• Reference Number: DW-252/2/14
• Ref No: DW-252/2/14
• Date: 20 Sep 2019
• Level: Item
• Extent: 1 file (559815 KB)
• Format: WAV Audio file
• Description: Interviewee: George Fouracres
  Born: 1990
  Interviewer: Josiane Boutonnet
  Date of Interview:20 September 2019
  Summary:
  Background: George grew up in Willenhall, spent his childhood in between his parents? house and his grand-dad?s house, a few streets away, in an area between Willenhall and Wednesfield, called Fibbersley.
  Edinburgh Fringe August 2019: His début performance at Edinburgh festival was informed by his childhood in this location, and relationship with his grand-dad. The show is about growing up in Wednesfield and going to university, then moving to London and also about moving social class.
  (02:57) His family: His grand-dad is a bricklayer, grew up in Willenhall, born and raised around Summer Road, lived most of his life in that town. He?s a champion pigeon flyer, belongs to a flying tippler?club. Well known in the world of flying tipplers.
  (05:10) George was never the funny one in the family, he was the clever one. Doesn?t know at what point he went from being the serious one to the funny one. Black Country families place a lot of importance on being funny, it?s an important aspect of the culture. The Black Country is one of the last places where a fully functioning English dialect survives in the form of traditional jokes, jokes being the main surviving literary form of your ancient dialect.
  (06:48) The general consensus in the family at large is that his dad?s brother, uncle Bill was the quickest witted, he was the best at put-downs. His uncles would constantly take the Mickey out of each other; for ex. one time they were all standing at the grand-dad?s grave, as they did every year, and they were taking the Mickey out of each other?s tellies, uncle Dennis was having a go at uncle Bill for his telly being rubbish, and uncle Bill said: phewa, yow telly so old them dials are in Latin! The best one for George is the one he wrote about in the Guardian article: there?s this guy called Tommy, who lived by his family, a real tight bloke, he was a painter and decorator, and on Xmas day, instead of not working on Christmas day, he cleaned his paint brushes with turps, but he was doing it while his wife was cooking the turkey, so ethanol and fire didn?t mix, so he burnt his house down. The next day, he went into the pub, and everyone went, oh God, there?s Tommy, and his house burnt down, and everyone went quiet as he walked into the pub, and immediately uncle Billy stood up and said: ppfoo what d?yow ave Tommy for Christmas, a blazer?
  (09:02) However, George thinks that although uncle Bill was the quickest witted, his granddad is the funniest, the cleverest, he never misses anything.
  (09:27) Q: Has your upbringing informed your sense of humour and taste in comedy?
  (09:35) G: My tastes are perhaps a bit more bizarre, quite dark, but I think there?s a gallows element to Black Country Humour. It comes from the fact that it?s been quite a tough place to live and to work, and people have struggled over the years. But the dryness certainly is typical of the BC, and always being on the look-out for something funny. Nothing is worth anything unless it?s got some funny dimension to it, and this is how I live my life, I don?t take anything very seriously.
  (12:26) G: Similarities between BC humour and Scottish humour: making fun of each other, Anynuck and Alyi make fun of each other, or the vicar, or some posh person they run into in the
  street, and the similarities with Scottish jokes would be that the people are used to be at the lower end of the social ladder. A lot of it tends to be about making fun of people higher up. Also, the fact that the dialects are not the ones people would hear on the radio, being aware that your way of speaking doesn?t have prestige.
  (15:10) Black Country humour is self-mocking, and growing up as a kid, you are raised to want to leave, and this is a sad thing, making out that the place you come from is rubbish, it?s odd that somewhere should be the punch line for jokes, when it?s one of the funniest places I know. People are not precious about themselves and able to laugh at themselves, people have always been extremely hard working. It?s part of our culture to poke fun at ourselves. There is a new prominent cultural voice though, and we have begun to realise how brilliant we are. So we mock ourselves in the knowledge that we are brilliant.
  (20:53) G: With my family, we watched lots of comedy on TV, but we didn?t go to Black Country night outs. I used to watch a lot of comedy with one of my friends, Chris, who had a lot of DVDs. We went once to watch live comedy when I was 16 in Lichfield, Joe Pas quale.
  (23:13) G: At university in Cambridge, I studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, I specialised in languages, you had to learn from scratch; I started off with learning Old English, Old Norse, medieval Irish, 4th-11th century chiefly ecclesiastical Latin, palaeography and codicology, by the end I specialised in Old English Poetry, the 6th to 7th century Italian Peninsula, I translated a hagiography into English for the first time for my thesis, and historical linguistics, Germanic Philology. A lot of looking at old manuscripts and being in old churches.
