Psycho. #7
Enjoy this free edition of Psycho., the Animus advice column for cinephiles.
Prawn cocktail flavour film?
My thanks to this week’s questioner, before I proceed to replying, for cutting through the bullshit, and incidentally for making clear to my readers once and for all that I am not writing my own questions. Prawn cocktail… flavour… film. OK. Let’s do this.
As with any question, a definition of terms is called for, before setting out any analysis. Prawn cocktail itself is a funny old thing. There’s a passage in Zoe Heller’s ‘Notes on a Scandal’ in which Sheba, a decidedly middle-class teacher, first enters the house of Steven Connolly, the lower-class schoolboy with whom she is having an affair. “There was a nylon, patterned carpet,” Heller tells us, “a display case containing several framed school pictures of Connolly and his sister, and a large three-piece suite in beige and cream stripe. Sheba had never actually seen a three-piece suite before, she says. Not in real life. The sighting amused her. It was like meeting a crying clown, she says, or a sailor with an anchor tattooed on his forearm.” Of course, Heller is poking fun at Sheba’s class prejudices, but I think in a similar way of prawn cocktail: something that I know to exist — a dinner party classic of the 70s and 80s! — but which I have of course never actually experienced.
Prawn cocktail, for readers who might not be familiar, is a bunch of prawns, served in a sauce made of mayonnaise and ketchup and a bit of tabasco and horseradish and paprika and so on, and presented with some lettuce IN A COCKTAIL GLASS. A truly mad proposition, this stuff was served up and down the land for a great long time, and you still get various gourmands and food writers — your Nigel Slaters, your Simon Hopkinsons — who mourn its loss in the cuisine pages of our Sunday newspapers every now and then, lamenting with a kind of plaintive nostalgia that this lovely, delicious dish has unfortunately become something of a joke. Babe, wake up, it’s defrosted prawns covered in slop inside a martini glass?
Now, if the question were “prawn cocktail film”, it would be an easy one. Of course, the answer would be Emmanuelle (Just Jaeckin, 1974). However, the questioner has asked “prawn cocktail flavour film”, which makes me feel quite certain that this person is asking for a film that has the flavour, not of prawn cocktail itself, but the flavour of prawn cocktail flavour. Back to the drawing board!
I remember exactly where I was when I first tasted prawn cocktail flavour crisps — I could probably date it to the exact day and time, if we needed to go full Serial on this question’s ass. I was eleven years old, on a school trip to London — from my school in France — and we were eating packed lunches that had been provided to us, near the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. Crisp flavours had been allotted at random, and those of us who had ended up with prawn cocktail were outraged. Cries of “putain, c’est quoi cette merde” and “ah putain, c’est dégueulasse, fuck you England!” rang out, as you may imagine. Because, you see, prawn cocktail flavour (one of the most popular crisp flavours in the UK!??!?!?!?!?!!!!?) is not a famous thing around the world, and English tastes, as denizens of Twitter know all too well, are not always met with enthusiasm by everyone else.
As a British person who grew up in France and then came back to live here, I’m often flummoxed by something that the English hold to be universal, widely known, or indisputably excellent. I have a pretty solid grounding in British culture, but occasionally the insularity of this place will really snap at your ankles after several years in the country. Prawn cocktail flavour crisps, for me, join a pantheon of English/British things that only natives know very well and which they often assume everybody else understands perfectly, but which everybody else is not naturally familiar with and can even be baffled by. That list also includes: the Chuckle Brothers, being miserable, Withnail & I, Anthony Powell, eating chocolate bars as an adult, lower-tier Britpop groups, having a Nan, Laura Ashley, Carry On films and associated figures, bullying, Marmite (and things being marmite), perceiving everything through the prism of class, corned beef, Glyndebourne, Gabrielle, being very prudent around fireworks, and when Del Boy fell through the bar.
So anyway: it’s a hydrogenated simulacrum of a dish of prawns and mayonnaise etc etc, on top of slices of potato. You know: prawn cocktail flavour! What could be more normal? Oh, and by the way, the flavour has strayed so far from the Lord that it is actually vegan.
To recap: we’re looking for a film that has the flavour of a very very popular, while completely insane, uniquely British thing based on — but containing none of the actual ingredients of — a perfectly revolting thing particular to the 70s and 80s. Ah, questioner, questioner, the Moriarty to my Sherlock — how wickedly you tease!
Taking Emmanuelle as our point of departure, we must filter that down through the ages, into a factory-made product. I didn’t want to have to bring Fredric Jameson into it, but it’s clear that we’re talking, here, about pastiche, and the way postmodernism subsumes the particular into an undifferentiated mass that is problematically divorced from its roots. I think the film we’re after must have a sickly sort of sweetness to it, with a hint of cloying spice; there must be a thin potato-y-ness. It can’t be good. It has to be mass-produced and widely consumed.
I’m afraid to say that, after all this, the answer cannot possibly be a film, but it must be TV. I would not be doing my job properly if I stated a film here. Prawn cocktail flavour film is a TV show, and I trust that the reasons for that are amply detailed in my careful consideration of this question, which unwittingly throws up the wider question of film’s diminishing place in public life. The answer is: Sex Education.
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