Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea (2013) s01e02 Episode Script
Episode 2
1 Has there ever been a drink that's meant more to the British than tea? Soon as you start work, cup of tea and then you have a break, you have a cup of tea A good, hot cup of tea worked wonders.
And it doesn't get more English than tea.
But tea's not English, it's not even British.
We've seen that we had to travel half way across the globe to get hold of Camellia sinensis.
We had to wage wars and smuggle drugs, and find a country where we could grow it, all for the sake of getting our daily cuppa.
Probably led us to rule the world.
OK! Now I want to find out why.
To be without tea was to be without lifeline, you know? How has it come to mean so much to us, this little exotic leaf? It can console you, there's the warmth and the ritual and you can share it.
Tea is a social drink you make a cup of coffee, you make a pot of tea.
Why has our nation been so obsessed with tea, for so long? One day I decided to try to have a complete day without tea.
I was quite shaken, I was quite disturbed.
And why can nobody else in the world make tea properly? Have you tasted the tea in America? Terrible! What I'm trying to find out is why we in particular have such a bizarre relationship with it? Why do we feel the need to advertise it with chimps in bowler hats, use the dregs to read fortunes and why do we have this persistent belief that it was the tea leaf that won us the war? Anyway, come with me, people, and we'll find out.
We think of ourselves as a nation of tea drinkers I bought some Jubilee kitchen roll last year - if I'd bought it this year it would have been cheaper - and the symbols on it were a union flag, a crown, an umbrella and a tea pot.
And my quest with this programme is to find out how British people really feel about tea and get them to articulate it but it's very difficult - it's like asking people what they feel about the back of their neck or their mattress.
I mean, I do know we love tea, we love it, it's just that we're never going to be able, really, to look tea in the face and say so.
Till we have built Jerusalem.
MUSIC: "Tea For Two" by Vincent Youmans Like a reliable dull old partner, tea is always there, hovering in the background.
Tea helps any social occasion, like my date with reclusive and seldom seen Graham Norton.
That's it, put the kettle on.
And Betty's not wrong.
No.
Put the kettle on.
Yeah.
Solves all.
A nice cup of tea.
See a nice cup of tea.
There we are.
It's never just a cup of tea, it's a "nice" cup of tea.
A nice cup of tea, I know.
I don't know why it is a nice cup of tea, we all keep saying that.
I suppose a "nice" cup of tea gives you that warm It's not just a drink.
It's a warm thing you have made them.
Yes, you've made them a warm thing.
Cos we are not good at talking in this country.
Perhaps it's a substitute? Yes.
For therapy! Tea is a social drink because coffee, it seems to me, you make a cup of coffee, you make a POT of tea.
Yeah, yeah, good point.
It's a gathering.
My mother takes it this seriously.
Does she? Yeah, like when we go on holiday, it's all she can talk about, the whole holiday.
Whether she is going to get a cup of tea or not? And what it will be like.
Well, it'll be rubbish, we know that! Me and my aunt Christine took her on a cruise and that was their holiday, essentially, was ordering tea and then complaining about the tea that you knew you wouldn't like.
No, you're not going to like it, no.
Then they found some Russian waiter who knew how to boil the water properly - they loved him.
They drink tea in Russia, you see.
They would hunt him down like a dog! "There he is! There he is!" They would get this nice tea! Anyway, if you were me and you were making a programme, a documentary about tea, where would you go? Erm, probably Harrogate.
I'm sorry, that was a set up question and answer - I needed someone to say Harrogate and Graham was there.
Don't blame Graham.
Drinking tea, looking out the window, there's a whole gamut of actions happening here.
But as exciting as it is, looking out on to a Yorkshire pavement, I'm on a fearless fact finding flipping mission - what makes a good cup of tea? Suzy Garragher knows.
She's a tea taster for Taylor's of Yorkshire.
She's one of around 80 tea tasters in Britain.
THEY SLURP Thick, 4.
3.
You'd think slurping and spitting would come easily to a comedian - not so.
I think you suck it in, sort of, behind your teeth, so teeth forward and suck it behind your teeth.
Crikey.
VICTORIA SLURPS AND LAUGHS Better! I don't know, something is inhibiting me.
I'm not doing I'm stopping 75% of the way through.
VICTORIA SLURPS Very good, much better.
Obviously, the thing is to stand on your tiptoes, that's the deciding factor! 'The slurping is to get the tea round all the different parts 'of the tongue and the spitting out, that's obvious - 'if you drank all that tea all day you'd never be there.
' You are a heck of a spitter! Not the most glamorous job, I know.
There's a whole tea tasting vocabulary, just like in comedy, they have descriptions like, "malty, brisk, kelpy," whereas in comedy we have, "Not funny.
" VICTORIA SLURPS That was a good slurp! I would call that bouncy.
Bouncy, that is a new tea terminology, great.
Suzy has to be able to accurately describe each flavour.
So Assam - nice, thick guttiness, it's a really good description.
I like that - gutty teas.
It means it's thick, it's rich, it gives you a bit of a kick.
The tea most of us drink in the UK is a blend of tea from lots of different teas, from lots of different countries - Kenya, India - and it's Suzy's job to choose from all those different flavours, which vary from harvest to harvest, so each new blend gives us the old taste we expect.
Tea is indigenous to China but it now grows in over 40 different countries and that's great for us cos all those different countries have different qualities that we blend together.
All the tea Suzy tastes will be made from a standardised ratio of tea to water and milk - we don't need to bother with that in our homes, or even get dressed - but she does have one handy tip.
Freshly boiled water, and this is really important for when you are drinking tea at home as well, because freshly boiled water has the right amount of oxygen in the water.
If you over boil the water Got no oxygen.
Exactly, and you are going to get a really flat tasting cup of tea.
And you will never be happy in your whole life.
Because happiness is good tea.
Absolutely.
'Look, I'm not a good slurper, can we just leave it there? 'Let's get to grips with the history.
' It's very rare in this country for a fashion to start with the lower classes and work its way up.
In fact, I can only think of tracksuit bottoms and Call The Midwife, and tea started at the top.
It took a posh foreigner to kick off the whole addiction.
It was Catherine De Braganza who came over from Portugal in 1662 to marry Charles II.
She already had the tea-drinking habit, she brought with her a tea caddy and instantly tea was all the go with upper classes.
We're very free and easy with tea now, any old pleb can drink it, but back then it was the preserve of the super rich.
Woburn Abbey is the ancestral home of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.
When tea first began to trickle into the country, dukes and duchesses would have been one of the few people who could actually afford it.
We've seen how far tea had to come from high up in the Chinese mountains, down those long rivers, to be loaded on the ships to make that hazardous voyage back to the London docks.
So any tea that arrived safely was hugely expensive.
So, this is the oldest receipt they have in the house, for tea, and this is from 1685, and they spent 24 shillings on a pound of tea, which is approximately the equivalent of £100.
So they were spending £100 on one pound of tea, which just shows you that would have been way out of most peoples league and ability to pay.
This strainer! This strainer actually The strainer doesn't go with these cups! No, no, the strainer doesn't go with these cups! 'I've just popped into Woburn 'to have a cuppa with the present Duchess - 'it was that or Toddington Services!' Is this Earl Grey? This is Earl Grey but they would have had Lapsang, most probably.
Yes, yeah.
So the time we are talking about, tea was a luxury item, wasn't it? Because it was very expensive, wasn't it? So that's why you have tea caddy's and things are locked up, and away.
Yes, I think it was expensive and I know that they would send somebody out to bring it back from the docks.
The family did own some docks at Rotherhithe.
Well, that's very handy! And as they owned most of Covent Garden they did, they used to use those shops and the dealers all in Covent Garden.
Would it have been that the men stayed behind at the table? Drinking port and smoking cigars and the ladies would most probably would have come in here, and drank tea and gossiped! Mamma! And that is how my life came to be saved by a haggis! THEY ALL CHUCKLE Please.
Mamma! And soon every novel had a tea table scene - Jane Austen, the Brontes - they could all use the tea table as a setting for revelations and high drama.
Pray take care of your nose, my dear, I prefer not to find a septum amongst the tea things! And, unlike horse riding or fencing, drinking tea for an actor requires no special training.
In the 19th century, the Seventh Duchess of Bedford, Anna Maria, had a very significant part to play in our tea story, which I will come to shortly, but, for now, have a look at her very upmarket lunch box.
This is a travelling tea service that Anna Maria would have travelled with.
So she could always be sure of having her own tea, out of her own teacups with her own kettle.
This would have been my cup and saucer.
Is this the sort of saucer that they used to drink tea out of? I have never seen one of those sort of saucers! So they would pour their tea into them and slurp, to cool it down.
And that's why they used to say that it was a dish of tea, didn't they? They used to say, "Take a dish of tea," and that's the dish! I'm really pleased to have seen that.
And then the tea caddy, where the tea would have been kept, oh, excuse my fingers, but it was locked.
Yes, because it was so expensive.
Because tea was so expensive.
BELL RINGS And a bell for, I guess, when she wanted her teaor some more tea! THEY LAUGH I feel like I'm on the Antiques Roadshow! Yeah, so do I! 'I couldn't put a value on it, though!' We didn't take any persuading to take up the tea habit - there was no hanging back like there was with olive oil or pesto.
Catherine de Braganza tipped up with just two ounces in her tea caddy in 1662.
