Dom and Harry (a satire for our times)
https://calwaygareth.blogspot.com/p/tom-and-harry-play.html is the tragic prequel to this comedy. This is that Tudor tragedy (repeated there as a revenge tragedy) repeated again here as postmodern farce.
Blickling Hall, Norfolk, May 19, 2036, the 500th anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution). A death bed and a drip. Harriet on it. Harlem Shuffle by a Strolling Bones skeletal self-tribute act (ie the Rolling Stones, approaching their early hundreds) are performing it. All the Blickling portraits dance in a ghoulish manner forming into a tableau around the bed. Harriet sees Anne’s Ghost.
Harriet I wouldn’t bother, dearie. There’s nothing left to haunt. And no-one here to watch you do it. The lane is so pot-holed, the planning company scheduled it for a rebuild - right in the middle of heritage fortnight- so the traffic control company set up its light show. Red green amber red. Which was all that happened around this famous Norfolk lane for a week. Apart from the signs warning that it was going to happen, two weeks after it hadn’t. By the time Privatised Highway Construction had coordinated enough migrant workers to start rolling tarmac, the privatised traffic lights company had removed the lights. PHC then had to wait for traffic control to put up the lights again by which time PHC had gone. That’s the trouble when only a small fraction of your employees actually do the work, rather than variously solicit ‘how did we do?’ feedback on it. This second week was networking a high-speed fibre optic conference about whose fault it all was. And that, ladies and gentlemen of Little England, is Blickling Hall Heritage Fortnight 2036, the 500th Anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s Execution-
Anne Are you talking to me?
Harriet I’m talking about you (indicates the audience) to the complaints desk. They’re the only ones here.
Anne You can see me?
Harriet Yes.
Anne How is’t possible? I’m a ghost.
Harriet You were born here so you haunt here. I was born on the NHS so I haunt it. I guess Blickling Hall and the NHS are in the same place because both are now part of the heritage industry. I knew it was all up when they gave me a free choice in the emergency ambulance about which A&E IOU I wanted to have my heart attack in. And when I ticked ‘the one without a full set of vowels’ it disappeared. I mean what if our post-NHS dentists thought of our mouths as a place to drill for gold rather than for the good of society’s health like that? Or our post-NHS opticians framed the public’s health for their own private gain, like that dodgy dealer up at Barnard Castle?
Dom (off) I heard that!
Harriet Of course you did, Dom. You went private. … I died on the post-NHS, making full use of the building, every single part of me tended by a different medic – none of whom talked to each other. Like a brilliant football team that doesn’t pass. Or as the guy from Laurence Fox News put it on Twatter
LFN Why would you trust your health to a service that needs applause just to do its job?
Shock- horror at this abuse of the NHS.
Harriet What, like an actor you mean?
LFN (bows) I thank you
Applause. LFN laps it up.
Anne We’ve come back for a Third Act? The climax?
Harriet There are no third acts in modern British lives, Anne.
Anne So what’s this?
Harriet The anti-climax. Strictly For The Birds: The First Election of a New Head of State by TV Show Phone In.
LFN And, in a major coup for those on the right side of the cultural wars, it’s all happening here at Blickling Hall in Old Norfolk, in the heart of real England.
Harriet It’s all we have left. The Empire’s gone. The Commonwealth’s gone. Europe’s gone. Scotland’s going. Northern Ireland’s going. Wales isn’t. It’s still voting Neoliberal Breck’s Isle Alliance, the More for Me Party, the one Dom finally seized it from Bullingdon Boris with leaked photographs of that greased piglet telling the truth at a privatised gathering in celebration of Freedom Day.
Anne Freedom Day?
Harriet July 17. The day we stopped protecting ourselves from the Plague in 2021. The two finalists are Dom of the Breck’s Isle More For Me Party who succeeded Boris as Breck’s Isle Tsar last year, seeing off the latest computer generated coup by the Russian-financed Putin Britain First Party. And Harry, the Progressive post-Royal.
Dom at a presidential desk.
Dom There is no break with tradition in my replacing Boris. You have my word…. Boris’s statesmanlike ability to repeat the same hypnotic winning phrase at the drop of a clanger - Get Brexit Done; I’m Sorry But I’ve Got Work To Do; Time to Draw Another Line; Never Mind The Flood, Here’s A Surf Board My Eton Pal Made …– was a mark of the man and his legacy. Every year on January 31 at 11 pm you are still neoliberally ordered to celebrate Boris Day with Boris Dancing and with every drink and scrap of food in the cabinet.
Harriet even though we can’t make, import or steal them like we used to and, even if we could, the Plague keeps neoliberally closing all the theatres and street parties in every street except Downing Street?
Dom Yes. We should see these as Opportunities -
Anne (horrified) Is’t the King?
Harriet The Head of State. There’s as much chance of a King now as of post-Royal Harry’s progressive alliance Taking Back Control of the Red Wall of Darlington.
Anne Our Head of State is not the King?
Harriet Not since Charles III in 2032, after New Elizabeth’s 80 years finally closed in a decade-long platinum jubilee thumbing its nose at him. (waves to a ‘portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth II d. 2032 who cheerfully waves back.) The shortest reign in history after the longest. Beating Lady Jane Grey’s previous record by nine days.
Anne Even I had three years.
Harriet Charles and William and all their immediate heirs were all poisoned at Charles’ coronation with an dose of Russian polonium in their Eton Messes. Allegedly chaliced in during the ceremony by a diversity Archbishop.
Dom According to the conspiracy theories. It was actually a long overdue herd immunity of the viral capitalist ‘I’ to the royal we.
Harriet 75% of the country didn’t even celebrate Elizabeth’s 10 year jubilee 2022-2032 so he’s got a point. Despite its 100% takeover of the BBC and the blue-rinsed grey-white liars still reading the print newspapers. And she was popular. The Head of State and the Prime Minister are now combined in one ‘person’.
Dom waves presidentially. Green traffic light on his face
Harriet (to the audience) And don’t think it won’t happen just because you’re watching a farce.
Light on Dom’s face changes to Simpson amber….
Harriet The Simpsons had Donald Trump as a cartoon President 5 years before he became a … cartoon President. But in a remarkable change to British tradition, a cartoon premier now faces a miracle alliance of progressives, from one nation Tories through (light changes to red) new world reds and old world liberals (yellow) and to end-of one-world greens (green…) united under post-royal Harry.
Dom That won’t last.
Harriet So in the first Election of a Head of State by TV Phone In, with me Harriet Toms, deceased, we ask you, our Strictly For The Birds audience, to vote for who You think should be… ABSOLUTE PREMIER-SIDENT OF BRECK’S ISLE. Remember, you must cast your vote for who best captures THE SOUL of BRITAIN.
