Telebrexit | Television | THE COUNTRY

While the British government became an Irish pub in San Patricio, with punches that come and go, the call of a listener to a London radio went viral repentant crying for having voted in favor of Brexit. The announcer consoled him and told him that it was the fault of the politicians and the millionaires who provoked such irresponsibility from their stands. It's strange that I did not mention TV too. How could he forget all these years of nostalgic crush? I am not talking about populist or propaganda TV, but about what is probably the best television in the world. I talk about series about queens, monarchies and Winston Churchills, about documentaries like Empire or of the thousand programs that search the essence of Britannia, from trips along coastal paths to cooks that rescue culinary traditions of Yorkshire or realities of London urbanites who are going to live on a farm. Today's British society, which resembles the Victorian one, as well as Jamie Olivier's paella with chorizo, to the Valencian paella, constantly looks at itself in that mirror, old and moldy, and longs for lost glory.

This does not mean that TV has idiotized a whole society, but it has flattered the vanity of the most lazy and least critical part of it. A few months before the Brexit I traveled through Wales and slept in a very flirtatious country house. The room was presided over by the portrait of a highly decorated 19th century general, and I asked the owner if she was an ancestor of his. "What's going on," he replied, "I bought it from an antiquarian and then discovered that it was a very bad man responsible for a massacre in India, they called him The Butcher. I thought about removing it, it horrified me, but the truth is that it is very good, it gives a very distinguished look to the room ". That is to say: between truth and aesthetics, he chose aesthetics. That is, at the end of the day, nationalism.