By the 1720s, we were importing more than a million pounds of tea a year - but it didn't happen without a fight.
You wouldn't think of something as cosy as tea causing a moral panic but it did.
As tea seeped through the social strata, the upper classes got very exercised.
A man called Jonas Hanway, he was writing in the 1750s, he was famous cos he was the first person to carry an umbrella, which was quite a sight, and they used to call them portable roofs, and they used to think, if he was so worried about getting wet, he should just get a cab, like we would say to people, "Get a room," they would shout to him, "Get a cab!" He thought tea was very bad for you, that it made your teeth black, it made you melancholic, that nurses were letting babies fall out of windows because they were so busy sipping tea and the father of Methodism, John Wesley, he said tea brought you near the chambers of death but, later on, he changed his mind.
What Wesley realised was that you couldn't make much of a case for the dangers of tea when there were huge social problems caused by the drinking of beer and cheap gin.
It was the drunks you had to watch out for with the baby dropping, not the tea drinkers.
The temperance movement had right on its side but you can't advocate abstinence from alcohol without offering an alternative.
Now we could drink tea not just for pleasure but as a moral duty.
I'll just use this small sieve! The elegance of your tea table astonishes me! It's Woburn all over again! Food historian and tea lover Clarissa Dickson Wright is living proof of tea's sobering influence.
So, why were people in such a lather about tea? Why were they so exercised about it? Because it was the latest fashion and therefore should be reserved for the rich and gentry, and whatever.
Yes.
And then, of course, it went on to be the saving of the nation, and suddenly, by the Victorian and Edwardian era, everybody was drinking tea.
They were drinking it in the factories - it probably led us to rule the world.
You drink a lot of tea yourself? I drink quite a lot of tea.
What sort do you like? Assam in the morning and then, in the afternoon, I either like a Darjeeling or some afternoon blend.
I drink about four or five cups, at least, a day.
You don't drink alcohol do you? No, not for the last God knows how many years.
25 years.
When you were getting sober was tea a useful thing? It was the MAKING of tea that was useful, rather than the drinking of it.
The activity? By the time you had warmed the pot and the kettle has boiled, and everything, you know, the craving has moved on.
I don't think it was a substitute for going to Alcoholics Anonymous, really, but the one thing you do get in AA meetings is a very good cup of tea! So no more gin-sodden mothers chucking the baby out with the bath water, the kettle was on.
Boiling the water killed the germs, the caffeine kept us going, and Britain became Great.
We would have drunk it with the germs - we just liked the taste.
It didn't really matter what posh people were saying about tea because the lower orders just carried on drinking it anyway.
And we do - we drink 160 million cups of tea a day - we're all at it! Take the London cabby - famously shy and retiring, reluctant to give his views on immigration or the traffic but Pete's had a cuppa, he's ready to talk.
My tea day starts with me getting up, getting in nice and early to beat the traffic and I have got my trusty little thermal mug, there.
Who makes it? You make it or your wife makes it? No, I got to do that myself cos the princess won't get up and make me a cup of tea.
I'm just a modern man! OK, yeah, yeah.
Tea bag? Got to be a tea bag, for convenience.
Yeah? You need it just to wind down from the stress cos this town gets busier, you got the buses and the lorries, and sirens, and the cyclists - not that I'm getting on the cyclists' case but So, it keeps you calm? And it doesn't get more English than a cup of tea.
Cabbies, like Pete, are lucky, they have their very own tearooms - these green huts were built as part of the temperance movement to keep hansom cab drivers out of the pubs and give them wholesome refreshment.
They used to be all over London but now there are only 13.
They're all green, they're all the length of a horse and cab, and you can only come inside if you are a cabbie, or you're making a documentary Can I sit next to you? Tracey runs this one, which is near the Albert Hall.
She has all the qualifications for working in this shelter - she's really energetic, she makes a great cup of tea and she's thin.
How much do you drink, Tracey, in a day? About six, seven, eight.
Anything! It's good for you, though.
Cup of tea, cup of tea, cup of tea! It's the cheapest place in the Royal Borough of Kensington to get a nice cup of tea.
How much is a tea? 60p and it's specifically for cab drivers, nobody else can come through that door.
That's great, thank you very much.
Do you want anything to eat? I'm all right thank you, I don't want to be spitting toast on people! Can I have your? Yes, thank you.
Thank you.
You also get used to Tracey's tea - it's got a nice colour on it, she knows how to put the milk in, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
Personal service.
If I don't have one first thing in the morning I get a migraine, I wouldn't be able to function at all.
Tea was keeping the horse and cab facing the right way but all the workers were using the sugar and caffeine in tea to get them through the working day.
There's red road tea, silver tips in Darjeeling, what do we have? Builder's.
It doesn't even get the qualification of tea, it's just builder's! OK, take me up the scaffolding! Ha! For most people, builder's means strong tea with milk and sugar.
We don't have the most sophisticated palates in this country and I think tea would never have taken off in the way it did if we hadn't been able to add fat and sugar.
Paul, do you drink tea? I do, yeah.
What sort of tea do you drink? Erm, PG Tips, normally, at home.
Do you think of that as builder's tea? Yeah, a strong cup of tea and two sugars.
All I can say is that it is a long day without a cup of tea, isn't it? It's a very long day without a cup of tea.
Suppose I say the words herbal tea to you? I've tasted it.
And? I didn't like it.
Work ended when the hooter went but the tea drinking carried on.
Tea had soaked right into our social life - even people from Lancashire had found a way to have fun with tea.
I know! STRONG LANCASHIRE ACCENT: There's a famous seaside town called Blackpool that's noted for fresh air and fun.
Some more F's - it's flipping freezing! And one thing you can do in Blackpool, apart from walking about with big foam genitalia strapped to your front, is have your tea leaves read.
The Petulengros have been reading the tea leaves on this pier for many years.
Is that Tom Jones? I love Tom Jones.
Of course not everyone's as open minded as me.
Tell us what you see! Tell me what you see! Tea leaves, Mrs Ogden.
TEA LEAVES! It's only the map of Australia, that's all.
Have you the slightest idea what the map of Australia looks like? Well, I have now, haven't I? It's in there! Now, while I am pouring the tea, you need to be thinking of a question that you want answering.
'Tarot cards I understand, Ouija boards, 'but getting hard info from a wet leaf 'clinging to the side of a teacup - well, call me an agnostic.
' Now, swill it round three times.
One, two, three.
Right, now pour it onto the saucer.
Pour the tea out onto the saucer? Yeah, that's it.
And we have to see what we are left with.
Now then.
When you are reading tea leaves, you have the handle on the left hand side.
That bit there, the front, that's your future, the back is your past.
I can see a musical note now.
If you look there, can you see? It's like going down and round at the back Hm, I can't really see it but, then again, I'm not psychic.
It's going down there and it's, sort of, coming round.
Now, to me, that would be a musical note.
Now that's in your past so that means, of course, you are a very musical person and you are a very creative person.
At the side of it, there is a little triangle.
'A little triangle! 'Now to me that's saying a Toblerone is going to come into my life 'or my car might break down.
' You been thinking of living near water? Uh-huh.
Well, that's going to be good for you because, water, it helps you connect with yourself spiritually and it will give you inner peace.
At the side, here, I am seeing, it looks like a wagon and I can see marriage for you.
Can you? VICTORIA LAUGHS Oh, yes! I don't think so.
There is a wagon, there.
A wagon? Yep, a wagon is a sign of marriage Is it? Mm.
You won't end your days alone.
Thank you.
Anyway, moving swiftly on from the contemplation of my last days, though if this ride should unexpectedly malfunction I will end my days alone, as I am one of the few people ever to be allowed on the teacups all by themselves.
Tea was an aid to meditation .
.
in a very calming ritual for the Chinese .
.
but we don't bother with that.
'We can meditate when we want to, 'just look through any laundrette window, 'but, for us, tea breaks the ice.
It brings us together, 'it even gets us up on the dance floor.
' A craze for tea dances arrived in Britain with the tango, in 1912, and though the smart set moved on in the '20s, to cocktails, the Tower Ballroom stayed loyal to the tea dance and nearly 100 years later you can still come here and have a twirl, and a cuppa and marvel at Phil Kelsall's mighty organ.
It's the usual crowd.
That's Mike.
He proposed to Jenny from the stage last year.
Luckily, she did know him, and said yes.
And that's Bev, she's here with her son and her mum, and dad and their mum, and dad.
OK, Beverly, fill me in.
Who's who? OK, so, we have my son, Ethan, he is ten.
Over the scones, yeah.
Peaking through the scones! We have got my grandma and grandad, Patricia and Arthur, and my mum and dad at the far end.
OK, and you all come dancing We come three times a week.
Do you? Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Lovely.
Do you have a husband, can I ask? I do, but he doesn't dance.
No, you married out! He comes when he wants to come, he sits and watches but I'm on the floor most of the time so he just gets bored.
Tea dances were a great way of meeting people - it was a nice safe atmosphere.
It was all quite strict in the early years - disorderly conduct would be dealt with by expulsion and a gentleman could only dance with a lady.
Maybe gentlemen were dancing with gentlemen somewhere else in Blackpool? It's a possibility.
But in the Tower Ballroom the girls could pick and choose.
Tony started coming here when he was on leave from the army.
When I started going to tea dances there were a lot of girls free Looking for men? Looking for men to have a dance with.