Strictly For The Birds theme tune. Accompanied by traditional Boris Dancing.
Common Don’t go to work
Don’t go to school
Stay in your homes
Keep the 2 metre rule.
From the council estates
To the posh ones with parks
From high fashion and high finance
To its slave kids in the dark
From the poles to the equator
Supermoon into eclipse
From the fjords to the deserts
Temperate zones to the tropics…
Can’t breathe…
Come and heal us with your caring
Then go back where you came
You’re not from round here
We don’t know your name.
From the centre of the cosmos
To Little England in the Styx
From the heart of Little England
To each human breath’s limits.
The world has come
To Little England in the Styx
Little England is the world
We’re all together in this
Blitzing Brits for Blighty
As the Beast in the East
Spits his cold War into Salisbury
Then we go off piste.
Covid’s knee in the throat
Of your healer and your bro;
In this world war for survival
Every ally is your is foe.
The world has come
To Little England in the Styx
Little England is the world
We’re all together in this
Except we have no test kits
We shut down too late
We didn’t quarantine
We didn’t track and trace.
We didn’t take the test
Now we’re top of Death’s class,
Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill
We are such a silly ass.
Can’t breathe…
Anne Has it come to this?
Scene 2.
Harriet We’ll start with King Harry in Exile who we can speak to now by satellite link, tempests permitting. Harry can you hear me?
A sword in a stone. Harry bestrides it.
Harry Yes Harriet I can hear you. Far away and long ago - on a druid island at the very end of the world - the land was divided and leaderless, groaning under its divisive winter King Breck.
Anne (aside) Breck?
Harriet (aside) Middle English for breached or broken.
Dom He means me. (to Anne) I was going to call us Breckland until Rees-Mogg said it made us sound like something out of Middle Earth.
Harriet Or a remote area of Norfolk.
Anne Break-land. Tis three hour’s ride south. Infertile land farmed by rotation, ploughed 1 year in 10 and lying fallow in the ‘breaks’.
Harriet Breckland is now mostly shooting preserves and rabbit warrens. And hobbit holes.
Dom (to Anne) So I called us Breck’s Isle instead.
Harriet The Broken land. And its slogan is-
Dom Imperial measures - of nothing much - for all Britons! The Last Ditch of History.
Applause
Harry Barbarians invaded from north, east and south. King Breck paid the fiercest of these to defend him but they kept the gold and took the land themselves. Against the advice of his Earl Marshall Uther Pendragon.
Anne (aside) My Harry loved an Arthurian romance too. It brought out the Welsh in him.
Harry and with his war council divided, Breck met the challenges by retreating ever deeper into his fastness of Little Britain, ordering his neoliberal wave-slaves to build an impregnable mountain fortress there, but it kept falling down. He forced the Druid Mer-
Dom Murdoch?
Harry Merlin …to read the roots of Britain …and its waters beneath ….and its stars above …to tell him
Dom Why does my castle keep falling down?
Anne He looks a bit like my Harry actually.
Harriet Breck?
Anne No, no. (indicates Harry) Your Harry.
Harriet It’s the ginger hair and Celtic fringe. And the red beard.
Anne Like my Elizabeth.
Harriet Unfortunately the original Breck, King Vortigern, the proverbial divider, had a red beard as well. You’re going to need to put some blue Celtic sky between you and him, Harry.
Harry A May King, a Dragon head, was needed to unite the people and drive out the invaders. Such a king would prove himself by drawing out from a weathered rock a wondrous sword. Many years passed and many strong men failed. At last- a boy succeeded!
He addresses the sword
Harry His name…
and pulls it out.
Harry was Arthur!
Anne Like my Harry’s older brother, the King who never was.
Harriet Not William V. Henry VIII’s older brother who died of consumption in 1502
Anne before he could consummate his marriage to Katherine of Aragon.
Harriet Probably. It was a name avoided by royals ever after despite its heroic original.
Harry Arth-ursus. War Bear in two languages. Crowned king of All Britain in a landslide of relief, renewal and cool Britannia like the Great Pretender Blair a millennium or two after. Eleven times Arthur the May King faced the barbarian invaders in battle, starting here on these old Iceni burial grounds. His cavalry drove all before him. But as Gildas Rees-Mogg
Dom Telegraphing the Ruin of Britain in a nearby monastery font
Harry warned the barbarians kept coming from the Wash/East Saxon rivers to the gulf of Londinos. To the Last Ditch of History, at the very end of civilisation as we knew it. Where Arthur, War Bear, drew up his
Dom British and natively brilliant
Harriet British and Roman-drilled
Harry cavalry at Badon Hill. And faced down the big bad Saxon sea-wolf for the twelfth and final time. His kingstone sword shattered in that Battle for Britain-
Dom EU-regulated French steel. Pa!
Harry Welsh actually. But Merlin the Druid took Arthur west to Glastonbury pursuing a light beyond the forest to a Lake shore and into the mists of herstory. Three damsels, not the distressed kind, walk there on the surface of the Lake. Subtle ultra-feminine beings of exceptional beauty and charm:
Anne I know the feeling. I played all three-
Harry Viviane, lady of the Lake, sword-bearer; Morrigan Macha Bodbh Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death; Arthur’s dark sister, and Raven, the Queen of the Wastelands -
Anne As the May Queen.
Harry And looking at the three damsels is like looking at the Sun. The Lady bears a mighty sword, Excalibur, ‘lightning blade’
Dom the brand of Britain!
Harry which can never fail in battle, and whose magical scabbard wills its wearer-king never to bleed, no matter how maimed. His birthright.
Dom Until some fay damsel from Glamorgan Welshes it.
Harry Arthur builds a great fastness named Camelot and trains a band of mounted warriors called The Knights of the Round Table. Together they drive out the invaders. For 50 years the land grows in peace and plenty. And the people love him.
Dom It’s what they did before they could vote.
Harry Arthur marries the beautiful (Welsh accent) Gwenhwyfar,’ (translates) white phantom.’
Dom ‘White phantom’
Harry ‘first lady’ of these islands.
Dom Of these islands.
Harry The most beautiful woman in the world.
Dom And that’s where the trouble starts.
Harry Arthur’s dark sister, the Celtic triple goddess of birth, marriage and death, the Black Lady, blights the wedding to which she was not invited with this impediment: that she and the god Arthur are already married in Annwyn, the Celtic otherworld. She makes a maiden speech to die for.
Dom Which splits her own party.
