The media construction of conservative Britishness around Captain Toms' birthday

I made the mistake of watching BBC Breakfast over breakfast today and caught 30 minutes of ‘Captain Tom’s 100th Birthday’ celebrations.

What struck me was just how much Tom’s life and lifestyle fall into conservative ideals about Britishness, which is shared by an extreme minority of the upper middle classes, but often presented in the media as normal.

Most of the themes are present in this 30 minute clip:

Royalty, The Armed Forces, Cricket, Football, The Village Life, The ‘Nuclear Family’, and of course the NHS, although the reality that 1/7 NHS workers aren’t actually British seems to have got lost on the media professionals who constructed this 30 minute tribute to fantasy Britishness!

▶️ 3Speak