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Does Prince Charles ever swear at his plants, I wonder. Somehow I doubt it. We all know he talks to them, of course, because he said so in an interview in 1986 when discussing his garden. “I just come and talk to the plants, really,” he said. “Very important to talk to them. They respond.” This much-mocked revelation was supplemented only last year when the panel show QI tweeted that he also shakes hands with trees. At tree-planting ceremonies, he apparently always gives a branch a bit of a waggle to wish it well.
This all makes perfect sense to me. It’s no surprise that a man in his position, when presented with an array of silent and quivering organisms, automatically starts chatting and shaking limbs. That’s what almost all royal events must be like. The nervous crowd he’s presented with when he gets out of the Bentley to cut a ribbon isn’t going to be significantly more responsive than your average clump of dahlias. He’s been instinctively filling silences with inane chatter all his life and it’s vital for his self-esteem to believe that, on some level, these mute lifeforms appreciate the effort.
In the case of the plants at least, it seems they don’t. That was the piece of news, gleaned from research by Professor Rich Karban of the University of California, which brought this most harmless of royal peccadilloes back into the papers last week, as something invariably does every few months. If it’s not the additional tree-shaking details, it’s a study saying maybe rice plants can feel vibrations, or perhaps one suggesting talking to yourself is good for mental health, or the news that Katy Perry wants to sing some shrubs a song.
People just love to mention Charles talking to plants and in this case Karban’s research (suggesting plants can communicate in a way “that may be analogous to language dialects” and even display distinctive personalities, but probably can’t actually hear anything) provided the mentioning opportunity. So that’s the latest on talking to plants: plants can’t actually hear anything so there’s no point talking to them. Let’s hope that’s not the end of the story or it’s going to get harder to crowbar kooky photos of the prince pruning hedges into the news media.
Does he ever swear at them though? Does he vent frustration? Does he tell an ailing rose bush where to stick it? Probably not, I’d say, because that’s not what he does at public engagements. We never hear royals swear – even Princess Anne only said “naff off” – because it’s not respectable. That’s not to say it’s not posh: it’s quite aristocratic, I reckon. It goes with the whole entitled “I’ll do what I fucking like!” upper-class vibe. But that is the very vibe the royal family has been assiduously eschewing since the accession of Queen Victoria. They effortfully project hard-working bourgeois respectability, foregrounding duty rather than privilege, as an effective technique for hanging on to all the free stuff. Unlike the stereotypical duke or dustman, but very much like the white-collar middle class on whose support they have long depended, British princes don’t say bollocks.
I was brought up in a very middle-class environment and swearing was really frowned upon. My fellow pupils at school obviously swore, but adults, in my experience, seldom did. When starting out as an actor and comedian, one of the things I considered to be, quite frankly, very cool about the acting profession was all the swearing. It was particularly enjoyable from older actors. The sound of old people with RP accents saying fuck and cunt was almost entirely new to me and it evoked a joyful childishness, a refusal to grow up or be respectable or sensible or get a proper job, which represented the liberating side of the fundamentally insecure and frightening acting profession. Swearing, like not wearing a tie, was a sign of freedom and it smacked of the arty and bohemian.
It feels like that’s changed. There’s less swearing among actors now and much less swearing is permissible on TV. Why is that? Well, of course everyone worries more in general about offending people these days and people who are offended are more likely to say so and have an internet on which to gather. For better and worse, being offensive has got more offensive. I always assumed that was the reason.
But the publication last week of research into swearing in the British workplace made me think again. The survey looked at 1,400 employees in 100 companies and found that people who worked in accountancy, banking and finance swore the most, followed by lawyers. Workers in those two sectors swore, on average, 963 times and 722 times a week respectively. Meanwhile, media sector swearing was way down at 497 times a week, the creative arts and design were on 423 and marketing, advertising and PR a paltry 414. Advertising! For fuck’s sake! The survey found that charity sector workers swore the least. Sanctimonious fuckers. Literally, in the case of those Oxfam workers in Haiti.
What a sign of how swearing has changed! We’re now used to the image of the banking world as filled with adrenalised chancers shouting four-letter words, but this is comparatively recent. The bowler-hatted City workers of any era up to the early 1980s had a very different reputation – much more Mr Banks from Mary Poppins, or Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army, than Nick Leeson. And accountants and lawyers used to evoke an aura of exhaustive documentation and procedural exactitude. They wouldn’t use a co-worker’s first name until perhaps, tentatively, with a handshake, at the end of their retirement drinks. Now they shout wanker more than 100 times a day.
So this is why actors have stopped swearing. Frankly, if accountants are doing it, what’s liberating about it? If it has been co-opted by the conventional office-bound working environment, it loses its cachet. Nowadays, it’s by being fastidiously careful about language, by seeming “woke” and sensitive to offence, that you demonstrate your creative, artistic or media-savvy credentials. Foul language, like so many other things, has been ruined by the fucking bankers.
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