Harry She is dark, unconscious, divine. Or, as the Welsh puns it, ‘Du’
Morgan I love males, yet live makeless:
The long night and false dawn still lingers lonely
As day breaks my dike-brook’s bed
Diluting with grey light my Du-distilled soul.
I give birth, yet grave brothers.
My mothering bosom of womb-mouthing earth
Is death-witch and dearth’s country;
Both vessel you’re born on and vestige’s barque.
I bride men and breed Mordreds:
The world’s consummation weds its confounding;
The lightning of love’s moon-lore
Will strike dead the armed man sick-nursed in these arms.
I brave blood, a bereaved bride,
God’s mother and man’s Eve, a death-moth and Mary:
O, Arthur, ardent brother,
The love-sword you bury here seeds the whole world…
Applause
Dom In short, she put the C word among the cocks.
Harriet Cynghanedd?
Harry Cymru.
Anne Country matters. It always did to me.
Dom God sends a bolt from the heavens, fire and brimstone from under the earth. In 536, there is a summer without sunshine all over the world. In 539, Arthur and his dark son Mordred, the evil one, murder each other at the icy battle of Camlaan. The Black Lady
Harriet Morrigan Macha Bodbh, Mordred’s mother, Arthur’s sister
Dom ships him officer class beyond the sunset to the mystical isle of Avalon. She will sing at his funeral.
Morgan makes to sing.
Harriet Not now Morgan.
Harry Gwenhwyfar, ‘wife of Britain’ – and who can blame her - finds consolation with Arthur’s faithful captain, her champion the lightning god Llugh, for whom London is named. Arrested at the infant stage in a hollow hill by his doting mother The Lady of the Lake, until she sends him to court with a magical shield conferring the strength of three men
Dom And useless against one woman
Harry He resists that one woman, the irresistible Gwenhwyfar, for a thousand years, while time stands still and Britain is serially conquered by Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, Roman Catholics, Danes, Vikings and the class-consumed Normans who convert him to Christianity and rename him (in perfect French) Lancelot du Lac.
Harriet Lance remains the monkish hero of his own boy’s story or, as it’s sometimes called, history, play-fighting all the other squires until he is king of the castle, then does the same against King Arthur’s real enemies.
Dom And everything in the rose-scented garden is lovely until one midnight, returning from the quest of the red hart by moonlight to find Gwenhwyfar alone there, with a troubadour singing ‘something for the ladies’ from an open window above, he and the story grow up to heaven,
Harriet or down to Earth, depending what side of Ofa’s dyke you’re on.
Lance The squire grows to knighthood, the heart learns to dance:
An Eye for the Ladies, an arm for the lance;
A foot for the stirrup’s blind date with chance,
Leaps the last ditch of history, for the lawns of romance
Dom Cue the Celtic harps and violins.
Harry Following in Arthur’s godly footsteps, Sir Lancelot du Lac, Britain’s greatest knight – former Celtic god, now Christian, French and half-mortal – seeks redemption for his sinful love in a quest for a horn of plenty
Dom rebranded as the Holy Grail.
Harry But just as he finally lays a Jacob’s Rees Mogg ladder against the wall and enters (perfect Welsh accent) Corbenic, the bewitched Castle of the Blessed Horn of Plenty, now trading as (French accent) Corbenoit, Castle of the Blessed Body of Christ,
Dom all visitors please report to Deception,
Harry and gets one grasping gauntlet on the Grail… his heart pulls him all the way back down the snake to Gwenhwyfar. Or actually the Grail Maiden
Dom in a racy Gwenhwyfar costume provided by that witchy wardrobe mistress Morgan le Fay. He should have gone to Specsavers.
Harry Like you, Dom. The day you stormed Barnard Castle. (the final pitch for the vote) But from this delusory union will spring her father the Maimed King’s real cure, the real consummation of her divine crush on Lancelot; the return of real fertility to our British Waste Land and – all these in one – a Christ, Gwalchaved the Grail Finder, who out of all this longing imperfection and imperfect longing
Dom Or, as we called it before The Woke, sin.
Harry unites purity with prowess and conquers the world, within and without. Everybody gets what they want.
Harriet Sort of.
Dom But infidelity consumes the heart of Britain.
Harry Well, you’d know all about that, Dom. Lancelot and Guinevere do to each other what Boris did to the country, fiddling around while post-Rome burns. And into that vacuum explodes the Celtic god of darkness. Arthur’s anti-son. Which you’d also know. The shadow conceived as summer dies by Arthur with his female counterpart.
Dom Or, as we call it on this side of the culture wars, his sister.
The Green Knight Goddess mother and goddess aunt. It got very complicated at Christmas. Especially when Gawain or as we used to call him (Welsh accent) Gwlachmei the Hawk of May- also turns up as Morgan’s nephew …
Harriet Not now, Sir Green. Your party will get a chance at the end.
The Green Knight
At the end of the world you mean? After the Flood?
Harriet Please don’t interrupt. (to Harry) You were telling us about the Celtic god of darkness. The King’s anti-son.
Anne My Harry was always seeing him in the shadows of his court.
Harry Born at Beltane, May 1st, Arthur’s coronation day, this un-May/ Winter King, this Nemesis – his name is legion but his enemies call him
Anne Mordred. My Harry loved this bit.
Harry - tears the land apart again.
Dom What do his friends call him?
Pause
Dom Murdoch?
Harry ‘Dom.’ Or as we called you before The Woke, ‘Satan’.
Dom Sssssssssssssssssssss.
Harry Mordred’s is no ordinary armed rebellion. There is a Beltane magic at its heart. He claims the throne of Logres. Which was rightfully Arthur’s.
Dom Never take a red dragon wall for granted.
Harry and the cry goes round the divided realm.
Dom “Which is the shadow and which is the Son? Which is the King and which the Usurper?”
Harriet Like ‘voting Brexit will add 350 million pounds to the NHS’ and other post-truths. Or Lies, as we called them before the culture wars.
Harry Alas. But, Arthur the Sun King, aided as always by the wizard
Dom Murdoch?
Harry Merlin. …overcomes even this. Arthur slays Mordred,
Dom his own flesh and blood
Harry his anti-self/shadow.
Dom And is mortally wounded by that self-murder.
Harry and escorted from the field in injury time – and on into a red dragon sunset - by that mysterious triptych of keening maidens. The Lady of the Lake, the Queen of the Wastelands and The Black Lady
Harriet Morrigan Macha Bodbh.
Harry Arthur’s last request is that Excalibur – lightning blade
Dom The brand of Britain
Harry be cast back into the fairy lake from whence it came.
Lights reddening and slowly fading towards blackout.
Harry He will live on in Avalon for centuries as a Maimed King (brandishing the sword) and return in our darkest hour to save us.