  (25:16) I fled my degree very quickly after starting, I wasn?t enjoying it very much, the university had a theatre, the ADC theatre, famous for the ADC club where Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Trevor Nunn and I enjoyed being an actor. They were doing 2 plays a week. By my third year, I was in a play every single week of term, or rehearsing for a play. From doing theatre I ended up always playing the comedy role. I had friends who were into comedy and doing the Footlights, where Fry and Laurie had gone and done comedy. I had no interest, it was not my bag at all. But then I thought why can?t I do that, because I had done comedy in plays, I did a lot of devised theatre, devised folk tale and cabaret and comedy and stuff like that, I thought why can?t I do that style of comedy at the Footlights? Initially, they didn?t want it. Later on, I just kept trying. At the end of my third year, as well as being able to specialise academically, I was doing a lot of theatre but then that had transitioned smoothly into doing lots of comedy because it meant I was able to write a lot of stuff in my own time. By the end of my third year I was a member of the Footlights committee. Then I did the Cambridge Footlights Tour Show, which went to the Edinburgh fringe, it was the fiftieth anniversary that year of the first one which was beyond the fringe with people like Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, John Cleese. We toured America, a lot of English Public Schools, and then back to Cambridge. I did that from the end of my graduation to the end of that year, and then moved back to Willenhall. A couple of months after that, I moved down to London.
  (29:40) With friends of mine, we formed a sketch group, I started writing sketches, not many people write sketch comedy any more, we did a few live sketch shows, and that transitioned really well onto radio, we did two series of our own radio show, and then I crop up in a lot of things with sketches in them, sketch acts, week by week News Jack, Nail show. I started to do a lot of impressions on radio 4 or radio 4 Xtra.
  (31:52) G: In Wolverhampton, I will be doing the show I did in Edinburgh, about my childhood, my grand-dad, the changes that have taken place in my life, it?s stand-up, there?s a lot of Black Country Jokes, a lot of Black Country Dialect in there, a lot of characters from my childhood, some made up
  characters to break things up. There?s a bit of music in it as well, references to the Roman Catholic Church, references to Sketchley that used to be in Wednesfield. Geographically the show takes place on about three streets between Willenhall and Wednesfield, so it?s all around Fibbersley, Pool Hayes, and Bentley Bridge, Wednesfield High St, where Woolworth was, and Alan Bennett the butcher, fantastic name. It?s all very specific local references, I talk about my grand-dad?s club.
  (33:51) G: In my show I make a point of being positive about where I?m from, about talking about things that are good about here, things that are beautiful about here. We have a strange dichotomy in the way we talk about here, either we?re acknowledging it?s rubbish, which isn?t true, or we?re making fun of ourselves, talking about how funny it is that we?re rubbish. And that?s patently untrue, this is a beautiful, complicated, interesting, ancient place to come from. It?s an extraordinary place to be from. It was the site of war between the two greatest north Western European powers of the 10th century, it was the biggest most prosperous central kingdom of the Anglo Saxon world, it was an ancient Celtic settlement, it was an interchange culturally in the 19th century of Irish workers coming to work here to build the infrastructure, that then went on to build the rest of the empire, the place that made the anchor for the Titanic, and all the locks and keys to the Empire State Building, a hot bed of revolution and civil war, a hiding place for Roman catholics, this incredible history that we have. I?m keen to talk about the very rich and interesting interwoven history of the place. I try to do this in the show, and try to be funny at the same time. It?s a blessing to come from here.
  (37:32) G: The dialect is the most incredible expression of it, the things that haven?t changed about the dialect, are so old. To make the vowel systems of Old English make sense, you have to relearn the pronunciation systems from before the corruption of all sorts of forces, it?s a thousand years of change, it?s not just the invasion of the Normans and the Victorians. I walked into my first lecture on Old English, and it made perfect sense to me, because the vowels are the same as ours. So the Great Vowel Shift of the 12th century that altered English just didn?t happen to us.
  (40:45) G: The oldest identical twins in the UK are from Tipton, Lil and Doris, 95, and listening to them, it?s like a chemical biological reaction, if you?re from the Black Country, it makes so much sense, it makes you feel at home, you listen to a form of English, that has in turn evolved and stayed the same, simply by speaking it.
  (41:58) There?s a recording of a man in a prison camp in 1914, this German Scholar, a philologist, made a recording of it, sounds exactly the same as anyone you might meet in Bilston, or Willenhall today, and that?s already 100 years, and it?s not changed. I love the fact that it?s been passed on by people speaking it. It?s all survived by people speaking to each other and by people telling each other jokes. I don?t know of anywhere else where this is the case.
  (45:16) People in the area are very loyal to the dialect, it?s part of our culture, part of our identity. Historically, people have looked down on the people of this area, the BC was the centre of the Industrial Revolution, produced vast amounts of steel, iron, coal, structures like railway tracks, engines, bridges, things that built the world. And they were also the people who were the most exploited, who worked in terrible conditions, Willenhall was known as Humpshire because people?s spines were bent, they are grooves carved into the walls of old Willenhall pubs because people had to rest their backs in there. The only entertainment they had was going to the pub because that?s all they had, and could afford, ?going down the public?. And people have the gore to call these people ?common?. It was accepted because it was the structure of British Society, and now we know that we?ve maintained this pride in where we?re from, what we?ve done, that comes from hard work, and kindness, and decency, and the fact that we?ve got this lovely stamp on it, how we speak to each other, is lovely, it?s fantastic. This dialect goes back to before England was even a country.
• Access Status: Open
• Contact: Wolverhampton Archives, Wolverhampton Archives & Local Studies

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