I'm surprised that Will Self's Great British Bus Journey on Radio 4 has the title it has. Given Will's eager recourse to the Thesaurus, you'd have thought that Will Self's Great British Omnibus Peregrination would have been a much better title.
The series is presented as his attempt, after Brexit, to find the “real” Britain and its workers.
I gave it a go and all I can say is that Catherine Nixey in The Times does it full justice:
This was billed as exploration, but it was snobbery, pure and simple. When Self and other middle-class Londoners say “real” Britain, what they really mean is “poor” Britain. And they don’t like it much. That’s why they live in Clapham. This was toe-curling to listen to. Self is patronising, crass and, for all his long words, a fool. It wasn’t quite as embarrassing as when he spent a week touring Cern’s Large Hadron Collider and failed to see the point of all that science. But nearly.
Even our old friend Hugh Sykes noticed the tone, tweeting "Will Self just posited on BBC Radio 4 that the high Leave vote in the West Midlands may have been a reflection of: 'the white working class coming out of the woodwork.' sic". Hugh then spotted the underlying metaphor, adding, "Insects?"