Dom (unimpressed) Meanwhile, Gwenhwyfar, and the rest of the story, drift off into a Celtic twilight as Europe comes pouring back in from the East.
Harry Curtains for Gwenhyfar and Camelot. And for our little foreshadowing. (bows)
Dom shadows his bow. Fade to blackout, which Dom embraces CS with Christ-mocking arms spread wide.
Morgan (as the light fades) It’s not over until the Black lady sings.
Scene 3. Harriet receives a post-NHS letter onstage.
Harriet It appears my death has been exaggerated. It wasn’t vagina after all, always fatal for a his-torian. It was angina.
Anne Can you still see me?
Pause. Wheezes for breath, sprays under her tongue.
Harriet Where’s Anne? Anne? We seem to have lost Anne.
Anne No, no. I’m still here. Here!
Harriet Anne? (another spray) Ah well, if we could come to you then Dom. You completely object to the idea of Britain Harry sketched out in the previous scene. Why?
Dom The whole thing’s a myth. There never was a sword in the stone for a start. That’s just a fake news story dreamed up by Merlin to keep him and his westering Celtic fringe in power. The real power in the country was the Saxon axe.
Harriet But the Celts were here first? And their 400 year deal with Rome had brought a European, world civilisation to these shores.
Dom But why has diversity got to drive everything? Roman civilisation was too bureaucratic, too big, too corrupt and too regulated. And when it failed the Saxons took control because they had a simple programme that worked. They were winners.
Harriet But without Rome didn’t Britain then take a large step back into the Dark Ages?
Dom Oh Harriet, you old Rome-moaner, there was a bit more to our Anglo-Saxon kingdoms than a Dark Age bonfire.
Dom addresses the sword in the stone, pulls it out , brandishes it.
Dom 'Logres forever!' cries the Sword that failed
Gwen the bad nun; Lance the penitent monk
At the big bad sea-wolf, the Saxon axeman,
The Seaxe-wielding Thor-blond incredible hunk.
(reverses sword to axe)
'And tomorrow belongs to me!' the brute hacks,
(punctuating each with a murderous blow of the axe)
Week without end, "Tiw's Day; Woden's day,
Thor's day, Freya's day-" but the Celt snatches back
Rome's long weekend, "Saturn-Sun-Moon-day!"
And follows the Grail off upstage right;
The Saxon keeps chopping, not knowing they’ve gone.
(sword) Britain goes West, into Celtic twilight,
Sunset and Moonset and World's End begun.
'I don’t like Moon-days.' The Saxon worker flails,
Chopping down the Moon for a Dark Age bonfire,
The Moon cries," the Grail! the Grail! Look Guinevere, the Grail!
Who dies wins, by this brute's axe shall live, forever!"
'And tomorrow belongs to me!' the Saxon stokes
(punctuating each with a murderous blow of the axe)
The red dragon blaze: "Tiw's Day; Woden's day,
Thor's day, Freya's day..." into not so much a twilight
As a Germanic-British Library Display:
Illuminations, Bibles, jewellery, Alfred's lore,
A Celt might trade her second best harp for,
The axe head reversing King Arthur's holy sword
(presenting the sword handle as an axe-head/Cross)
Beaten - lifted - as a Cross: and taking it forward.
Harriet Christ’s Cross?
Dom The Union Jack.
Harriet Hardly the same thing, Dom! This is Herstory. Not that dirty flag of modern Britain, the Daily Mail.
Dom I think we can see which side of the culture wars you’re on, Harriet.
Harriet I’m on the side of truth, Dom.
Anne (to Dom) Is Daily Mail the armoured Knight of truth? Holding the sword of justice and carrying the shield of British fair play?
Dom can’t hear Anne
Harriet (to Anne) More a Hitler-gothic Argus with its eyes in its tail feathers, Anne. Hang on. He still can’t see or hear you. But I can!
Anne You must have died after all. It was vagina.
Harriet (to Anne but Dom thinks to him) Never mind. (as in ‘the show must show go on’) Herstory must go on! If history is written by the victor and then continually rewritten to suit the needs of the present, the Mail– the only daily mainly read by women - is the story of England that never changes even when its alibi is broken.
Dom That’s the Express.
Harriet But we were talking about grownups who can read.
Dom Grownups?
Harriet Women.
Dom Well, there you are. The Mail is herstory.
Harriet More like herstory under house arrest. (to Harry) Well, Harry. Does Dom’s Saxon axe define Britain?
Dom reverses Arthur’s sword to an axe again.
Harry Christ’s Cross? Embracing everyone?
Dom The Union Jack. Taking back control. If I may continue-
Harry My Union Jack is Christ’s Cross at the heart of four patron saints, four home nations. More of a broadsheet, Dom. An elaborate unity narrative spread across twenty centuries.
Dom An elaborate lie spread across twenty pages of the Guardian! I thought this was supposed to be a balanced coverage. Do I get to make my case or not?
Harriet Go ahead.
Dom spreads the Union flag aloft on his cruciform arms. Kneejerk applause. Chorus of God save Our Team etc.
Dom The Union Jack.
A model of diversity and inclusiveness
representing a clear majority
Harry 52%
Dom of our four home nations and their patron saints.
(makes an X ) The red saltire of Saint Patrick for Ireland-
Harry Ireland minus not just its 26-European-Counties but also the remaining 6 who voted for the EU.
Dom (makes an X) the white saltire on a blue background of St Andrew for Scotland
Harry EU and SNP
Dom (points at the Union flag) the yellow cross on a black field
of St David and Wales ...
Harry Not there, Dom.
Dom (points at the Union flag) beautiful red dragon of on a green field of King Arthur
Harry Not there, Dom.
Dom represented in absentia by St George
Harry who slew that Welsh dragon in 1284
Dom Wales
Harry EU-Funded
Dom but Brexit voting
Harry an absence voting for an absence
Dom and, last and most, stamping a seal on all the others
Harry like a Brexit vote (makes an x)
Dom (make a +) the majority red cross of St George
Harry a Turkish-born Greek 3rd century Roman
Dom who soldiered for his faith in Israel
Anne nailed to the red cross of loving His enemies, like Christ?
Dom Taking back control of the Holy Land from militant Muslims
Harry By murdering them back. Which is of course Christ’s basic message just as Buddha’s was Every Man For Himself; Rama’s that Greed is God; Zoroaster’s insistence on ‘Bad Thoughts, Bad Words and Bad Deeds’ and Krishna’s that anything except self-interest is an Illusion.
Dom Exactly.
Dom’s Union Jack is flanked by several English flags
Dom Cry Dom, England and St George!
