MEDIA : A Little Bit of Blimey From Home

The crowd at Ye Olde King’s Head devours British Weekly. If ever they need a partner for snooker, or maybe a bargain fare to Manchester, they know where to turn.

“Everybody reads it,” says bartender Hilary Kenny, leaning over the rail at the Santa Monica pub as customers look up from their ale. “It disappears as soon as we get it.”

Kenny nods at a diminishing stack of the Venice-based tabloid as if to prove her point. The sun may have finally set on the British empire, but that’s OK. Hundreds of thousands of Her Majesty’s former subjects would rather watch the sun set on the Pacific Ocean, anyway.

British Weekly is their community newspaper.

For 10 years the free tabloid has provided a slice of the old country for expatriates who have no taste for American media sensationalism. Instead, they prefer a dose of British media sensationalism, packaged in 16 pages with ads for immigration lawyers and bone-china shops.

The paper caters to the estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million British expatriates living in Southern California, many of them in Santa Monica and Venice. Determining a precise number of residents is impossible, British Vice Consul Angus Mackay said, because many British nationals do not report their comings and goings to immigration authorities.

“The Beach Boys, palm trees, fast cars--and the weather. That’s what draws most Brits here,” said Neil Fletcher, 31, editor and publisher of British Weekly and a Windsor native who immigrated to the United States a decade ago.

“What I’d like to see the paper do,” Fletcher said, “is enable people to hold on to Englishness as part of their cultural identity. There’s a tendency to lose Englishness really fast in America.”

Not much chance of that happening to regular readers. British Weekly covers political and other big news from back home, most of it recycled from the London dailies. Southern California news of interest to Brits is also mentioned. There is travel and legal advice, plus a biweekly column poking fun at American manners--or the lack of them.

Fletcher prints 35,000 copies every week, but estimates a total readership of 75,000 because copies of the paper are often passed around.

He started writing for the paper when it was established in 1984 and took over as owner four years ago. He edits and produces British Weekly on a personal computer in his Venice apartment and sends it out to be printed by another community newspaper. It is distributed at 200 Southland locations, mostly pubs and British-themed gift shops.

News and editorials are unsigned, but columns by free-lancers--some of whom are also advertisers--get prominent play.

“Shooting From the Lip,” by Alan Darby Drake, the pseudonym of Westwood writer Alan Shadrake, is filled with the anti-Yankee musings of a fictional, champagne-tippling English crank. Every column ends with the tag line, “Pop another cork, Rosie!”

Fletcher said the column generates 90% of the paper’s hate mail.

“It’s slightly zany,” Shadrake said of the column. “It’s tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time enables me to exorcise my irritation” at American customs. One recent column took aim at Americans who have urged a pardon for a U.S. teen-ager sentenced by Singapore to be flogged for vandalizing cars.

“Let us give (the youth) an American welcome, a ticker-tape parade down Santa Monica Boulevard, a medal, film and book rights, talk shows, and 50 cans of free paint,” the columnist facetiously suggested.

The paper’s editorials are not as controversial, although Fletcher does not shy from taking sides. He said he admires former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as much as he loathes her successor, John Major.

And, Fletcher asked, “Where else can you go to find out where to buy a pint of Guinness in L.A.?”