You know, they weren't interested in anything else, it was purely and simply for pleasure and social.
I bet you've got Tony in the builder's-with-two-sugars bracket - you're so wrong.
What tea do you drink? This is cranberry tea.
Herb tea? This will be rather hot, this.
OK it's all rumba hot tea! Yeah! So, do you drink this all day long, Tony? I have about four or five cups I warned you! Just keep talking! Yeah, you did, I may never sing again but maybe that's probably not a bad thing.
I have it about four or five times a day.
Do you drink ordinary tea as well? Occasionally But you really like this? It's better, yeah.
Well, it keeps me going, anyway! Good to know.
Tea dances took a bit of a dip in popularity in the '60s and '70s - I, for one, was distracted by Tree Top squash and Angel Delight but they have had a resurgence in the last few years as has another old tradition.
OK, memory test, remember the Seventh Duchess of Bedford, Anna Maria? She of the velvet lined travelling tea case? Well, one afternoon in 1841, it seemed to her to be a very long time till dinner.
She got this rather sinking feeling, round about five in the afternoon.
We all get that! Yes! And so started the tradition of afternoon tea.
So, before that, people struggled to get from lunchtime to dinnertime? Well, I think maybe they did and tea was generally drunk after dinner.
Do you think, when she had her sinking feeling and had to have a piece of bread, and butter, and a cup of tea, do you think she realised that she was starting this enormous trend? I doubt very much that she did.
Mm, just wanted a cup of tea, really, didn't she? She wasn't to know that it was going to spread out to the world.
The craze for afternoon tea would soon sweep Britain.
In 1884, a chain of bakery shops, the Aerated Bread Company, made a spare room at their London Bridge branch into a tea room.
They soon had 60 tea rooms and Lyons, Express Diary, and the Kardomah chains all followed suit.
Soon anyone with the price of a cup of tea could be served in clean surroundings by a uniformed waitress and get a taste of the high life.
'Just to clear up, afternoon tea is not to be confused with,' "Tea a drink with jam and bread," as Julie Andrews would have it, not that I like that line because no-one says, "Jam and bread.
" They say, "Bread and jam.
" It's not like there aren't any rhymes for jam, so not to be confused with that.
It's also not the same as tea, the meal, or what, now we're all middle class, we have to call dinner and it's not really the same as high tea cos high tea is like afternoon tea but later, and with beans on toast.
Oh, look, I'll show you! I'm on my way to Claridge's - like many top London hotels, they've taken Anna Maria's sinking solution, and given it a twist.
Afternoon tea here starts at 40 quid - more with champagne, and there's a waiting list of months.
I'm down in the engine room with head chef Martin.
Give you an apron.
It's got my initials on it! Yes, just so that we don't forget you're a chef! Don't forget who I am, yes.
The sandwiches need to marry well with tea.
So, cucumber, egg, chicken, ham - always a little bit of smoked salmon.
So, anything a little oriental or anything like that is always going to bash with the tannins in the tea.
So, I think it's about also having a little taste and trying your tea as well and thinking, "No, that doesn't go.
" Can I have a go at that one? Yeah, please do.
How far in? That far in? Yeah, just a little bit off the end.
Perfect.
So, Martin, why do you take the crusts off? I think if we go back to when ladies originally were taking tea, of course, the crusts would have been off and I think that little bit of refinement, and that little bit of detail has gone on.
I'm sure you and I love the crusts.
I love a crust.
Yes, me too I have had to restrain myself from eating those crusts, actually! If I was on my own, I'd have a mouthful of crusts.
Feel free.
'I could never go on anything like MasterChef 'but to be in Claridge's kitchen putting hazelnuts on something 'I can't even pronounce with a lot of double L's in it, such a treat.
'Crikey, I nearly put one on upside down then - 'that would have gone viral on YouTube.
'I do find it odd that girls will choose to have these posh teas 'rather than get legless in a bus shelter - call me old-fashioned.
'Anyway, Nick's in charge of pastries.
' And do you think that people have very high expectations now of what an afternoon tea in a top hotel would be like? I think they have always had high expectations but I think that afternoon tea is now so popular that they are expecting to have something, you know, something different and something special.
I've had to leave the kitchen - they'll have to glue their own nuts to their mille-feuille.
I'm entertaining a young gentlemen to a Claridge's special.
Earl Grey is not Chinese! Look, it's Dr Who! Oh, blimey, it is! Come on, Craig, breathe! Actor Matt Smith shot to fame playing the 11th Doctor and he's a big tea drinker - as is the Time Lord himself.
Why do you think Dr Who drinks tea? I think that Dr Who I'm going to have some more.
I'm going to have some more of the Assam, I'm a bit nervous about the vanilla Have another Assam and when you feel you've got your strength up, I'll slip you some French vanilla! I think there is something quintessentially quite British about the whole show.
Even though he is intergalactic? Yeah.
But he is British intergalactic? Yeah, blue police, sort of, telephone box, tweed That fits with loose leaf and a tea strainer.
But I like to think that he is not that precious about I think that he, you know Just have a tea bag? Yeah, like a space kettle.
What do you think it says about us, as a nation, that we are tea drinkers but we also embrace the idea of being tea drinkers? Sort of, boast, isn't it? That we have, in the world.
Yeah, it is.
Why would that be? These things, sort of, bed themselves in to the fabric of our society, somehow, don't they? Yeah, they do, they do.
And I don't know how.
I mean, if I was making a tea advert, what I think I would try to communicate about tea is that it can console you, it can start your day, there is something, you know, there's warmth and the ritual and you can share it, you know, make someone a cup of tea, and you offer it them, and you give it to them.
You know, you've got to boil the kettle, get the sugar, ask what they want, you've got to engage with them, I suppose.
I love the ritual of a cup of tea in the morning.
I love tea and a scrambled egg sandwich, tea and a bacon sandwich, tea and a fry up.
Tea is the whole running theme of all your meals.
You know, weirdly though, not weirdly but because I had some trouble sleeping, I think just because of learning lines and work, after six o'clock, I started drinking decaf tea, which my dad was appalled by.
I feel, like, a bit, I don't know Effeminate? I asked my dad for a cup of decaf tea and he looked at me like I was an alien! Well, he is an alien! Well, Dr Who is an alien who drinks tea and appreciates its restorative qualities.
You need rest.
One more.
I think he is often at his most interesting when he is doing things that are relatively human and normal because it highlights that he is an alien, somehow, and so I think there is something wonderful about an alien enjoying tea.
Maybe you've had enough coffee now? How about some nice calming tea? Let's get you a cup of camomile or something, shall we? The tea, the tweed, the bow tie - they make him more intriguing but the Doctor is still the star of the show.
In my perfect world the tea is the star! This isn't about you, we are giving people a cup of tea, we are giving them a pink wafer biscuit, we are giving them a sausage It's the tea urn, she won't boil! Bring her over to the socket! Quick, table! The one in the kitchen is faulty, that could have turned her off.
'What we forget is that once upon a time, 'tea had a sort of celebrity status.
' Back in the 19th century, it was still something exotic, and, yes, alien, and we had to go to the ends of the earth to get it.
That's where those beautiful clippers came in, racing each other all the way back from China.
The arrival of tea wasn't just a grocery delivery, it was an event.
You think of all these wonderful ships racing around the Cape of Good Hope to get back to London to be the first with the tea and people following these tea races in the paper, and there was lots of publicity, and lots of glamour - about tea! It was an exotic product from a country hardly any of us knew about and historian Amanda Vickery says the fact that it could get to us so quickly added to its appeal.
What the Cutty Sark is all about is a sort of glamour that perhaps an older viewers might associate with the Onedin Line, you know, the sort of idea of these, kind of Yes, they might! People who are in a home! I found it glamorous, Khachaturian, butso, it's more this idea of speed and that you could bring back the tea harvest so quickly - it captures the public imagination.
The golden age of the tea clippers didn't last long the Cutty Sark only made a handful of tea-bearing trips, before it was seen off by the steamship and the Suez Canal and, by that time we'd started growing our own tea on British soil, by which I mean Indian soil and it was becoming a mass market drink.
The Cutty Sark is associated with this, kind of, changeover from Chinese tea to black teafrom Assam, in particular.
And one of the things that the marketers get on to very, very quickly is the idea of the brand, and the trust in things like Lipton's, Brooke Bond.
You get this whole, kind of, packaging of the working class diet and the British start to put their trust in a label.
Tea time won't be the same without bananas.
So, as we've heard, tea was the first commodity to be packaged and branded.
So you would go to a shop and, instead of just asking for tea from your grocer, you would say, "I want Typhoo," which is the Chinese for doctor, or because you'd seen the advert on the station platform, you might say, "I want Mazawattee," or you might, although I have my doubts, you might ask for Twinings Blue Tips, at 1.
9d, which is a very strange name for tea and sounds like a below-the-waist disorder.
And so tea just became one of those things, you had your own brand, and you would be brand loyal.
So while, in one part of our Empire we were happily planting tea, we were losing our grip on another part of the Empire.
While tea was soothing us down on these shores, across the Atlantic it was stirring us up.
MUSIC: "Block Rockin' Beats" by Chemical Brothers Tea is a funny old drink, it has given us the teasmaid and the tea cosy but it has got this dramatically bloodstained history.
We never really think about it but it has taken us to war, it has underwritten the Empire and it's even sparked a revolution.
