What is Britain’s elusive ‘nationwide persona’? The Ballad of Wallis Island may simply let us know | Gaby Hinsliff

It is, in line with no much less an expert than the romcom king Richard Curtis, destined to be “one of the greatest British films of all time”. But don’t let that put you off. For The Ballad of Wallis Island – the not likely new story of a socially awkward millionaire who inveigles two estranged former halves of a folk-singing duo into enjoying a personal gig on his windswept non-public island – isn’t some floppy-haired Hugh Grant automobile, however a mirrored image on our nationwide persona this is altogether extra of its instances.

It’s a wonderful, melancholic comedy concerning the acceptance of failure, loss and the gradual figuring out that what’s long gone isn’t coming again: an ode to rain and cardigans, awful plumbing and worse puns, shot in Wales on a shoestring funds in a summer season so unforgiving that a health care provider was once it sounds as if required on set to test for hypothermia. Its primary characters have no longer simplest all tousled at one thing – relationships, careers, managing cash – however appear rather able to messing up once more in long term. Yet as a movie it’s each gloriously humorous and oddly comforting, taking an international the place the whole thing appears to be slowly coming adrift and making that really feel so a lot more bearable.

There’s no such factor as a countrywide persona in reality, after all; or no less than no set of indubitably British characteristics on which 68 million folks may ever all agree. Yet there’s a transparent development to how we adore to peer ourselves represented on display – endearingly hopeless, perennially mortified, well-meaning however at risk of be eaten alive by means of Americans – which is telling.

There was once a lot flapping lately about polling appearing simplest 41% of technology Z say they’re proud to be British, a steep decline on earlier generations. But it stays unclear whether or not the problem here’s gen Z, or the theory of Britain by which they have got in recent times been anticipated to show pride. If Britishness didn’t appear relatively so puffed-up and competitive, so relentlessly concerned about who’s deemed no longer British sufficient; if it will concurrently include a extra self-deprecating, extra tolerant, distinctly embarrassed sense of nationwide identification, would that be one with which some folks felt extra relaxed?

For we aren’t, essentially, a “make Britain great again” roughly position. Even when our legislators intentionally attempt to evoke the Maga spirit, they do it (fortunately) badly: Britain’s resolution to Elon Musk’s terrifying Doge (“department of government efficiency”), as introduced this week by means of the Reform birthday celebration, is headed by means of some tech dweeb you’ve by no means heard of whose position necessarily boils right down to poking spherical Kent county council searching for “waste”, earlier than probably finding that he hasn’t in reality were given the ability to fireside any individual.

With all due recognize to Rachel Reeves’s challenge to rebuild the country, in the meantime, probably the most recognisably British a part of her giant speech on making an investment in infrastructure this week was once that it revolved round regional buses. The pinnacle of our nationwide ambitions is not to rule the waves however simply so as to get into Huddersfield a little bit quicker than up to now, alongside a highway with relatively fewer potholes, and it’s time to possess that with pleasure: that is, goddammit, who we in reality are.

For that is the country that made a copper-bottomed hit out of How to Fail, Elizabeth Day’s podcast by which visitors cheerfully spill the beans on all of the tactics they have got screwed up at existence; a country that may’t settle for a praise to avoid wasting its existence, and is aware of that if by chance you ever develop into excellent at one thing then you definately’d higher make up for it rapid by means of stressing simply how dangerous you might be at one thing else. (In this week’s revealed extracts from How Not to Be a Political Wife, a British name for a memoir if ever there was once one, the demonstrably a hit and well-connected Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine returns time and again to the failure of her marriage and the impossibility of maintaining with high-powered pals: she’s been within the newspaper industry lengthy sufficient to understand her readers would infinitely slightly pay attention concerning the fall than the upward push.)

We stay with relish no longer simply on our particular person failings however on our superb nationwide defeats, memorialising all of the soccer tournaments we ever misplaced on consequences and weaving heroic failures – Scott death within the Antarctic, the retreat from Dunkirk – into our nationwide tale. We are the rustic that grew to become “we’re shit, and we know we are” right into a carrying anthem; that treats failure much less as a essential degree of innovation than as a gentle state to be lived with, like the elements. Our tendency to think issues will cross flawed undoubtedly has its drawbacks – no longer least a bent to treat unalloyed excellent information with crabby suspicion – but it surely in all probability makes us extra philosophical after they do. Not such a lot a land of hope and glory, as considered one of perennial gentle unhappiness.

In the previous, this unerring skill to puncture our personal balloons may were a wholesome trait, a safeguard in opposition to an international energy getting over excited by means of its personal significance. Of overdue, the similar Eeyorish diffidence feels extra like some way of coming to phrases with inevitable decline. But both approach, tucked within The Ballad of Wallis Island is the germ of a countrywide tale: suffering to inform folks how we in reality really feel about them, within the rain, however nonetheless by some means discovering causes to be cheerful. If that’s no longer a model of Britishness we will be able to all get in the back of, what’s?