I am not normally an anglophile, but over the past couple of months I have spent way too many hours devouring British TV shows.
I have even developed a severe case of confused Brit accent disorder as I switch from listening to 1920s Birmingham gangsters to 1950s upper class Londoners, and back.
My ancestors fled England in the 1620s on a small ship, not far behind the Mayflower, and I’ve always assumed they had good reasons to risk everything for a new life so my interest in Britain has been minimal.
But my current problem is Netflix and access to two addictive British TV series, namely Peaky Blinders and The Crown. I first became aware that I had a problem just a couple weeks ago when I found myself chained to the couch watching episode after episode.
Like many modern problems, this one started on Facebook.
A few months back a friend recommended Peaky Blinders in a Facebook post and I put it on my burgeoning to-watch list. Finally, several weeks ago as a lunch-time diversion I started been watching the show, which really should be called Peaky Fookin’ Blinders, to capture the spirit of the characters, and I became hooked. OK, and confused by the accents, forced from time-to-time to rewind to catch key bits, much as I had done when trying to understand the inner-city Baltimore dialects on The…