Hear, ye! Hear, ye! Huzzah! The story of the Boston Tea Party is taught to every American school child.
It took place nearly 250 years ago, when, of course, America was still British.
Just.
In the winter of 1773, three ships belonging to the East India Company sailed into Boston Harbour loaded with tea and that would spark one of the most iconic events in world history.
Of course, the events of that December night in 1773 were really about tax rather than tea.
Americans liked tea, they drank lots of tea, what they didn't like was the 3d tax on every pound imposed on them by the British government.
And so it was here, in the Old South Meeting House, that nearly 7,000 angry Bostonians gathered, determined to stop the tea landing.
"No taxation without representation," was their battle cry and, as historian Benjamin Carp explains, as the meeting broke up it all kicked off.
OK, so there is a big angry crowd, here, there's three ships in the harbour, so everybody just high tails it down to the harbour and jumps on the ships? Yeah, I mean, a huge crowd goes down to watch and then there was a select group of maybe 100, maybe 150 men, who start swarming over the decks of these three ships and they take these hundreds of crates of tea, and they chop them open and dump it all into Boston harbour.
ALL: Drop the tea into the sea! Drop the tea into the sea! 'And now, of course, the battle cry is, '"No insurrection without a reconstruction.
" 'This is the Boston Tea Party Museum 'and I think I'm going to have to pretend to throw pretend tea 'into the harbour in a minute.
' Now, my friends, these are not mere tea chests, no.
These represent something far greater.
These represent a tyrant across the seas who would tell us how to lead our futures! ALL: Boo! Step on up to commit treason! One, two, three! Over the side, patriots! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah? Huzzah.
'It's quite a dilemma, isn't it? For a British person.
'Should I have hung on to the tea 'and demanded three shillings and sixpence tax, 'that's assuming my pretend tea chest weighed 14lbs, 'not that I'm taking it too seriously.
' That was a very difficult situation for me, I wanted to join in as part of the reconstruction.
I felt I was, you know, condoning the oppression of the American people.
I didn't know whether to throw it in or not and, actuallyI'm depressed now.
I think I've played it all wrong.
'Luckily I was only depressed for seven seconds 'because then I remembered there was a gift shop!' Three years after the tea hit the water, the Americans inexplicably embarked on the war of Independence and within ten years they were no longer British.
And that's the end of my interest in them.
They were obviously spoiling for a fight, the tea was just an excuse, but I wonder if it all could have kicked off over something else.
It might have been something else but the thing is that tea was so important to Americans.
I mean, the Americans all want to be like Britons in the 1770s, they really loved tea, they loved what it signified and so it was the fact that Americans loved tea so much that made this such a significant event.
RAP: Yeah, I'm up at Brooklyn now I'm down in Tribeca Right next to De Niro but I'll be hood forever I'm the new Sinatra And since I made it here I can make it anywhere Yeah, they love me everywhere There was no going back after the Tea Party - you think of old American movies - the waitress in the diner coming round with the coffee pot, Friends, Frasier - it's coffee all the way.
Actually, that's not true, Americans drink loads of tea, they are the sixth biggest consumers of tea in the world, they drink 65 billion cups a year they just don't want you to know about it.
New York, concrete jungle I don't think it's about how much tea you drink but how much you care about it.
Coffee is part of America's image and tea is part of ours, like red telephone boxes and black cabs.
This is Tea & Sympathy, an old-fashioned English tea shop on the Lower West Side and an old-fashioned grocery shop next door.
Both were set up by Nicky Perry, who in a previous existence was a tea lady in London.
When I first came here I couldn't believe that - a) you couldn't get a cup of tea and, b) all these Americans were being very disparaging about English food, which enraged me.
So, I decided, "Right, I'm having myself "a nice little English restaurant "and I am going to show these Americans," and this is how you have a cup of tea.
But what is it about tea that makes us feel so British? Why tea, of all things, it's just in our blood, do you think? It's in our blood, it's ingrained in our being.
I mean, what is it when you go to somebody's house, the first thing that happens in England is the kettle goes on.
I have to tell you, I've had people in here looking at teapots, "Can you put this in the microwave?" I'm like, you're going to put a teapot in the microwave? "Yeah.
" I'm not selling you a teapot, I'm just not.
I have got a whole list on my tea list of how to make the tea! There we go.
Yep, "Good quality tea, freshly drawn water," yeah, we knew that.
"Warm the pot," we knew that.
"One teaspoon of tea and one for the pot," yeah.
"Leave for two to six mins.
" You've got it all here.
You need to because I will tell you, in my opinion, the tea that you get served in most places in America, tastes like someone has lent over and put the old spoon in the Boston Harbour and then just put it in the microwave and served it to you.
It's vile.
I might not say that to them.
THEY LAUGH While I'm over here, I'm going to meet someone for a cuppa and I'm very late, I don't like to be late, and I'm actually 22 two years late.
I was doing a season of stand-up in London in 1990 and I had a letter from Morrissey inviting me for a cup of tea, anyway I couldn't go.
To make amends, I've brought him a tea cosy knitted by my friend Norah.
I've seen Morrissey on a documentary having tea with Nancy Sinatra and he has a plain white teapot.
It's a black and white tea cosy, so it's going to look great.
Oh Is this your own teapot? This is mine, this travels with me, I bought it in Rome but it's Parisian.
What sort of tea is this that we are drinking? We are drinking Ceylon tea and it is very weak.
I mean the bag skims the surface of the water and is removed.
(The bag.
) The bag, yes.
I mean, I know that you are a caddy person but I was hoping you might come out with a caddy.
Yeah, but some of us don't remember World War II.
I am a teaholic, even though I don't have very strong tea.
How often? What time do you kick off with it? Well, as soon as I wake up I must have tea.
I think one day, because I have never had coffee, you see, one dayI decided to try to have a complete day without tea and I was quite shaken, I was quite disturbed.
It is interesting, we just went to see this tea shop, Tea & Sympathy where the whole point of it is to encapsulate Britishness and people go and think they are having a British experience but, actually, if you went to Britain there wouldn't be a tea shop like that.
No, but there was once Yes.
There was once and it was a very British thing, and it was a very stoic thing, and it was the solution to everything.
Calm you down, a nice cup of tea.
I mean, nobody ever said, "I'll make you a horrible cup of tea," it was always, "I'll make you a nice cup of tea.
" I mean, why does it have to be nice? I want to make you a really RAUNCHY cup of tea! I think it was very British and part of the British resolve, and the reason why Hitler couldn't get us was because of tea and nothing else.
I know, but that is so strange, isn't it, when you think about it.
It is just a hot drink and, you know, why not cocoa? Why not coffee? Why not cocoa? There is bound to be a reason! I am going to give you something but you don't have to have it.
Please, don't say it's a tea caddy! It's not a tea caddy.
Does it look like a tea caddy? A cosy? A tea cosy? Yes, it was, forget it, it doesn't matter, I'm not going to give it you now.
It doesn't matter.
Cut.
I knew it was a tea cosy.
Come on, let's see it, now.
We don't want to waste further film.
No, cos it's not going to match your teapot.
I don't care what you say about it now.
This is a beanie hat! It has got holes for the spout! This is what the skateboarding kids wear.
"Reduced to clear, made in Morecambe.
" Just give it me back, I'll give it back to Norah.
No, I will keep it and I shall cherish it because I don't want you to.
I didn't say I was going to use it, I said I was going to keep it in a bottom drawer In a bottom drawer for when you get marriedwhere nobody goes! Thank you for your generosity.
You know what? I love Morrissey! And he has a point about Hitler and the British, and tea.
All those things that made us seem rather dull before the war - our love of routine, our reluctance to engage in hysterics, our faith in a nice cup of tea and a sit down - in the Second World War we were able to embrace those qualities, and be proud of them.
Were we downhearted? Well, probably, but never mind let's put the kettle on.
I will always remember that day that war was declared my wife come out to me in the garden and told me the ghastly news about the outbreak of hostilities.
"Never mind, my dear," I said to her, "you put on the kettle, we'll have a nice cup of tea.
" AIR RAID SIREN BLARES And we're off.
'Hold on tight, everybody!' I've been let loose in a rain storm driving a NAAFI van near priceless aircraft.
I've come to talk to some men and women who, unlike myself, thank you, Morrissey, do remember the war.
Ha-ha! Jeremy Clarkson, eat your heart out! OK! Yay! Tea was so important to morale in the war, that stocks were dispersed around the country to protect them from attack.
And hot tea was doled out from vans, like this one.
This is one of five surviving NAAFI vans and they went everywhere, and they were even at Dunkirk.
Tea fortified the troops on the front line and it was there for the blitz victims on the home front.
Tea expert Henrietta Lovell recently did a special blend for the Royal Air Force and she's going to help me recreate some genuine NAAFI tea.
It was absolutely important to national moral - we couldn't get through the war without tea.
In fact, it was so important the Government took over supply.
So the three things that we needed to get thorough the war were food, fuel and tea, and they were all rationed.
Churchill knew the value of tea, they say he called it more important than ammunition.
But with everything in short supply we were going to have to improvise.
If you didn't have anything, you used one of these.
Ha-ha! If she didn't have anything, of course you had a silk stocking! You wouldn't have, probably, used a brand new one but you might use an old one that you had.
You probably had to sleep with somebody to get it, so it does make the tea-making process a little bit longer! Because of the sexual intercourse having to happen first.
