other sports as recreational activity for their workforces. Football clubs quickly sprang up in towns and cities all over Britain, and football was rapidly taken into working-class culture. The Saturday afternoon match was an occasion which working - class men would attend, supporting their local team.
From the sixties, however, the character of football began to change. A fundamental reason was the financial one. As match attendances dropped, club sought external help from sponsorship and advertising. Commercial companies found this profitable. For example, Cornhill Insurance began to sponsor English 'test' cricket in 1980 at a cost of 4.5 million.
Beforehand only 2 per cent of the population had heard of Cornhill, while by 1985, 20 per cent had done so, Cornhill had almost doubled its turnover. The decline in spectators forced club managers to make their sporting events less occasions for local support and more displays of spectacular skill. Football clubs started buying and selling players.
Football had become big business, and immediately began to attract private investors. Multimillionaires and commercial enterprises soon took an interest and several bought control of particular clubs.
Over a century ago, the novelist Anthony Trollope listed the sports 'essentially dear to the English nature'. These included hunting, shooting, rowing and horseracing. He was, of course, referring to the 'gentleman class', which through the public school established football, rugby and cricket as national games. A class dimension to sport persists. Because of the expense involved, hunting, rowing and horseracing have remained primarily upper-class pastimes. Golf is still to some extent financially segregated between exclusive private clubs and municipal facilities. Football remains essentially lower class, but with a growing middle-class following.
Sport remains one of the areas in which members of ethnic minorities have demonstrated their ability in a white dominated society, particularly in athletics, cricket and soccer. The black footballer, Paul Ince, has captained the English football team and the black sprinter, Lindford Christie, was the captain of the British men's Olympic team in both 1992 and1996.
Arts
The British find discussion of their national artistic and intellectual life faintly embarrassing. As the great British art historian, Nikolaus Pevsner, himself a refugee immigrant, remarked over 30 years ago, 'None of the other nations of Europe has so abject an inferiority complex about its own aesthetic capabilities as England.'
Nowadays, Britain has much to be proud of, though its artistic achievements are frequently better appreciated, and known, abroad than home.
As in fashion, the British seem to enjoy breaking the rules of the current modernist style, and this perhaps is what gives British art such originality. As one critic wrote recently, 'British artists, who are currently enjoying the highest international standing, have been singularly unaffected by the much vaunted internationalism of the Modern Movement. English art is perhaps beginning to escape from insularity and provincialism though a rediscovery of its Englishness.'
Theater is a powerful instrument in education as well as art and culture. Another significant feature of British theater is a result of the intensive preparation and speed with which productions are staged and their short performance lifespan. Their intensity and freshness is not allowed to grow stale. Another important point, however, is the youthfulness of many of the best productions. Length of experience in Britain is not allowed to stand in the way of talent, and as a result, young people, some recently from drama school, perform many leading roles.
Since the sixties Britain has achieved a special position in music. Britain remains at the forefront of pop music. At the start of the nineties, British pop music seemed to be rediscovering the spirit of the sixties. The new music marks a departure from the unrelaxed mood of the eighties, and is a declaration of freedom.
