English pleasures are like English sauces: simple and, at first, intolerable.

There have been a number of things that confused me when I first got to England, and which I would like to forewarn other Americans of before they travel here.
Some things you just have to get used to. For instance, kids aged 18-22 in London party hardest Monday-Thursday and relax more on the weekend. I had heard this from a bunch of English kids and people who were here first semester but it goes against so many of my deeply held convictions that I refused to believe it. But it’s true. Clubs have student discounts during the week, and kids go where the cheap cover charges are. On Saturdays it isn’t unheard of to have a cover charge of 15-20 pounds (POUNDS! That’s 25-35 dollars!). It’s not really the students’ choice, we’re handcuffed by our wallets. I think this is why it took me so long to adjust to the sleep pattern, English kids rest on different days.
Also, sports. In America people like to watch sports to see mammoth superhumans perform acts of physical prowess that we mere mortals could only dream of (i.e. Lebron James). With the exception of football/soccer, English sports tend to have no regard for athleticism. A good analogy would be the American sports that are becoming more popular in London. The NFL has repeatedly tried to entice English fans, having staged games here for the past couple years. These have been utter failures. English people I ask assure me those games are a joke, the only people who go are given tickets or are ex-pat Americans. But do you know what sport is catching on? Bowling. That’s right, mofo, BOWLING. At first this is mind-boggling. I mean, I love bowling, I proudly bowled competitively through high school, me and a couple of my friends were captains of the team my senior year, but how could a culture embrace a sport like bowling while giving the cold shoulder to something as awesomealicious as (American) football. I mean, darts is on television here more than Friends and Seinfeld combined in America. It took me a while to understand how these people could be so into darts. The reason behind all this occurred to me the other day. English people don’t really care about the sport that’s going on: they’re just trying to get drunk. Again, with the sole exception of football, which they still do get hammered while watching. But the other sports, even rugby, which requires an immense amount of athleticism, are just an excuse to drink. Somebody was trying to explain cricket to me and I just could not grasp what the fuck he was talking about, it sounded so dumb. Because it is sooooo dumb. But then he stopped and said something really enlightening, “no, man, you’re going about it all wrong, you’re focusing on the runs and wickets and overs, when you should be focusing on the fact that you’re out there all Sunday afternoon in the sunshine gettin’ rounded out (British equivalent of nicely drunk).” This changed everything for me. He’s right, every British sport is just a way for people to get together and get cheerfully drunk. Thus the popularity of stuff like bowling, darts and snooker, which are admittedly not sports at all. They like games with convenient bars where you don’t have to exert yourself.
And, finally, how are English people so well-informed????!!!! When I tell people I’m from New York they start to talk about Giuliani’s lasting impact on crime in New York City, ask about Bloomberg (as if he comes to Thanksgiving) and want to know how people felt about “the whole Spitzer thing.” They ask if I think prop 8 is going to make a comeback. They wanna know about recent Supreme Court rulings. They’re more informed on American Politics than the vast majority of Americans. This alone wouldn’t surprise me, I know better than anyone that the vast majority of Americans are blithering idiots. But the thing is, it took me forever to realize how the English came to know so much. Their newspapers are embarrassing, more like a mix between grocery store checkout line celebrity gossip rags and softcore porn than anything resembling news. The reason it took me so long to figure out was that I didn’t watch any English television until this past week. What it all comes down to is the fact that ENGLISH PEOPLE HAVE NO CONCEPT OF ENTERTAINMENT. Take, for example, the Monty Python, probably England’s most revered Comedy troupe. For a long time I thought they were the funniest group in the world. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I thought that because all I ever saw was the “best of” of Monty Python. That’s all anyone sees really. Have you ever watched an actual episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? It’s awful. Nearly unwatchable. There’s a reason they play it at 4 am on public access, that’s where it belongs. From seasons upon seasons worth of footage they can pull together an episode’s worth of truly hysterical sketches. Compare that with something like the Chappelle Show, an American sketch comedy show, which is funny every time and shit-your-pants funny 50 percent of the time – I know there are the rare gems, people like Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Izzard, that are the exceptions to the rule, but even they had to come to America before achieving their potential. And the truth of the matter is Monty Python is good by English television standards, that’s why they love it. Think about that. Most English tv wouldn’t cut it even as the unseen graveyard-shift of American public access programming. No wonder they’re still waiting patiently for the third season of the OC to premier here. And I know this all seems like a digression, but it’s not. On multiple occasions I’ve seen English kids flick through the channels once, then twice, and usually another time after that, before reluctantly settling for BBC. It’s not that they care more about what’s going on in the world, the news is just the most exciting thing on tv! I’d be interested to see what happens as more and more popular American programs cross the pond and start to take off in England. It might not be our nuclear bombs or fast food that ends up destroying the world, it could be our knack for creating entertaining diversions.