A little - at the Olympics anyway. But then, this reflects British culture too, this capacity to absorb and give their own twists to all kinds of outside influences. The whole ceremonies, not only the show part, were also very much oriented on the present/future (their choice of people to light the cauldron was probably the pinnacle of that motif or angle they wanted to give the ceremonies). I thought it was quite intentional to give prominence to contemporaries far less representative of "britishness" to foreigners at the end of the number. For artists taken out of the mottballs they already had McCartney later.





I wouldn't describe myself as especially anglophile either. Sure, I adore their telly and spent most of my youth listening mostly to British music, but even for aspects I have little interest in it's amazing how many aspects of British culture are familiar to me if I stop to think about it for 5 minutes (for sure some of that as to do with living in a Commonwealth nation, but only some of that. Québécois are hardly the Queen's most loyal or loving subjects... the Royals more and more skip Québec altogether when they visit Canada, to avoid stirring controversies and protests).

"Average" was ill-chosen - the average people know not much about history - including their own - and heavily populated countries like China seriously dent any notion of average, and I probably should have put "educated" there too as I originally intended.

But I wouldn't underestimate either the importance of the legacy of the British Empire worlwide, cultural and otherwise. Familiarity with aspects of British history, culture and way of life goes beyond "the West".. India, Hong Kong, Australia, tons of small pacific nations, good chunks of Africa, the Carribeans to cover only the obvious (i.e. the Commonwealth outside the "west". And beyond that, there's just the sheer importance of those parts of British history. You find references or surveys of British industrialization everywhere, even in histories of Japan written by Ĵapanese historians. The NHS, the suffragettes, it's stuff we covered in high school in Canada where we didn't study British history per say - it was rather covered as part of what inspired similar social changes here (and remembering that is what made me drop the "educated" - it's not things only history buff know about, it's stuff any Québécois student is taught, whether they remember it later or not). It would be the same in Hong Kong or Australia. And beyond the boundaries of the Commonwealth and even of "the West", don't forget Karl Marx.

What I was getting at is that Boyle stuck to aspects of British history that are pretty much studied or at least surveyed worlwide as it's fundamental to early modern history, even as the seed and the landmarks to which to compare industrialization anywhere else, and that whether it's looked at from the capitalist or communist prisms. Even the economical and social aspects from that period are fairly well known. And Elizabethan music, Shakespeare... it's all hardly obscure.

As for British pop music, it "invaded" far beyond the boundaries of the Western World. British television I suspect is a more recent phenomenon (there's been a boom of popularity of British TV with consummer pre-recorded VHS and even more with DVDs. The BBC, Acorn etc. joined very early in that wave), though just as I thought of old british series we got here (in French speaking Québec, I mean) in the 70s and 80s and how maybe that was due to the ties between the UK and english-speaking Canada I remembered all those shows were dubbed in France at the time, so broadcasted there too (later - in the heydays of Ab Fab for instance, British series became more often presented subtitled instead). Even today, one of the first (if not the first, I'm not sure) national TV to put the efforts to work out the matters of rights and to offer an app to make its programs available worlwide is the BBC. Then there are the Americans like Disney who propelled knowledge and popularity of British characters even further.