Jack Whitehall Teaches You How To Be British

Hello, I'm Jack Whitehall and I am British.

Today I'm going to show you how to be British.

I'm going to teach you how to use some slang,

and instruct you on making the perfect cup of tea

and talk you through a couple of British snacks

and I'm going to introduce you to a few of our accents.

[upbeat music]

We are not a nation that is famed for our cuisine

but we are quite good on snacking,

presumably to avoid having to eat our bland, tasteless

horrible, flacid food.

So first up, Maltesers.

You don't have Maltesers in America?

[Producer] It's Whoppers out here.

Whoppers? Yeah, but they're crap.

They're crap? Well these are amazing.

Like a light chocolate, they sort of melt in your mouth.

We have a lot of Maltesers in the house actually.

My girlfriend is a diabetic.

There's an interesting little titbit

of information about my life.

And for any of you that don't know about diabetes,

you have to very carefully monitor your blood sugar levels

which means if you do strenuous exercise

they can dip very dangerously low.

So what that now means in my life is that

I can tell exactly how good of a performance

I've put in in the bedroom

by what my girlfriend is having to snack on

after we've had sex.

For example, if post-coitally, I were to roll over

and see her tucking into an entire novelty-sized Toblerone,

I would be like, well played Jack.

Bravo. Good work.

I have on occasion, rolled over after sex

and seen her consuming a single Malteser.

Which is not a great review.

[laughter off camera]

So I do actually find the Malteser quite triggering now.

The sight of her popping just one of these in and going,

Right, I'm going to bed now.

Not great.

[Jack snorts] [crew laughing]

Could be worse, could be a Skittle.

Okay, what have we got here?

Jelly Babies.

Little, sort of,

I guess little jellified human beings that we eat.

I remember as a kid eating these a lot,

and like taking great joy in like beheading the Jelly Baby

which makes me sound like a psychopath,

but like all kids did that, definitely.

It wasn't just me.

[chuckles] Again, there's a lot of these in the house.

Oh dear.

Percy Pigs.

Love a Percy Pig.

These are from M&S.

And they have M&S in all of the service stations in the UK.

So these, you tend to eat if you're like on a long drive.

Stop off at M&S, fill up on the Percy Pigs.

These are the GOAT sweets.

They're great.

Okay, cockles.

Now these are a Cockney delicacy.

The old me would've told you

that these are absolutely minging

but now I have to like these

and enjoy all of these things like cockles

and whelks and jellied eels. [retches]

Oh, like literally thinking about that makes me retch.

It's like a bony, chopped-up eel in gelatin

and that is a delicacy in the East End.

And then cockles, you eat these as well

with like a little toothpick.

And I've had to sit in front of my girlfriend's grandfather

and pretend to enjoy these

when inwardly, I'm dying.

Tea? You've got tea here.

Surely?

Oh, English breakfast tea.

I mean actually, to be fair,

the reality is, when I've been traveling in America before,

I have brought my own tea with me.

I also brought Marmite with me

when I came to America as well.

'cause you can't get Marmite here.

I mainly like Marmite

'cause of how much it disconcerts Americans.

[bright elegant music]

You're not necessarily aficionados

when it comes to making tea over here.

I have even heard stories

about people putting lemon in it. [gags]

So now I'm gonna show you how to make a proper

British cup of tea.

First up, set your tea bag into the cup.

All good so far.

Hopefully everyone's up to speed.

You'll take your water which must be boiled

and gently soak that teabag.

Pour a little bit into the saucer as well.

That's always good.

I am fond of a little bit of tea bagging.

So I like to lift it up

and just gently dunk it in a couple of times,

just to get everything out of that bag.

And then you need to let it steep.

About two minutes of steeping time.

Then we're gonna take the bag out

and then we've got milk here.

Don't put the milk in first

and don't ask for any other milk.

It needs to be proper milk from a cow, okay?

None of your nut juice.

I haven in fact seen an American

attempt to ask for alternative milks in the UK,

and the admittedly, slightly older gentleman

that was working there,

looked at him with pure hatred in his eyes,

and he said, The milk options are hot or cold.

And then a little stir. [spoon clinking]

And no sugar either.

I don't think you're allowed to have sugar.

Or maybe you are.

Hm. That's builder's tea.

That's what we call,

it's when you have about eight sugars in it.

And there, that's your perfect cup of tea.

[slurps] Yeah, pretty good actually.

[upbeat funky music]

[flip chart paper rustles] [pointer stick taps]

Trollied, this is a British word for drunk.

I had too many ales last night, officer

and I'm afraid I'm a little bit trollied.

Just like the Inuits have 60 different words for snow.

We have a lot of different ways to describe getting drunk.

Steaming,

blotto, wasted,

minted, munted.

Trollied is a sort of interim stage.

When you are on your way to being completely shitfaced.

It's just before that.

And then a couple of more drinks

and you would be annihilated.

[paper rustling]

Pants.

So pants is a word that is used to describe something

that is not great.

Not pants like underpants.

Oh no, I think it is like pants.

Yeah, it must be like pants.

It's like a derogatory term.

Oh that's pants.

Or I went to watch my football team, not soccer, last night

and they lost three-nil.

It was pants

[paper rustling]

Pied off.

This means to disrespect someone.

The etymology of this is from pie in face.

Like having a pie shoved into your face.

Pied off has become very popular,

especially with the kids of late

because it has been popularized in a television show.

The show where they follow the dating lives

of people with learning difficulties.

Love Island, that's it.

