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Where have all the “ordinary” Britons gone?

Looking for an “ordinary” or “average” Briton? Well, don’t. A British filmmaker, who tried, discovered that it was a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.

To his surprise, Tim Wardle, whose 30-minute documentary In Search of Mr. Average was shown on Channel 4 last week, found that even boring towns — the kind that he optimistically hoped would be teeming with ordinary folk ̵ 2; did not yield anyone who answered his description of a Mr. or Ms Average: 40, married with two children, drives a Ford Fiesta, drinks three cups of tea a day, owns a £200,000 house, goes on a foreign holiday once a year and, among other things, believes in God.

Mr. Wardle says his statistical profile of an average Briton came from official sources, market research surveys and newspaper reports. He wanted to give them a reality check: “Do they exist in the real world? What do they look like? Where do they live? And what can they tell us about the state of our country in the 21st Century?”

That set him off on a three-month wild-goose chase through the length and breadth of Britain experiencing many false dawns on the way.

“But every time I thought I’d found Mr. or Mrs. Average, they revealed something about themselves that was annoyingly unaverage,” he wrote in the Daily Mail describing his odyssey.

Contrary to his film’s title, Mr. Wardle was looking for any average Briton, man or woman. And, actually, at one point he did come close to finding a woman who appeared to tick all the right boxes until he learnt that some of her pastimes, such as skydiving and riding the Harley-Davidson, were not the sort of things an average British woman did.

So, if that “Army wife from Surrey” hadn’t flunked the test, his documentary might have been called In Search of Ms Average though feminists insist that given the alleged “sexist bias” in British television, Channel 4 would, most probably, have settled for the more gender-neutral In Search of Average Briton.

There were at least two more near-misses: a couple in Wigan, Greater Manchester; and a school caretaker in Dartford, Kent. But the first ruled themselves out after it emerged that the husband was self-employed and ran a successful business; and the second was disqualified because he didn’t drive the “right” car. Instead of Ford Fiesta, his was a Vauxhall Zafira!

But undeterred, Mr. Wardle persevered because the whole point of the film was to find a Mr. or Ms Average. Or Channel 4 might have politely shown him the door.

“I always wanted the film to culminate in me tracking down my ‘Average Briton.’ I was adamant that I didn’t want it to have a cop-out ending, where I had an epiphany and realised that ‘no-one is truly average’ or something equally unsatisfactory for the viewer,” he says.

And, eventually, he did. A man called Peter Williamson in Swindon qualified with flying colours: married, father of two, a Fiesta-driving office worker, believed in God, considered himself working-class and went to “the toilet six times a day.”

For Mr. Wardle, it was a Eureka moment: “As I approached the Williamson family’s home on the outskirts of Swindon, the signs looked good. The quiet, new housing development was reassuringly average. Better still, parked outside their house was a silver Ford Fiesta. With my heart pounding, I knocked on the door. The man who opened it was wearing an England football shirt and listened calmly as I excitedly tried to explain my search for the average Briton. He invited me in for a cup of tea. It soon became apparent that Peter was everything I’d been looking for.”

Unlike many others who protested at the idea of being labelled an average person, Mr. Williamson was rather pleased.

“If you spend all your time trying to achieve instead of looking at what you’ve got and being happy with it, it can destroy you. Whereas if you’ve got a loving family and are content with your life — even if you haven’t achieved greatness — then you’ll be happy,” he told Mr. Wardle. A philosophy that, to many of his fellow countrypersons, might sound like a prescription for failure. So, as one viewer noted, next time Mr. Wardle is In Search of Mr. Failure he would know where to go.

Mr. Wardle’s documentary made interesting viewing, but, in the end, what’s the point of such research? There is something slightly absurd about going looking for an “average” Briton or an average Indian (wonder where the search for a “Mr./Ms Average Indian” would lead to?) on the basis of a set of unconnected and arbitrary criteria. It is of a piece with “studies” that tell you how much time Britons spend in the “loo” in a lifetime; what makes “sensible” and “rational” people fall in love at first sight; why Brits love queues so much; why some men are more likely to end up as henpecked husbands than some others….

There has been a proliferation of such studies in recent years and the media love it because quirky stories make sexy headlines.

Mr. Wardle’s film has not only been extensively written about, it has revived his flagging career. His career, he says, was “going nowhere” and nothing was working for him when he heard that Channel 4 was commissioning “innovative” documentaries from new directors for its First Cut series. Thus the idea of Mr. Average was born — and his career was back on track. What next Mr. Wardle?

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