Germany on Brit Television

Something that has been striking me about England is that it's even more xenophobic than America.  There are many, many retrospectives on World War II on the television and all of them leave the impression that Germans are a bunch of a goose-stepping baby-killers.  I've also heard references to Poles coming to England only for benefits and Romanians only coming to London for shoplifting.  Perhaps that's amusing over here but I doubt the people at Belly Buster would find it very funny.

America has its own share of xenophobia in the way it bashes Mexicans and I thought America held the world title on racist crap but that's not true.  Something that's been another surprise over here is the attitude toward black people.  Where mixed marriages in the U.S. are still kind of precious and people are a bit self-conscious about them, there doesn't seem to be any of that over here.  What I suspect is a large part of that is people speak in accents based on locale rather than race.

America has also gone at least a little distance toward humanising the view of Germany and one example is "Hogan's Heroes" in which the German military officers are funny and not at all Nazis.  Another one that comes to mind is "The Great Escape" as the camp commander is a German military officer but he's definitely not a Nazi and he's almost sympathetic to an imprisoned officer's first directive to try to escape.

One of the ways in which Cat has enlightened my view of things is in showing me the tremendous contribution by Germans to art in music and cinema.  In contrast, there's the endless musical crap on Brit television and I noticed there was a special featuring Miley Cyrus the other night.  I also saw a headline in a newspaper that proclaimed Miley Cyrus had said I'm Not Trying to Be Sexy.  Don't worry, Miley.  You aren't.

Cat and I were talking on Friday about never hearing of a French rock band.  If anyone thinks of French music at all it's likely to be oh, they like jazz a lot, don't they.  Do you seriously think they don't have rock bands ... but you never hear of them.  You know many German rock bands and maybe one of the biggest was Scorpions but they're far from the only one.

Paris Obscure is a French musician I greatly admire but I doubt I would ever have heard of him if he did not perform in English.  He's obviously French and he has that ultra-cool French accent but his English is excellent and his lyrics and stories are brilliant.  I believe it's safe to say the reason German rock bands have achieved such good penetration into the musical market is their willingness to perform in English.  Nightwish is Swedish rather than German but they're a huge favorite with me and they perform in English as well.  (I don't know how it goes with them since Tarja Turünen left them but they were fantastic previously.)