Harry as our – French - national hero King Couer de Leon did
loving his enemies to death under the Victor’s cross
Dom (with audience support) England, my England!
Harry and Edward "love your enemies" the First
- whom Scots love so much, for love begets love,
they SHOUT OUT HIS NAME in their national song –
Dom (waving his Saxon axe/George cross, with football crowd support, all carrying England flags) ENGLAND! ENGLAND!
Harry who, along with Edward Mark III, his killer grandson
made George - that Turkish Christian saint of Georgia and Catalonia -
the red standard of English military prowess,
football hooligans and the Far Right
Harriet in 1348
Uproar. Cries of Take back control. Take back control.
Dom (bringing his Union flag back through the crowd of England flags and indicating it) Britain for the British. Lions led by unicorns. What more do you want?
Harry A truly Great Britain. The one we really are or could become. Diverse, inclusive, devolved, global.
Dom Political inclusiveness gone maaaaaad!
Harriet Some would say you’re political exclusiveness gone mad, Dom. Or the Bullingdon club, as it was called before the culture wars.
Harry White English males drunk on power and privilege.
Dom The trouble with your diversity and inclusiveness, Harry, is that white English males are excluded. That’s why they voted Brexit.
Harriet White English males drunk on power and privilege. Leading all the other white English males who are just drunk?
Dom White English males expensively trained to lead the country, leading all the majority white English males, also excluded from the diversity project, who vote for them.
Harriet Leaving aside that the actual white English majority is female for a moment, what do you say to Dom’s point Harry? Does your diverse Britain and your ‘woke’ history have no place for his mainstream white Englishman?
Dom Excluded from ‘woke’ history and their own white cliffs. The Englishman of Crecy, Agincourt, Shakespeare, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Lords Test match on TMS with the last man in -
Harry and a match to win against the colonials -
Dom England at Wembley …
Harriet being booed and racially abused for taking the knee and missing a penalty they missed because they were being booed and racially abused and have been all their lives
Dom the Lancaster bomber, English beer, Scotch eggs, Welsh rarebit, Irish stew, red Leicester, white cheddar, blue nun, the George Cross in the Union Jack-
Harry I could give itemise all the diversity whitewashed from that ‘English’ history
Dom yawns Ere we go… minorities to the front as usual
Harry - the Africans in Elizabethan England, the colonial regiments in the trenches, the Poles in the spitfires who helped win the battle of Britain – but all that would just confirm your prejudice.
Dom You said it.
Harry So let me flag up an earlier, gentler England instead.
Harry hoists Edmund’s flag.
Harry Some in the East say the English need a flag and a patron saint from a home nearer than George. Someone properly English. Actually Christian, rather than a Crusader.
Dom God help us. We’d be a Muslim colony in the shake of a scimitar-
Harry Someone like the Angle St Edmund the Martyr, King of East Anglia, born on Christmas Day-
Dom In Germany -
Harry As was England… this Christian King who Dunkirked to Bury, under his white dragon on a red field flag, the moral standard of the beautiful loser, was captured and tortured to death by Danes for refusing to renounce his faith.
Dom Exactly. Winners are us.
Harry Danes are us, Dom. That's where 'every Englishman's home is his castle' comes from. Sea-borne freeborn Danes refusing that pan-European know-your-village-place-and-never-leave-it feudal deference. Viking winners. But Edmund’s heroic un-defeat - unlike vic-Tory-us King Richard - really did convert his enemies.
The Common seize Edmund’s flag and sing
Red as Christ's blood,
White as chivalry
But shouldn't our Saint
Be an Angle like me?
You can shoot me with arrows
And chop off my head
But the Christ within me
Will never be dead.
In a thick wood my people
Lose one another
"Where are you? And where's
The head of our Martyr?"
You can shoot me with arrows
And chop off my head
But the Christ within me
Will never be dead.
"Hic hic, over here!"
My head wolf-cries,
Holy spirit of England
That never dies.
Between a wolf's paws
They find, in wonder
My head that to body
Returns un-sundered.
You can shoot me with arrows
And chop off my head
But the Christ within me
Will never be dead.
Dom A loser’s flag for a loser’s cause. Is that the best you can do?
Harry The absolute divine best, yes.
Dom Meanwhile, back in the real world, we’re back at Hastings. Fighting to take back control from a successful European invasion. And you give us a loser’s flag.
Harry It's the flag the English carried at Hastings. The flag carried into battle by Aelfred the Great.
Dom Now you’re talking. The man who saved England.
Harry By losing most of it. Not to mention those other ‘English’ greats. King Canute, a Great Dane. Harold, a Great Half-Dane…
Dom There you go again, bringing diversity into everything.
Harriet I think it’s already there Dom.
Dom Your King Arthur wasn’t keen on it though was he?
Harry Merlin’s vision of Logres was a white dragon fighting a red one. Edmund’s red and white flag combined them.
Dom More diversity. Why don’t we ever hear about some proper full-blooded English kings.
Harry Because we haven’t had one of those since Aethelred the Unready a thousand years ago in the primary school of our history. And he fares rather badly in its OFSTED report.
Harriet (pause) Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the Abingdon Monks (puts her hands together in prayer)
The Abingdon Monks (the Common in monk wigs etc) – their hands together in prayer - perform in a plainsong
Aethelred II served as King of the English from 978 to 1013. And usually turned up on time. He is inadequate with some Arma-geddon out of here features. And recommended for takeover as a Norse Academy.
"A feeble and treacherous ruler who failed to prevent the Danes from over-running England. Implicated in the assassination of his half brother King Edward the Martyr, thus sabotaging English resistance and causing nearly the whole country to be ravaged.
During his reign, the Church was deprived of all reverence and just dues; the rights of free men were destroyed; innocent men and young children were sold into slavery; treachery was so rife and the social order so loosened that noblemen and slaves took each other’s places.
His policy to buy peace made the invasions worse. His other policy to massacre the Danes already here brought the wrathful Swine Forkbeard of Denmark who replaced him as temporary Superhead of the English and after Aethelred’s return for two final inglorious years, the end of English rule forever: ultimately precipitating a Norman conquest which would last until Domesday.
Aethelred’s self-evaluation – that his reign included the legendary resistance of the Battle of Maldon; the finest scholarship and illuminated manuscripts of the entire Anglo-Saxon period; and the word ‘Unready’ in Old English meant ill-advised not unprepared cannot be located in the annals because everyone thinks his name begins with an E whereas in fact it begins with an A .
Eeeeeee-men."
Harriet The Abingdon Monks, appearing in a monastery font somewhere near you. (applauds)
Harry retrieves Edmund’s flag.