Or you took a piece of muslin, then you take some NAAFI tea, that would have been like this.
NAAFI tea, so that's a smaller A more industrial grade and then we make a tea bag, which we are going to pop in, and you want to make as much room as possible so the tea can unfurl a little bit, you don't want to do it tightly, like that.
So, I need your help with some string.
Yeah, I'm here.
That's my finger! Oh, sorry! So, is this the first time we had tea urns? Did we have tea urns in the First World War? Yeah, absolutely, we are British, we can't get through life without tea.
It wasn't just the NAAFI, of course, the WVS, the Red Cross, even Gracie Fields chipped in to keep Britain topped up with tannin.
I am swooshing it about a bit.
Oh, my God, look at all the lovely dark colours coming off straight away.
Looks like tea.
Smells like tea! Oh, my LORD! That is practically purple! When I made this for some pilots, they used there Bic pens to Of course they were.
And you know the RAF man often had a moustache? Mm.
Sometimes they didn't have time to make the tea in the urn, they just made it in the cup and there was leaf everywhere, and they couldn't strain it, so they used their moustache to strain the tea! How on earth did we win the war? It's probably not easy for the current generation of Facebooking smoothie-sippers to get what tea meant to people fighting that war - for RAF pilots, like Harry Mottershead, it was crucial.
Oh, it played a big part, let me tell you.
To be without tea was to be without life, flying, you know? Tea warmed up the sailors who were manning the Atlantic convoys, like Ray Ashby.
Tea was pretty strong - I mean, the spoon would stand up in the tin, it was that thick! You, sometimesmetaphorically speaking! And in the ration packs of soldiers, like John Ainsworth, on the Normandy beaches, there was always tea.
Tea is essential and tea is also a great comfort when you are in stress, and you feel as though things are not going your way.
You get a nice cup of tea, it helps you to calm down, and I'll never change - not now I'm 91! Problem is the butter.
Knife's coming.
I think this is when tea became more than a drink, it became a symbol.
Somehow it combined ordinariness and courage, while physically pulling us together as we were served tea, or someone served us, it pulled our morale together.
A drop of, you know what.
I'm coming round your way, don't you worry.
It gave us an identity, as a nation, it was shorthand for what we were fighting for.
Eva Rowland is 98, and as a young Salvation Army officer she dished out tea for the troops.
I saw more military men than I ever thought existed.
Where were you? I was stationed in Portland, with the Royal Navy, and that was the finest experience of my life.
Really?! Believe me.
Yes.
Did you like the sailors? Oh, what, they were grand! Were they? Yes.
You think tea was important? Oh, yes, it was the greatest asset.
A good, hot cup of tea worked wonders.
Right, cup of tea? Please, dear.
'And at Bletchley Park, 'where Alan Turing and his team were working day and night 'to crack the German U-boat codes - tea again, was keeping them going.
'Ruth Bourne was a Wren working at Bletchley.
' It was on a trolley and you could hear it rattling down the corridor, and we would all shout, "Tea boat! Tea boat!" And we would all run out, and we all had our own mugs, and it was particularly good for us in the middle of the night, about three in the morning you were really flagging.
And then you had this wonderful cup of tea.
Is that your own mug? This is my own mug, we all had our own mugs.
That was painted with my own fair hands, using paint stolen from the paint store up the corridor.
It's original wiring from the Turing bomb.
From the actual machine? Yes.
But Alan Turing also had his own mug, we all did.
Did you? What did Alan's look like? Well, if you were to go into Alan Turing's office you will see a mug chained to the radiator cos that's what he did.
He chained his mug to the radiator? Oh, yes.
In case someone took it? Absolutely.
Can we say that tea cracked the code at Bletchley? Without tea you wouldn't have been able to do it? Without the tea, we would have lost the war! No doubt we would have all been drinking ersatz coffee.
Exactly, and we would all be speaking German.
So, we won the war, hooray for us.
Back to work, everybody.
CHATTERING AND SHOUTING Well, they say everything stops for tea and now the tea break was enshrined in British law.
Wait! Andrew! And enshrined in British comedy we had the tea lady, dispensing not just tea but common sense.
What's wrong now?! Nothing, just a rather mysterious phone call from the Far East.
Well, sometimes that's God's way of telling you to think on and look sharp! But the tea lady would, sadly, eventually be replaced by something much less amusing - the vending machine.
The cup will drop down into what we term the cup station.
And I always liked doing a blind tasting between the hot chocolate and the chicken soup.
But while we were all merrily pressing the normal button tea was sneakily giving itself a makeover and very funky new look.
The biggest revolution in tea's history started in New York, in the early 1900s, where one man had an extraordinary piece of luck.
His name was Thomas Sullivan and, like lots of other inventions, none of which I can think of at this minute, it happened by accident and it would change the world of tea drinking, as far as English-speaking countries were concerned, for ever.
It happened on Front Street, in Lower Manhattan, in the early 1900s, where Sullivan worked as a tea merchant, sending out samples of his tea in tin boxes.
Tea historian Elizabeth Knight says we have a lot to thank him for - and his wife.
So what did Sullivan actually do that we are remembering him for now? Thomas Sullivan invented the tea bag and the story is that Mrs Sullivan is the one who got the bright idea of cutting costs.
No surprise there.
No surprise there! Well, it was expensive to send the samples out in the tins of the day and Mrs Sullivan supposedly got the bright idea to zip up a few little mesh silk bags and pack the samples that way.
So the customers thought that they were intended to be dropped into to the boiling hot water and brew the tea.
But that's not what he intended No, but his customers began writing back saying, send more, send more of the samples in those great, wonderful tea bags.
Sullivan never patented his invention, so everyone could just copy it.
The first paper tea bags arrived in 1930 and we didn't have rectangular tea bags until 1940.
By the '70s we'd just about got the idea and we loved them - even Welsh people love them! Well, I think tea pot tea is a bit messier, I prefer it don't block up the sink and things like that.
It tastes nicer, that's why.
You don't want tea leaves in your cup, do you? Tea bags totally changed the way we drank our tea - all the stuff like the caddy and the teapot, and the strainer, that was SO yesterday.
We went tea-bag bonkers.
There's been a revolution in tea-bag technology in the last decade.
What? There's one cup, for if you just want one cup.
Pot size.
Drawstring.
Pyramid.
And they are bringing one out for osteoporosis! LAUGHTER Today, nine and a half out of every ten cups we drink comes from a bag and the rise of the tea bag coincided with the rise of another British addiction - television.
Commercial television began broadcasting in 1955 and viewers were introduced to the ad break - that two-minute opportunity to put the kettle on.
And TV wouldn't just encourage you to make tea, it would urge you to buy it with some of the most memorable ads ever created.
Oh, look and see! Tell me that monkey isn't happy.
I'm telling you, that monkey is not happy.
Oh, the classic.
Coo-ee, Mr Shifter.
Light refreshment? Did you draw inspiration from that? Strangely not, no.
PIANO CLANGS One way of shifting it! These are the best ad's ever! It was the most successful advertising campaign, ever.
The most effective.
Ooh! Ooh, it's a lovely cuppa They made that chimpanzee look like Sue Pollard! Oh, wow! When we want a brew Oh, that looks unsavoury, doesn't it? Very close with her with her donkey friends, there.
THEY LAUGH I wonder if that's what makes you go, "Ooh!" Fellow Britons, let your stiff upper-lips cavort like a wanton gypsy Now, is this the idea that tea is very, very British, so we need Stephen to tell us? Yes, that's right, yes.
.
.
over a mug of Twinings See, I think somebody could re-brand tea.
If somebody decided to, if some big tea company decided to go all Starbucks on tea's ass, I bet you, you could do it.
I get the feeling tea could maybe do with a bit of a rebrand.
The Second World War was a long time ago, I don't think we feel the same about tea.
Everything has to be instant now - we even want our fortunes read quicker Got to make the tea, got to sit down and drink tea with people, which, when you are trying to earn money, you really can't be bothered sitting down drinking tea with people! .
.
and if builders don't drink builder's, the rot really has set in.
If I'm cold I might have a cup of tea in the morning but I'm not one to drink, like, ten cups a day.
I prefer to have an energy drink.
How many do you have a day? I'll probably have three or four off the lady who runs the cafe.
And we all know, cos we're all doing it, what else we're drinking.
I've noticed that the big corporations have come in and took over.
I'm not going to mention the name but the big bean.
Yeah.
The big bean is out there.
The guilty bean.
A lot of the little greasy spoons have disappeared and I think we've lost something, which is a shame.
I have felt, making this programme, that there's a nostalgia about tea.
Really, as if its glory days are over, as if, as young people say it's not, "with it.
" The reality at the moment is that tea's in a long-term decline.
Over the last ten years the overall consumption down by 14.
5% So this is the challenge for the ad men, tea drinkers are getting older and you can't use chimps - discuss.
Alistair Owen at Dare works on the prestigious Tetley's account - and, as soon as he's done this presentation, his mum says he has to do his homework! And then the other thing is coffee shops having a huge influence.
You only have to look at something like that, "frozen grasshopper mocha," to realise quite how diverse the coffee field is now.
Can I just ask you something? Course you can.
Do you think people are switching away from, say 30 years ago, when you would have breakfast.