[paper rustling]

Bob's your uncle. Yeah, this is a really weird one.

This one means like something's really easy.

You go down to the shops,

stick your items in the basket,

go to the till and pay for them.

Bob's your uncle.

It's got nothing to do with anyone actually called Bob.

I have no idea where this one came from.

It's pretty weird.

It is not a phrase I use a lot.

It's quite old-timey.

It's the kind of phrase that my parents might use.

From this, thus far, remember pied off.

That one gets used a lot more.

This one I feel like is gonna be phased out.

[paper rustling]

Under the cosh.

This one is used by sports telecasters a lot.

If you are watching a game

and your team is up against the wall,

they could be under the cosh.

That means under pressure, I guess.

Cosh, what does cosh mean?

Is that like a baton that you whack people with?

Could this be a cosh?

So under the cosh suggests maybe

someone getting beaten with a baton.

[upbeat music]

So Scouse accent is people from Liverpool, Merseyside.

It's a very distinctive accent.

Quite unnerving if you hear it

come out of someone's mouth for the first time.

It's quite hard on the consonants.

There are certain gateway sentences

that can help you into the Scouse accent.

Famously, Bucket of fried chicken and a can of Coke.

Just 'cause there's lots of Cs

and you have to really wrap your tongue around it.

You get quite a lot of saliva building up in your mouth.

So if you're not trained in the Scouse accent

then you do have to stand back

from people when you speak it.

'cause there can be quite a lot of spray.

Geordie.

This is a dangerous one for me to attempt.

It can sometimes veer into Jamaican, which is not great.

So I will try to be careful.

This is people from the Northeast of England,

from Newcastle.

Oh no, it's already gone a bit. [laughs]

Focus.

Their big phrase out there is howay.

Howay the lads.

That means like how are you doing?

No, it doesn't. It means, come on.

That's what it means.

Famous people from the Northeast are like

Paul Gascoigne and Sam Fender.

He's in a band from the Northeast and he talks like that.

And if you do it really slowly, then it's a lot safer.

If I speed up any more than this,

then we may end up in Kingston, Jamaica,

which we don't want.

It's like you're sort of just belching out

each of the syllables, like that.

Don't think I'm gonna be invited back

to Newcastle anytime soon.

Soon.

Yorkshire, this is an accent from the north of England.

People from Sheffield, and Leeds, former mining towns.

They got Yorkshire Tea up there.

They really like gravy, which they have on everything.

They say things like, Ayup, duck.

I think that's hello.

Received pronunciation, RP.

This is how people used to speak on the wireless,

on the radio back in the day.

And everyone was trained to talk like this.

Whether you were from Newcastle or Liverpool or...

Yorkshire.

If you wanted to get on the telly,

you had to talk like this.

That's very clipped

and you'll have to annunciate all of the words

and speak very quickly like that.

And is sort of, I would say my accent.

I speak in Received Pronunciation

because I tend to talk on a day-to-day basis

like I have found a time machine

and traveled from the 1930s.

Cockney, the accent that was famously murdered

by Dick Van in the Mary Poppins films.

It is an accent that is used

by people that are from the East End of London.

Traditionally that grew up within

the sound of the Bells of Bow,

which is a cathedral in East London.

And if you were born within earshot of the Bow Bells

then you would be considered a Cockney.

It's an accent that I have to be careful with.

My girlfriend is from the East End.

Her family are from the East End.

It used to be an accent that I would

slip into for comic effect,

but quite frankly, I'm scared of them.

Brummie.

Brummie is the accent used by people from Birmingham.

You will have heard it, you lot,

Conde Nast viewers,

smart sophisticated people like you, in Peaky Blinders

which I have not featured in because,

you've guessed it, I cannot do a Brummie accent.

It's one of the few that I don't think I can do.

Brummie. That was sort of it.

Brummie, I'm from Birmingham.

Actually, that's better than it's ever been.

Wow. Maybe I should have been in Peaky Blinders.

[upbeat funky music]

Start in London.

I think you would head off down the Thames

to wonderful Henley on Thames where they have the Regatta

and it's absolutely swarming with toffs

in gilets and red trousers and boater hats.

That would be a lovely place to sort of start.

Then you might punt down the Thames

and you could head off to Oxford

where they have the famous university

which I didn't get into.

So actually, you know what?

Fuck Oxford.

I'd go to Swindon.

There we are.

I mean, it's not necessarily the finest city in the country.

It's got a little bit of a reputation

for being possibly a little bit backward.

It's not backward, it's just that Swindon has

the most complicated roundabout system in Europe.

It's called the Magic Roundabout.

It's literally impossible to navigate.

It's like eight roundabouts

surrounding a massive roundabout.

It's impossible to drive across.

And I had to learn to drive there

and obviously failed my test

because I kept getting stranded on the Magic Roundabout.

I suspect they have the Magic Roundabout in Swindon

because it's the only way that you could

keep anyone in Swindon.

It's like a moat, almost,

to keep people within the city of Swindon.

You literally can't escape.

I mean that's probably where the road trip would end.

'cause you'd just be there,

stranded on this fucking roundabout.

I mean, it's not a great road trip.

You're not seeing a lot of the country.

You're mainly just seeing Swindon. [chuckles]

Thank you very much.

I've been Jack Whitehall

and I hope this gets you through Britain

without getting punched.

And as the Geordies would say,

Howay, whey aye, man.

Gan away...

On the Toon.

They would never say that.

'Cause it makes no sense whatsoever.

It's just noises.

[upbeat music]