Harry The truth is, Dom, it’s not England you Brexit winners believe in. It’s conquering. Your warrior Normans seized the white dragon of Edmund and adopted it. But that George’s bloody British Legion Cross came to suit you better. When you talk about the Battle of Hastings and taking back control, you’re of the Conqueror’s party without knowing it. You’re about as English as William the Bastard.
Dom Are you calling me a Frenchman?
Harry Not even a Frenchman. A third generation Viking. The clue is in the name. ‘Nor-man’. A Guy of Gisbourne robber baron who crashed, burned and made such monumental efforts to ethnically cleanse English culture of Englishness through the feudal Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet centuries. And never even half succeeded. Because the real England – Common England - is unconquerable.
The Common Public! Common Land! Keep Off. An Englishman’s home is his Common!
Harry Hereward seized history; Robin Hood the greenwood and the Saxon underdog his day. And I’m telling you so in Angle-ish, not Norman. It's one of the wonders of these islands. English survived. And then it triumphed. Despite 300 years of suppression from the Conqueror to Chaucer. That's the soul of England, not you. You’re like that joker-minstrel at Bourne who sang for Hereward’s father but changed his market stall snake-skin as soon as the Normans took over because it was the only soul he knew, Dom.
Dom I’m the patriot here. I love and believe in Britain. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori was my Old School motto.
Harry Like your party under its Hitler-backing Mail-flag whose much vaunted ‘love’ of and belief in Britain was exposed in that 2012 report
Dom (donning a Norman helmet and brandishing a sword) Britannia Unchained!
Harry damning our people ‘as the worst idlers in the world.’ A nation with the fewest national holidays in the world.
Harriet (like a sports score reader) England and Wales 8. Scotland 11. Europe 13. Japan 17.
Harry You love a Britain that slaves for your private profit, Norman.
Dom The English are a motley bag -
We pocket them like money -
Of Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes
But 'ereward's really funny;
The dozy brute, the son of a nun
Godiva and a Dane,
Ereward the Wake was 'alf asleep
Till William the Conqueror came.
We'll turn your stagnant fens around,
Your farms and mills advance,
Make lazy Saxon manors French
And work-shy peasants dance.
If 'alf a Dane with 'alf a brain
Can stop us, where was 'e
At 'astings when ze arrow fell?
Pah! skulking o'er the sea.
Viking round the world just like
The half-blood Dane he is
Now let me civilise you, wench
With French embrace and kiss!
We'll turn your stagnant fens around,
Your farms and mills advance,
Make lazy Saxon manors French
And work-shy peasants dance.
Our brutal Norms are cultured now
By three French generations,
Our hot Norse blood cooked into wine,
Our priests don’t have relations.
The English are a mongrel race,
Their priests the marrying kind,
Their Rome with Celt and Viking Crossed,
Their kings are Cnuts and Sweyn-
We'll turn your stagnant fens around,
Your farms and mills advance,
Make lazy Saxon manors French
And work-shy peasants dance.
Dom bows. Wild applause. Chants of “Take back control!” “England. Oi!” threatening to overwhelm the debate.
Harriet Ladies, please!
Dom Those are the economic realities, Harry. The real world. For all your historical ‘myths’.
Harry is up against jeers and cynicism with this plea for national unity but perseveres.
Harry British place names – the social-economic nouns we make over the centuries- dispute that, Dom.
As any kid who’s pulled a sword from a stone
Will tell you,
The real Myth of Britain lives on in a harp-dreaming present
Stretched away beyond the limits of the past and future.
A Sword pulled from a Stone from Wales to the heart
Of Stonehenge; to Pen y ghent; Pont-y-fract; Dundee; Lynn,
London, Dover, Thames; Cumbria; Glastonbury, Cornwall
Through Brittany to Normandy and on to Provence
Where the Matter of Britain is The Matter of Europe
And Arthur Rome's heir and Europe's High King.
The real Myth of Britain - more real than its history-
Is what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
We bury the axe, put the sword back in the stone
And make a nation, an agreement to differ.
Silence
Dom We’ve given you back control. What more do you want?
Anne (points at Harriet) The rest of herstory.
Scene 3
Harriet Well, in 1485, something terrible happened. The Welsh came back, in the shape of Henry Tudor. Yes, he did what Owain Glyndwr could only dream of. Logres was no longer the lost Land. King Arthur rode again, even if in Henry VIII’s case the tilt at Arthurian glory was more cloth than gold and ended like hybris before a fall in a rotting ulcerated leg. And whether a Welsh dynasty ruling England did Wales any more good as an independent nation than James Stuart did Scotland later by uniting the thrones and nations beneath him is
Harry Whatever a moot point is in Welsh.
Morgan ‘Cardiff.’
Dom Shakespeare gives the Tudors the finest English press a Welsh dynasty could have and demonises the last Plantagenet Richard III
Morgan But his actual Welsh characters are dreamers like Glendower or idiots like Fluellen (sneezing this) llewing all over the shop.
Morgan (sing) There’s a kind of Welsh all over the shop tonight-
Harriet Not now Morgan. Meanwhile, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, the old money left over from the Battle of Bosworth, after a lifetime flirting with the premiership title, heads for a retirement in that Henry VIII Care Home, the Tower. Cue the Strange Death of Catholic England under Good Queen Bess.
Anne My baby!
Harriet Whose ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ confirmed the Break With Rome. Church Walls, windows and interiors made Cromwell-clear of decoration.
Anne Thomas. Not Oliver.
Harriet Puritan Middle England had voted with its Protestant Work Ethic to
Dom Leave Europe
Harriet Leave Catholic Feudal Agrarian Festival Southern Europe and Remain with Dynamic Trading Proto-Industrial Northern Powerhouse Europe. Or, as they called it before it grew up, The Hanseatic League. England stopped looking South to Holy Rome and Imperial Spain and started looking North to New Merchant Holland. After Edward and Mary’s see saw Margery daw
Common Mary Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Goosey goose gander
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
A priesthole for the old Guy
Who crossed the new State God,
The left-footed southpaw
Gutted for His Love.
Mary Tudor, Bishop Gardner
Killing and Torturing Prots,
Silver thumbscrews, Manhood carvers,
Maidening their anti-Mary plots,
Anti-Mary maidening their plots.
Goosey goose gander
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who would not say his prayers.
I took him by the left leg
And threw him down the stairs.
Mary Mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Harriet under Elizabeth, Catholic England went West. Protestant England went everywhere else.
Anne Attagirl. She had my blood in her all right.
Harriet Except that she died a virgin. And her Scottish heirs and cousins the Stuarts had a nasty habit of either marrying Catholics or making a marriage-deathbed with them. So the English clock rewound towards ritual and away from spirit.