You would cook your breakfast at home, where you would have it, would you say that generation is just leaving the house? Absolutely, they're going into work early they're getting coffee from a coffee shop and that tea is being directly replaced by a coffee on the go.
"Right, girls, fancy a cuppa?" Great news! This latest Tetley campaign is stressing the pleasures of sharing a cuppa with your real living friends as opposed to just connecting with people online.
And in a celebrity-led culture, as I believe we have now, the hunt is on for a real life tea-drinking role model, like Lady Gaga.
I suppose, what we really need in this country is the new Gracie Fields.
My name's Ria, I drink a lot of tea.
I'm Andrew, I have about one or two cups of tea a week.
I'm Jenny Two cups of tea a week?! No wonder our wars last so long these days! You may not recognise them by this point in the programme but these are young people.
This is a focus group to find out what they think about tea or if they think about tea.
Do you think there is any way that you could do with tea what they have done with coffee? Personally, I think what they need to do is to make tea cool.
If it's embraced by somebody that you really love, would that make a difference? Yeah, if someone did a massive campaign that was very different and Lady Gaga, I think, is an example of that, I think it would change my attitude towards that.
Yeah.
No offence to Lady Gaga but, surely, tea can manage without her? I think it's still got a surprise or two up its leaves.
Hear, ye! Hear, ye! Let's not forget, this is a drink that sparked the American Revolution, that sobered up the workers, drove the British Empire and helped us see off the Nazis.
It has a 5,000-year history - it changed history.
We loved it so much we were prepared to travel half way round the world to get it.
I don't think tea is finished yet.
If a terrible iced bun you can buy for 20p at the school fair can reinvent itself as a four quid cup cake, then surely a brilliant, living plant, like tea, can keep a place in our lives.
I mean, I don't know what - maybe as a gel you rub on or if we can implant it under our skin, like a contraceptive, or maybe, more likely, we'll all be too poor to afford these fancy coffees and we'll end up back round the kitchen table, making our own beverages.
Whatever.
I think that somewhere, someone will always be having a nice cup of tea.
And it doesn't get more English than tea.
But tea's not English, it's not even British.
We've seen that we had to travel half way across the globe to get hold of Camellia sinensis.
We had to wage wars and smuggle drugs, and find a country where we could grow it, all for the sake of getting our daily cuppa.
Probably led us to rule the world.
OK! Now I want to find out why.
To be without tea was to be without lifeline, you know? How has it come to mean so much to us, this little exotic leaf? It can console you, there's the warmth and the ritual and you can share it.
Tea is a social drink you make a cup of coffee, you make a pot of tea.
Why has our nation been so obsessed with tea, for so long? One day I decided to try to have a complete day without tea.
I was quite shaken, I was quite disturbed.
And why can nobody else in the world make tea properly? Have you tasted the tea in America? Terrible! What I'm trying to find out is why we in particular have such a bizarre relationship with it? Why do we feel the need to advertise it with chimps in bowler hats, use the dregs to read fortunes and why do we have this persistent belief that it was the tea leaf that won us the war? Anyway, come with me, people, and we'll find out.
We think of ourselves as a nation of tea drinkers I bought some Jubilee kitchen roll last year - if I'd bought it this year it would have been cheaper - and the symbols on it were a union flag, a crown, an umbrella and a tea pot.
And my quest with this programme is to find out how British people really feel about tea and get them to articulate it but it's very difficult - it's like asking people what they feel about the back of their neck or their mattress.
I mean, I do know we love tea, we love it, it's just that we're never going to be able, really, to look tea in the face and say so.
Till we have built Jerusalem.
MUSIC: "Tea For Two" by Vincent Youmans Like a reliable dull old partner, tea is always there, hovering in the background.
Tea helps any social occasion, like my date with reclusive and seldom seen Graham Norton.
That's it, put the kettle on.
And Betty's not wrong.
No.
Put the kettle on.
Yeah.
Solves all.
A nice cup of tea.
See a nice cup of tea.
There we are.
It's never just a cup of tea, it's a "nice" cup of tea.
A nice cup of tea, I know.
I don't know why it is a nice cup of tea, we all keep saying that.
I suppose a "nice" cup of tea gives you that warm It's not just a drink.
It's a warm thing you have made them.
Yes, you've made them a warm thing.
Cos we are not good at talking in this country.
Perhaps it's a substitute? Yes.
For therapy! Tea is a social drink because coffee, it seems to me, you make a cup of coffee, you make a POT of tea.
Yeah, yeah, good point.
It's a gathering.
My mother takes it this seriously.
Does she? Yeah, like when we go on holiday, it's all she can talk about, the whole holiday.
Whether she is going to get a cup of tea or not? And what it will be like.
Well, it'll be rubbish, we know that! Me and my aunt Christine took her on a cruise and that was their holiday, essentially, was ordering tea and then complaining about the tea that you knew you wouldn't like.
No, you're not going to like it, no.
Then they found some Russian waiter who knew how to boil the water properly - they loved him.
They drink tea in Russia, you see.
They would hunt him down like a dog! "There he is! There he is!" They would get this nice tea! Anyway, if you were me and you were making a programme, a documentary about tea, where would you go? Erm, probably Harrogate.
I'm sorry, that was a set up question and answer - I needed someone to say Harrogate and Graham was there.
Don't blame Graham.
Drinking tea, looking out the window, there's a whole gamut of actions happening here.
But as exciting as it is, looking out on to a Yorkshire pavement, I'm on a fearless fact finding flipping mission - what makes a good cup of tea? Suzy Garragher knows.
She's a tea taster for Taylor's of Yorkshire.
She's one of around 80 tea tasters in Britain.
THEY SLURP Thick, 4.
3.
You'd think slurping and spitting would come easily to a comedian - not so.
I think you suck it in, sort of, behind your teeth, so teeth forward and suck it behind your teeth.
Crikey.
VICTORIA SLURPS AND LAUGHS Better! I don't know, something is inhibiting me.
I'm not doing I'm stopping 75% of the way through.
VICTORIA SLURPS Very good, much better.
Obviously, the thing is to stand on your tiptoes, that's the deciding factor! 'The slurping is to get the tea round all the different parts 'of the tongue and the spitting out, that's obvious - 'if you drank all that tea all day you'd never be there.
' You are a heck of a spitter! Not the most glamorous job, I know.
There's a whole tea tasting vocabulary, just like in comedy, they have descriptions like, "malty, brisk, kelpy," whereas in comedy we have, "Not funny.
" VICTORIA SLURPS That was a good slurp! I would call that bouncy.
Bouncy, that is a new tea terminology, great.
Suzy has to be able to accurately describe each flavour.
So Assam - nice, thick guttiness, it's a really good description.
I like that - gutty teas.
It means it's thick, it's rich, it gives you a bit of a kick.
The tea most of us drink in the UK is a blend of tea from lots of different teas, from lots of different countries - Kenya, India - and it's Suzy's job to choose from all those different flavours, which vary from harvest to harvest, so each new blend gives us the old taste we expect.
Tea is indigenous to China but it now grows in over 40 different countries and that's great for us cos all those different countries have different qualities that we blend together.
All the tea Suzy tastes will be made from a standardised ratio of tea to water and milk - we don't need to bother with that in our homes, or even get dressed - but she does have one handy tip.
Freshly boiled water, and this is really important for when you are drinking tea at home as well, because freshly boiled water has the right amount of oxygen in the water.
If you over boil the water Got no oxygen.
Exactly, and you are going to get a really flat tasting cup of tea.
And you will never be happy in your whole life.
Because happiness is good tea.
Absolutely.
'Look, I'm not a good slurper, can we just leave it there? 'Let's get to grips with the history.
' It's very rare in this country for a fashion to start with the lower classes and work its way up.
In fact, I can only think of tracksuit bottoms and Call The Midwife, and tea started at the top.
It took a posh foreigner to kick off the whole addiction.
It was Catherine De Braganza who came over from Portugal in 1662 to marry Charles II.
She already had the tea-drinking habit, she brought with her a tea caddy and instantly tea was all the go with upper classes.
We're very free and easy with tea now, any old pleb can drink it, but back then it was the preserve of the super rich.
Woburn Abbey is the ancestral home of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.
When tea first began to trickle into the country, dukes and duchesses would have been one of the few people who could actually afford it.
We've seen how far tea had to come from high up in the Chinese mountains, down those long rivers, to be loaded on the ships to make that hazardous voyage back to the London docks.
So any tea that arrived safely was hugely expensive.
So, this is the oldest receipt they have in the house, for tea, and this is from 1685, and they spent 24 shillings on a pound of tea, which is approximately the equivalent of £100.
So they were spending £100 on one pound of tea, which just shows you that would have been way out of most peoples league and ability to pay.
This strainer! This strainer actually The strainer doesn't go with these cups! No, no, the strainer doesn't go with these cups! 'I've just popped into Woburn 'to have a cuppa with the present Duchess - 'it was that or Toddington Services!' Is this Earl Grey? This is Earl Grey but they would have had Lapsang, most probably.
Yes, yeah.
So the time we are talking about, tea was a luxury item, wasn't it? Because it was very expensive, wasn't it? So that's why you have tea caddy's and things are locked up, and away.
Yes, I think it was expensive and I know that they would send somebody out to bring it back from the docks.
The family did own some docks at Rotherhithe.
Well, that's very handy! And as they owned most of Covent Garden they did, they used to use those shops and the dealers all in Covent Garden.
