What exactly is a wazzock? A guide to the James Blunt 'controversy' for non-Brits

The singer-songerwriter is in dispute with a Labour MP about something or other. What’s going on? Allow Esther Addley to explain

 James Blunt: rocking out. Photograph: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

Esther Addley

Monday 19 January 2015 15.11 EST

A British politician suggested the success of actor Eddie Redmayne and singer James Blunt raised questions about the diversity of the arts in the UK. Blunt hit back with an open letter calling the MP a “classist gimp” and a “wazzock”. The politician responded calling the singer “blooming precious”. Erm, sorry. What?

Allow us to explain. And like many things in ultra-modern, 21st-century Britain, it helps to have a sense of the British class system, and where the characters involved fit into it. 

The players

Chris Bryant MP, the politician in question, has just been appointed the arts spokesman for the Labour party, the leftwing opposition party. He represents a poor constituency in rural Wales, where not many people go to private schools.
Bryant, by the way, was also a leading critic of the Murdoch press during the phone hacking scandal and once had photographs of himself posing in underpants, taken from his Gaydar gay dating site, published in a national newspaper, but those facts are less relevant to the story in hand.

James Blunt is a multimillion-selling crooner whose love-to-hate-it earworm You’re Beautiful was voted the seventh most annoying song of all time by readersof Rolling Stone. He is also, in the classic British sense, posh (to be clear: Posh Spice even in her current fashion incarnation, is very much not-posh).

Evidence for the singer’s poshness may include the facts that Blunt is a former officer in the British army, and his real name is spelled “Blount” (he dropped the “o” to make it easier to pronounce – it’s a posh British thing). But it certainly turns on the fact that he attended Harrow school, the second poshest and most exclusive of England’s public schools (which are, it is important to say, not “public schools” in the sense that a normal person would understand it, but very decidedly private). Not entirely irrelevantly, so did Benedict Cumberbatch.

As for Eddie Redmayne: also posh. He went to Eton, the poshest public school of the posh, posher even than posh Harrow. As did Dominic West, Damian Lewis and Hugh Laurie. And Princes William and Harry. (If you’re now wondering if every British actor on US TV went to Eton, best not to start on the British government.)

Ok, so …?

So that’s the background to Bryant’s comments, in an interview with the Guardian, in which he said that while he can celebrate the success of Britain’s more privileged stars, he will also seek to address a “cultural drought” in areas outside comfortable south-east England.

“I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe for best actor], but we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk,” he said.

Bryant wondered if today’s cultural conditions would produce another Albert Finney or Glenda Jackson, both of whom came from humble backgrounds. British broadcasters also had a responsibility to produce “that kind of gritty drama, which reflects [the country] more. We can’t just have Downton programming ad infinitum and think that just because we’ve got some people in the servants’ hall, somehow or other we’ve done our duty by gritty drama.”

(Important explanatory note for non-Brits: a majority of us do not live or even work in stately homes).

Blunt’s reply was indignant. He “happened” to go to a boarding school but had bought his first guitar with money saved up through his holiday jobs packing sandwiches. No one at his school could help him with his musical dreams because “I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker”.

“Every step of the way, my background has been AGAINST me succeeding in the music business. And when I have managed to break through, I was STILL scoffed at for being too posh for the industry,” he said, proving that an expensive education does not teach you to avoid capitalising words in the middle of sentences. Bryant was teaching “the politics of jealousy” and was a “prejudiced wazzock”.

A what?

So what – and at last we get to the nub – is a wazzock? Glad you asked. Urban Dictionary defines the term as a mild insult directed at “one who is foolish, one who has made an arse of themselves, one who is rather daft”. (The rest of those Britishisms we hope you can work out for yourselves.) It is one of a number of faintly limp insults that are more often used ironically than in seriousness. See also: twit, pillock, wally, plonker. Basically, they can all be used on telly without frightening your gran. (This list, by the way, does not include wanker, which is much ruder than many Americans seem to realise. and normally asterisked in British publications other than the Guardian.)

“Blooming”, meanwhile, is the polite form of “bloody”. Which is the very much less polite form of “very”.

One further note: Blunt signed his note “James Cucking Funt”, a neatly self-deprecating nod to the rhyming-slang nature of his second name. It’s not the first sign of his own sense of humour – after being a figure of open scorn for some years, the singer has recently gone through a dramatic reputational rehabilitationthanks to his witty ripostes to Twitter critics.

While there was plenty of praise for the singer on the social network on Monday, including from Gary Lineker, the TV presenter and former English footballer, others were less clear where they stood.

Hope that helps.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/19/james-blunt-wazzock-chris-bryant-guide