Harry For some this put us on the wrong side of the Thirty Years War – that holocaust of Protestant Merchant North against Catholic Feudal South –
Harriet but, if so, we were on the right side as well, because Absolute Charlie Mark I declared war on - and lost to – and had to pay crippling compensation to - both sides at once….. And then chose the Catholic side anyway. English Churches and Crosses were re-dressed a la French mode. Cue a Very English, Very Un-Civil War. Families, friends, classes, the Church, ideals of fidelity and honour and truth, minds and the ‘home nations’ all divided from each other and against each other and themselves. A Lost Land, implacably divided.
Harry No change there then.
Harriet Oliver ‘Williams’ Cromwell the one who gets blamed for straining out the stain in the glass of Ely’s Lady Chapel, even though it was Thomas – called them Roman Temples. And led a new model new Elizabethan blood and thunder cavalry charge through them into the future.
The Common chants
'Cut off his head with the crown upon it,
God damn this king!' we cried
Only tyrants will tremble recalling this day.
Good men recall it with pride.
Cavalier tales of Cross-dressing Kings
Royal-escaping up oaks! – Ha! -
Give us that heaven on earth achieved
And run by New Model blokes!
The greatest England for 400 years
From Agincourt to Waterloo
Won with God on our side at Naseby Field
For ever! For England! For you.
Harriet Those the Civil War reduced in wealth and power begged to differ of course. And that conflict has given English one of its slipperiest words: that as a noun means ‘gallant dashing knight’ and as an adjective ‘irresponsible anti-social oaf’.
Dom Bullingdon?
Harriet Cavalier. (pause) Cromwell’s Greater England flew its 4 nation flag - equal quadrants for each of the ‘home’ nations, unlike your ‘Union’ flag, Dom - and rode the revolutionary tide to international prestige through the 1650s, mapping out a future ahead of its time. But never really healed its rift. At the Restoration, his embalmed body was ripped from its tomb, dragged through the streets to Tyburn, decapitated, hanged drawn and quartered; and the head spiked on a pole atop Westminster Abbey.
Dom It was a head of its time.
Harriet After 25 years soaking up the sun, the heavens opened in an electric storm and it was struck down to Earth, hidden up a chimney and for three centuries appeared in museums, freak shows and episodes of ‘the good old days’ before finally being laid to rest at Cambridge University in 1960, in the sanctuary of his old college. No-one digs it up from there, for the very good reason that they don’t know where it is and that all our premiers have come from Oxford not Cambridge for 100 years.
Dom The last time Cambridge won that Thames-igniting Boat Race was ‘Safety First’ Stanley Baldwin in the Nazi First 1930s.
Harriet Who famously said, in his Old School Cambridge Conservative way, (Cambridge sneer, down the nose) “I cannot tell the truth. It would cost me the next election.”
Dom (bored Oxford drawl, in the throat) At Oxford we were trained to sound like we’re telling the truth even though we don’t know what it is.
Harriet Now Dom what would Old Noll, England’s only previous Republican Head of State say, about his stab at ruling this Eton Mess Arthurians call Logres; Shakespeare called this jewel set in a silver sea; Milton called a Paradise Lost; Churchillians call The Empire and you call Breck’s Isle
Cromwell’s Head terrifyingly appears before Dom can answer, clearing the stage.
Cromwell “a Kingdom of the Saints!” (speaking from bitter experience) Potentially.
Cromwell’s Head leads The Common in an Essex chant
In Sixteen Hundred and Forty Eight
When England suffered the pangs of State,
The Roundheads laid siege to Colchester town
Where the King's Men still fought for the Crown.
There One-Eyed Thompson stood on a wall
He was the deadliest gunner of all,
From St Mary's Tower, his cannon aflame.
Humpty Dumpty was its name.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Applause
Harriet You should tour that, Cromwell. Only maybe not in Ireland…. And so our long island story ends in a Strictly For The Birds Dom and Harry TV Play Off final. It won its last battle with the Nazi end of civilisation, bomb-dusted itself off and then emerged from that finest hour to totter down its always-England country lanes to the end of a Second Elizabethan age
Anne My blood in its veins.
Harriet Your sister Mary’s actually.
Anne That Harry-serving little Tom!
Dom (sings) You’re the headstrong Boleyn. She’s the royal one!
The Beatles plays
Harriet Don’t look so disappointed. Spirit is truer than blood and your spirit was definitely there when the sons of the British Empire conquered Everest, not to mention at the Boleyn ground in Swinging London itself when West Ham won the World Cup; the Beatles conquered America; and Harry ‘the pipe’ Wilson rewrote the nation into the Twentieth Century with his post-Buggery Act, post death penalty, post racial and gender discrimination Sixties just as Thomas Cromwell wrote it out of the Middle Ages in Act One; and Thomas Howard failed to write it back in Act Two. World-saving Tommy’s Yellow Submarine may have gone down since – repainted as a Blue Meanie U boat snatching children’s Free Milk on its way to abolishing Society altogether but it went down singing. The All Made in Great Britain that gave us Shakespeare, The Steam Engine, The TV, The NHS and The BBC adding The Beatles, Edward Jenner and The World Wide Web. It was a brilliant New Elizabethan farewell. After which, there was …
Dom Freedom Day!
Harry Freedom from European civilisation. January 31 2020. Freedom from Plague-protection. July 17 2021. A laughing stocks on the world stage, Logres a prey once again to a host of enemies without and a fatal paralysis of tribal self-absorptions within. Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill. Drawing a line under a line under a line under a line…
The immediate past. Enter Boris dancing, boozing, snatching, drawing a line, then another, then another, knocking everything over.
Boris (drunk and slurring) I think one of those eighteen litres I had must have been Belgian. I’ve got a terrible hangover. Still, yet another No Confidence motion won thanks to Rees-Mogg’s casting Vote and the rule changes I, Boris, ‘British-bulldozed’ through. (a toast) To the Conservatives. Sorry, I forgot we'd thrown those Rome-moaning Law-Abiding Commons Wets to the British Bulldog. To The Breck’s Isle Union of Fascists. Whatever else you say about me, I know how to throw a Party. Cheers everyone.
Exit, tripped by Dom. Applause
Harry And now this Joker auditioning to be King Breck.
Dom His small eye revolving his treasure -
Little Britain and all it contains -
The King steals from Merlin a vision
His tiny mind hardly sustains:
Harry "Your castle, King Breck, keeps collapsing
Because built on the underground lair
Of two warring dragons, the red split
In the white's jaws of victory there.
"The red dragon stands for Britannia,
The white for the English-to-be
And your red worm is turning - and driving
The white dragon into the sea."
