“America was always in our family myth – we should have been there.
His great-grandfather, a kosher butcher in Ukraine, had planned to emigrate to Chicago but ended up on Merseyside when he got off the boat prematurely. We became deserving targets for generations of pent-up anger.”
ROGER BENNETT WINDOWS
“Turd, which I presumed to be human, was dropped from windows opened above our heads. “No sooner had the leaflets left our hand than we were set upon by dogs,” he writes. Though Bennett was no right-winger – his school blazer sported a “Coal not dole” sticker – his Thatcherite father, a judge, insisted they go campaigning for the Conservatives in council estates. Given his depictions of the sadism and brutality of his all-boys school (caning, after all, was not outlawed in private schools in England and Wales until 1998), it was not surprising he fantasized about a different life despite his relative privilege. In well-crafted chapters crammed with anecdotes – some very funny, some wince-inducing, some both – Bennett writes that he felt like an outsider as a middle-class Jewish kid attending a private school in a struggling, scuffling, heavily Catholic city. If you moved there it was as if you’d gone through a hole in time and space.” “London was genuinely for the truly intrepid. “Manchester felt more of a culture shock to me than Chicago,” he tells the Guardian via Zoom. As English football rotted, the NFL became a cult hit on the new-fangled Channel 4.
Long before instant on-demand media gave much of the rest of the world a taste of American-style 24/7 abundance, music, television and films took months to cross the Atlantic, adding to the anticipation. Like countless others, Bennett was weaned on American pop culture in the 80s. (Re)born in the USA, the football broadcaster’s homage to America, is mostly set in his native Liverpool. Holy crap, happy people! Teal! What is that color? It’s not been invented in Liverpool yet.” And as for Hart to Hart and Miami Vice: “Beaches, bikinis, guys in linen, just incredible.
But in Dallas and Dynasty “the problems in life were having too many oil wells to drill, too much money, too many marble fountains in your driveway.” They were exotic, colorful, aspirational.
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