Would it have been that the men stayed behind at the table? Drinking port and smoking cigars and the ladies would most probably would have come in here, and drank tea and gossiped! Mamma! And that is how my life came to be saved by a haggis! THEY ALL CHUCKLE Please.
Mamma! And soon every novel had a tea table scene - Jane Austen, the Brontes - they could all use the tea table as a setting for revelations and high drama.
Pray take care of your nose, my dear, I prefer not to find a septum amongst the tea things! And, unlike horse riding or fencing, drinking tea for an actor requires no special training.
In the 19th century, the Seventh Duchess of Bedford, Anna Maria, had a very significant part to play in our tea story, which I will come to shortly, but, for now, have a look at her very upmarket lunch box.
This is a travelling tea service that Anna Maria would have travelled with.
So she could always be sure of having her own tea, out of her own teacups with her own kettle.
This would have been my cup and saucer.
Is this the sort of saucer that they used to drink tea out of? I have never seen one of those sort of saucers! So they would pour their tea into them and slurp, to cool it down.
And that's why they used to say that it was a dish of tea, didn't they? They used to say, "Take a dish of tea," and that's the dish! I'm really pleased to have seen that.
And then the tea caddy, where the tea would have been kept, oh, excuse my fingers, but it was locked.
Yes, because it was so expensive.
Because tea was so expensive.
BELL RINGS And a bell for, I guess, when she wanted her teaor some more tea! THEY LAUGH I feel like I'm on the Antiques Roadshow! Yeah, so do I! 'I couldn't put a value on it, though!' We didn't take any persuading to take up the tea habit - there was no hanging back like there was with olive oil or pesto.
Catherine de Braganza tipped up with just two ounces in her tea caddy in 1662.
By the 1720s, we were importing more than a million pounds of tea a year - but it didn't happen without a fight.
You wouldn't think of something as cosy as tea causing a moral panic but it did.
As tea seeped through the social strata, the upper classes got very exercised.
A man called Jonas Hanway, he was writing in the 1750s, he was famous cos he was the first person to carry an umbrella, which was quite a sight, and they used to call them portable roofs, and they used to think, if he was so worried about getting wet, he should just get a cab, like we would say to people, "Get a room," they would shout to him, "Get a cab!" He thought tea was very bad for you, that it made your teeth black, it made you melancholic, that nurses were letting babies fall out of windows because they were so busy sipping tea and the father of Methodism, John Wesley, he said tea brought you near the chambers of death but, later on, he changed his mind.
What Wesley realised was that you couldn't make much of a case for the dangers of tea when there were huge social problems caused by the drinking of beer and cheap gin.
It was the drunks you had to watch out for with the baby dropping, not the tea drinkers.
The temperance movement had right on its side but you can't advocate abstinence from alcohol without offering an alternative.
Now we could drink tea not just for pleasure but as a moral duty.
I'll just use this small sieve! The elegance of your tea table astonishes me! It's Woburn all over again! Food historian and tea lover Clarissa Dickson Wright is living proof of tea's sobering influence.
So, why were people in such a lather about tea? Why were they so exercised about it? Because it was the latest fashion and therefore should be reserved for the rich and gentry, and whatever.
Yes.
And then, of course, it went on to be the saving of the nation, and suddenly, by the Victorian and Edwardian era, everybody was drinking tea.
They were drinking it in the factories - it probably led us to rule the world.
You drink a lot of tea yourself? I drink quite a lot of tea.
What sort do you like? Assam in the morning and then, in the afternoon, I either like a Darjeeling or some afternoon blend.
I drink about four or five cups, at least, a day.
You don't drink alcohol do you? No, not for the last God knows how many years.
25 years.
When you were getting sober was tea a useful thing? It was the MAKING of tea that was useful, rather than the drinking of it.
The activity? By the time you had warmed the pot and the kettle has boiled, and everything, you know, the craving has moved on.
I don't think it was a substitute for going to Alcoholics Anonymous, really, but the one thing you do get in AA meetings is a very good cup of tea! So no more gin-sodden mothers chucking the baby out with the bath water, the kettle was on.
Boiling the water killed the germs, the caffeine kept us going, and Britain became Great.
We would have drunk it with the germs - we just liked the taste.
It didn't really matter what posh people were saying about tea because the lower orders just carried on drinking it anyway.
And we do - we drink 160 million cups of tea a day - we're all at it! Take the London cabby - famously shy and retiring, reluctant to give his views on immigration or the traffic but Pete's had a cuppa, he's ready to talk.
My tea day starts with me getting up, getting in nice and early to beat the traffic and I have got my trusty little thermal mug, there.
Who makes it? You make it or your wife makes it? No, I got to do that myself cos the princess won't get up and make me a cup of tea.
I'm just a modern man! OK, yeah, yeah.
Tea bag? Got to be a tea bag, for convenience.
Yeah? You need it just to wind down from the stress cos this town gets busier, you got the buses and the lorries, and sirens, and the cyclists - not that I'm getting on the cyclists' case but So, it keeps you calm? And it doesn't get more English than a cup of tea.
Cabbies, like Pete, are lucky, they have their very own tearooms - these green huts were built as part of the temperance movement to keep hansom cab drivers out of the pubs and give them wholesome refreshment.
They used to be all over London but now there are only 13.
They're all green, they're all the length of a horse and cab, and you can only come inside if you are a cabbie, or you're making a documentary Can I sit next to you? Tracey runs this one, which is near the Albert Hall.
She has all the qualifications for working in this shelter - she's really energetic, she makes a great cup of tea and she's thin.
How much do you drink, Tracey, in a day? About six, seven, eight.
Anything! It's good for you, though.
Cup of tea, cup of tea, cup of tea! It's the cheapest place in the Royal Borough of Kensington to get a nice cup of tea.
How much is a tea? 60p and it's specifically for cab drivers, nobody else can come through that door.
That's great, thank you very much.
Do you want anything to eat? I'm all right thank you, I don't want to be spitting toast on people! Can I have your? Yes, thank you.
Thank you.
You also get used to Tracey's tea - it's got a nice colour on it, she knows how to put the milk in, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
Personal service.
If I don't have one first thing in the morning I get a migraine, I wouldn't be able to function at all.
Tea was keeping the horse and cab facing the right way but all the workers were using the sugar and caffeine in tea to get them through the working day.
There's red road tea, silver tips in Darjeeling, what do we have? Builder's.
It doesn't even get the qualification of tea, it's just builder's! OK, take me up the scaffolding! Ha! For most people, builder's means strong tea with milk and sugar.
We don't have the most sophisticated palates in this country and I think tea would never have taken off in the way it did if we hadn't been able to add fat and sugar.
Paul, do you drink tea? I do, yeah.
What sort of tea do you drink? Erm, PG Tips, normally, at home.
Do you think of that as builder's tea? Yeah, a strong cup of tea and two sugars.
All I can say is that it is a long day without a cup of tea, isn't it? It's a very long day without a cup of tea.
Suppose I say the words herbal tea to you? I've tasted it.
And? I didn't like it.
Work ended when the hooter went but the tea drinking carried on.
Tea had soaked right into our social life - even people from Lancashire had found a way to have fun with tea.
I know! STRONG LANCASHIRE ACCENT: There's a famous seaside town called Blackpool that's noted for fresh air and fun.
Some more F's - it's flipping freezing! And one thing you can do in Blackpool, apart from walking about with big foam genitalia strapped to your front, is have your tea leaves read.
The Petulengros have been reading the tea leaves on this pier for many years.
Is that Tom Jones? I love Tom Jones.
Of course not everyone's as open minded as me.
Tell us what you see! Tell me what you see! Tea leaves, Mrs Ogden.
TEA LEAVES! It's only the map of Australia, that's all.
Have you the slightest idea what the map of Australia looks like? Well, I have now, haven't I? It's in there! Now, while I am pouring the tea, you need to be thinking of a question that you want answering.
'Tarot cards I understand, Ouija boards, 'but getting hard info from a wet leaf 'clinging to the side of a teacup - well, call me an agnostic.
' Now, swill it round three times.
One, two, three.
Right, now pour it onto the saucer.
Pour the tea out onto the saucer? Yeah, that's it.
And we have to see what we are left with.
Now then.
When you are reading tea leaves, you have the handle on the left hand side.
That bit there, the front, that's your future, the back is your past.
I can see a musical note now.
If you look there, can you see? It's like going down and round at the back Hm, I can't really see it but, then again, I'm not psychic.
It's going down there and it's, sort of, coming round.
Now, to me, that would be a musical note.
Now that's in your past so that means, of course, you are a very musical person and you are a very creative person.
At the side of it, there is a little triangle.
'A little triangle! 'Now to me that's saying a Toblerone is going to come into my life 'or my car might break down.
' You been thinking of living near water? Uh-huh.
Well, that's going to be good for you because, water, it helps you connect with yourself spiritually and it will give you inner peace.
At the side, here, I am seeing, it looks like a wagon and I can see marriage for you.
Can you? VICTORIA LAUGHS Oh, yes! I don't think so.
There is a wagon, there.
A wagon? Yep, a wagon is a sign of marriage Is it? Mm.
You won't end your days alone.
Thank you.
Anyway, moving swiftly on from the contemplation of my last days, though if this ride should unexpectedly malfunction I will end my days alone, as I am one of the few people ever to be allowed on the teacups all by themselves.
Tea was an aid to meditation .