Both Let a nation divided/ in battle be joined,
Raven and Eagle conceiving the dove
As the Little is lost in the Greater Britain
Let Arth/Ursus cleave; hate is conquered by love.
Dom "But the red dragon's head is young Uther!"
Says King Breck, "And it ought to be mine!"
"My Breck's Isle exists on division,
I’m the crack in Great Britain's behind."
Harry Merlin magically helmets young Uther,
Who cleaves to his dead captain's wife.
She believes he's her lost war-dead husband
In the hottest night of her life
And bears him a son, an Arth/Ursus,
A high noon in our deepest night sky,
The May-Winter King of a Lost Land
That Was Never, but Is, and Can't Die.
Let a nation divided/ in battle be joined,
Raven and Eagle conceiving the dove
As the Little is lost in the Greater Britain
Let Arth/Ursus cleave; hate is conquered by love.
Harriet But there’s life in the old bulldog yet. We can still come second in the Eurovision Dom contest. Congratulations, white Cliff! Now Dom and Harry it’s time to sum up your entire side of the cultural war in one sexy, spectacular, vote-catchy Song For Breck’s Isle. Are you ready?
Harry Yes.
Dom Yesssssss.
Boris (off) Yesh.
Harriet (as on Gladiators) On my first whistle, Dom you will put your case. On my second whistle, Harry you will answer.
Grn Knight And what about the Green case?
Harriet Sorry, we seem to have run out of time.
Apocalyptic thunderclap.
Grn Knight We certainly have.
Dom If we don’t keep selling each other stuff, and flogging the planet to make it, capitalism will die.
Grn Knight If we don’t stop viral capitalism-
Harry I’ve got this, Sir Green. If we don’t stop selling each other stuff, and flogging the planet to make it, humanity will die.
Eurovision razzamatazz disguising the Apocalypse. Dom with Churchill-Farage cigar-ette and beer glass of champagne. The italic verses are spoken in a would-be Churchill voice; the rest rapped.
Dom As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a No Deal with Nil Points
The UK will win Eurovision again;
Cilla, with Ringo's hair.
The Tories will be Winston Churchill again.
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
Rap beat. Over it
Dom You can keep your French shtick, your double Deutch,
Your Dolce-clad discothèques
Your tiqui-taca, your Peps and your Klopps
Your Lattes and Pilsners and Becks.
You can keep your fromage, your Nordic noir,
Your Breughel and Brendan and Brecht,
Your Christendom, culture and 'civitas,'
Let me live on the Isle of Breck
Where coiffure d'Albert is Albert's of Heacham
And le bistrot a gastritis-pub;
Where mange tout de chef is Chav's All You Can Eat
And pure white folk rules at the club
And pure white folk rules at the club.
As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a no-deal with 'nil points',
England will win the World Cup again,
Harry Kane will be the hot Spur
The Who will be Number One again
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
You can keep your Rioja, your Pinot, your Brut,
Give us Spitfire and Bombadier
And Broadside and Bomber and Brexile Bitter
And rationing, hatred and fear.
It's the new party line, the new Civil War,
Breaching kin, class, friend and Union
Eyes right, all salute the all-white flag
Of our half-mast donkey-led kingdom.
Full steam ahead to Breck's Isle, Ahoy!
A hundred percent right and sure
Or 52 on a confident day
Which it might not be anymore.
As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a no-deal with 'nil points',
Wales will win the World Cup/ beat the All Blacks/ again;
Real Madrid/ Warren Gatland/ the Spur;
The valleys be home-grown and funded again
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
100 percent for a four point turn
Going back where we weren't before
Back from the Front and that Normandy beach
Home to Brexile's doughty white shore.
We will fight in the plazas where families dine out,
Kick over their wine and cuisine;
We will never surrender our country and cod
And chip on the shoulder and Queen.
We are the champions of Europe we were
And will be, by running away
Backwards up Winston Churchill Drive
Though his soft 'Will' has shrunk to hard 'May.'
Though his soft 'Will' has shrunk to hard 'May.'
As our sandy shores rock Euro-vision
With our white Cliff-Engelbert noir
And seize back control from green Brussels
And win a no-deal with 'nil points',
Northern Ireland will win the World Cup again,
A backstop midfield be the Spur,
Our Lost Lands will be Arthur's England again
- Except that they never were,
Except that they never were.
Uproarious applause. Shouts of “Red Leicester. White Cheddar. Blue Nun!” Dom dons a British army beret, hoists a British Legion flag, deploys around the Arthur Sword now dressed with poppies as a War Memorial Cross
Anne Has it come to this?
Harry Yes.
We were never truly in
We'll never be truly out,
This hard or soft Breck's Isle we seek
Is a Round Table roundabout.
A Round Table has no leader,
A lone nation has no place,
"We demand to be Kings of Europe - or else…
We'll disappear without trace!"
Once Breck, King of All Little Britain,
Paid sea-wolves to help him defend
Breck's Island against its invaders
Now those sea-wolves rule without end.
We're the one at the Table insisting
'We stand alone, merci, m'sieu!'
Safe behind national borders
Hard as nails, though the nails aren't secure.
Singing "not from our part of the world, bye "
- To the world inside our Breck's isle,
- To its goods on our continental shelf,
- To its services with a smile.
A Round Table has no leader,
A lone nation has no place,
"We demand to be Kings of Europe - or else…
We'll disappear without trace!"....
As fossilised as a Daily Mail font,
We gather for remembrance, Brexit-badged
With poppies pinned tweet-loud, Union-flagged
Against the Europe we won then didn’t want;
The dying leaves in wild gusts blowing blunt
Our inside-out umbrellas like the rags
Of Empire, this beret-ing bulldog wag's
Self-crowned Napoleon pushing to the front.
And yet up lines dividing Indian,
Arab, Jew - as MIXED-RACE BRITAIN WINS F1
IN GERMAN CAR - for King, Country, the names peal
Cleaving off a tongue that joins us all
The way from Private Ames to Lancelot Percival
Williamson, knights of faith: these countrymen.
Harriet (to the audience) So – who you gonna vote for? Vote now by tapping Dom or Harry on your Strictly For The Birds app and tune in next week for the result, Apocalypse permitting. That’s all for now. Good night!
Fade into a long red dragon sunset as....
Morgan It’s not over till the Black Lady sings. (sings)
“Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!”
He begged Bedwyr, and twice more,
“Throw back, grown-black Excalibur”
That he might live forever,
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of his heart’s bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream.
That Artos, once man Arthur,
Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long fought malice, Mordred,
Is god, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look:
A Christ-sword to Word your sky!
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