.
in a very calming ritual for the Chinese .
.
but we don't bother with that.
'We can meditate when we want to, 'just look through any laundrette window, 'but, for us, tea breaks the ice.
It brings us together, 'it even gets us up on the dance floor.
' A craze for tea dances arrived in Britain with the tango, in 1912, and though the smart set moved on in the '20s, to cocktails, the Tower Ballroom stayed loyal to the tea dance and nearly 100 years later you can still come here and have a twirl, and a cuppa and marvel at Phil Kelsall's mighty organ.
It's the usual crowd.
That's Mike.
He proposed to Jenny from the stage last year.
Luckily, she did know him, and said yes.
And that's Bev, she's here with her son and her mum, and dad and their mum, and dad.
OK, Beverly, fill me in.
Who's who? OK, so, we have my son, Ethan, he is ten.
Over the scones, yeah.
Peaking through the scones! We have got my grandma and grandad, Patricia and Arthur, and my mum and dad at the far end.
OK, and you all come dancing We come three times a week.
Do you? Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Lovely.
Do you have a husband, can I ask? I do, but he doesn't dance.
No, you married out! He comes when he wants to come, he sits and watches but I'm on the floor most of the time so he just gets bored.
Tea dances were a great way of meeting people - it was a nice safe atmosphere.
It was all quite strict in the early years - disorderly conduct would be dealt with by expulsion and a gentleman could only dance with a lady.
Maybe gentlemen were dancing with gentlemen somewhere else in Blackpool? It's a possibility.
But in the Tower Ballroom the girls could pick and choose.
Tony started coming here when he was on leave from the army.
When I started going to tea dances there were a lot of girls free Looking for men? Looking for men to have a dance with.
You know, they weren't interested in anything else, it was purely and simply for pleasure and social.
I bet you've got Tony in the builder's-with-two-sugars bracket - you're so wrong.
What tea do you drink? This is cranberry tea.
Herb tea? This will be rather hot, this.
OK it's all rumba hot tea! Yeah! So, do you drink this all day long, Tony? I have about four or five cups I warned you! Just keep talking! Yeah, you did, I may never sing again but maybe that's probably not a bad thing.
I have it about four or five times a day.
Do you drink ordinary tea as well? Occasionally But you really like this? It's better, yeah.
Well, it keeps me going, anyway! Good to know.
Tea dances took a bit of a dip in popularity in the '60s and '70s - I, for one, was distracted by Tree Top squash and Angel Delight but they have had a resurgence in the last few years as has another old tradition.
OK, memory test, remember the Seventh Duchess of Bedford, Anna Maria? She of the velvet lined travelling tea case? Well, one afternoon in 1841, it seemed to her to be a very long time till dinner.
She got this rather sinking feeling, round about five in the afternoon.
We all get that! Yes! And so started the tradition of afternoon tea.
So, before that, people struggled to get from lunchtime to dinnertime? Well, I think maybe they did and tea was generally drunk after dinner.
Do you think, when she had her sinking feeling and had to have a piece of bread, and butter, and a cup of tea, do you think she realised that she was starting this enormous trend? I doubt very much that she did.
Mm, just wanted a cup of tea, really, didn't she? She wasn't to know that it was going to spread out to the world.
The craze for afternoon tea would soon sweep Britain.
In 1884, a chain of bakery shops, the Aerated Bread Company, made a spare room at their London Bridge branch into a tea room.
They soon had 60 tea rooms and Lyons, Express Diary, and the Kardomah chains all followed suit.
Soon anyone with the price of a cup of tea could be served in clean surroundings by a uniformed waitress and get a taste of the high life.
'Just to clear up, afternoon tea is not to be confused with,' "Tea a drink with jam and bread," as Julie Andrews would have it, not that I like that line because no-one says, "Jam and bread.
" They say, "Bread and jam.
" It's not like there aren't any rhymes for jam, so not to be confused with that.
It's also not the same as tea, the meal, or what, now we're all middle class, we have to call dinner and it's not really the same as high tea cos high tea is like afternoon tea but later, and with beans on toast.
Oh, look, I'll show you! I'm on my way to Claridge's - like many top London hotels, they've taken Anna Maria's sinking solution, and given it a twist.
Afternoon tea here starts at 40 quid - more with champagne, and there's a waiting list of months.
I'm down in the engine room with head chef Martin.
Give you an apron.
It's got my initials on it! Yes, just so that we don't forget you're a chef! Don't forget who I am, yes.
The sandwiches need to marry well with tea.
So, cucumber, egg, chicken, ham - always a little bit of smoked salmon.
So, anything a little oriental or anything like that is always going to bash with the tannins in the tea.
So, I think it's about also having a little taste and trying your tea as well and thinking, "No, that doesn't go.
" Can I have a go at that one? Yeah, please do.
How far in? That far in? Yeah, just a little bit off the end.
Perfect.
So, Martin, why do you take the crusts off? I think if we go back to when ladies originally were taking tea, of course, the crusts would have been off and I think that little bit of refinement, and that little bit of detail has gone on.
I'm sure you and I love the crusts.
I love a crust.
Yes, me too I have had to restrain myself from eating those crusts, actually! If I was on my own, I'd have a mouthful of crusts.
Feel free.
'I could never go on anything like MasterChef 'but to be in Claridge's kitchen putting hazelnuts on something 'I can't even pronounce with a lot of double L's in it, such a treat.
'Crikey, I nearly put one on upside down then - 'that would have gone viral on YouTube.
'I do find it odd that girls will choose to have these posh teas 'rather than get legless in a bus shelter - call me old-fashioned.
'Anyway, Nick's in charge of pastries.
' And do you think that people have very high expectations now of what an afternoon tea in a top hotel would be like? I think they have always had high expectations but I think that afternoon tea is now so popular that they are expecting to have something, you know, something different and something special.
I've had to leave the kitchen - they'll have to glue their own nuts to their mille-feuille.
I'm entertaining a young gentlemen to a Claridge's special.
Earl Grey is not Chinese! Look, it's Dr Who! Oh, blimey, it is! Come on, Craig, breathe! Actor Matt Smith shot to fame playing the 11th Doctor and he's a big tea drinker - as is the Time Lord himself.
Why do you think Dr Who drinks tea? I think that Dr Who I'm going to have some more.
I'm going to have some more of the Assam, I'm a bit nervous about the vanilla Have another Assam and when you feel you've got your strength up, I'll slip you some French vanilla! I think there is something quintessentially quite British about the whole show.
Even though he is intergalactic? Yeah.
But he is British intergalactic? Yeah, blue police, sort of, telephone box, tweed That fits with loose leaf and a tea strainer.
But I like to think that he is not that precious about I think that he, you know Just have a tea bag? Yeah, like a space kettle.
What do you think it says about us, as a nation, that we are tea drinkers but we also embrace the idea of being tea drinkers? Sort of, boast, isn't it? That we have, in the world.
Yeah, it is.
Why would that be? These things, sort of, bed themselves in to the fabric of our society, somehow, don't they? Yeah, they do, they do.
And I don't know how.
I mean, if I was making a tea advert, what I think I would try to communicate about tea is that it can console you, it can start your day, there is something, you know, there's warmth and the ritual and you can share it, you know, make someone a cup of tea, and you offer it them, and you give it to them.
You know, you've got to boil the kettle, get the sugar, ask what they want, you've got to engage with them, I suppose.
I love the ritual of a cup of tea in the morning.
I love tea and a scrambled egg sandwich, tea and a bacon sandwich, tea and a fry up.
Tea is the whole running theme of all your meals.
You know, weirdly though, not weirdly but because I had some trouble sleeping, I think just because of learning lines and work, after six o'clock, I started drinking decaf tea, which my dad was appalled by.
I feel, like, a bit, I don't know Effeminate? I asked my dad for a cup of decaf tea and he looked at me like I was an alien! Well, he is an alien! Well, Dr Who is an alien who drinks tea and appreciates its restorative qualities.
You need rest.
One more.
I think he is often at his most interesting when he is doing things that are relatively human and normal because it highlights that he is an alien, somehow, and so I think there is something wonderful about an alien enjoying tea.
Maybe you've had enough coffee now? How about some nice calming tea? Let's get you a cup of camomile or something, shall we? The tea, the tweed, the bow tie - they make him more intriguing but the Doctor is still the star of the show.
In my perfect world the tea is the star! This isn't about you, we are giving people a cup of tea, we are giving them a pink wafer biscuit, we are giving them a sausage It's the tea urn, she won't boil! Bring her over to the socket! Quick, table! The one in the kitchen is faulty, that could have turned her off.
'What we forget is that once upon a time, 'tea had a sort of celebrity status.
' Back in the 19th century, it was still something exotic, and, yes, alien, and we had to go to the ends of the earth to get it.
That's where those beautiful clippers came in, racing each other all the way back from China.
The arrival of tea wasn't just a grocery delivery, it was an event.
You think of all these wonderful ships racing around the Cape of Good Hope to get back to London to be the first with the tea and people following these tea races in the paper, and there was lots of publicity, and lots of glamour - about tea! It was an exotic product from a country hardly any of us knew about and historian Amanda Vickery says the fact that it could get to us so quickly added to its appeal.
What the Cutty Sark is all about is a sort of glamour that perhaps an older viewers might associate with the Onedin Line, you know, the sort of idea of these, kind of Yes, they might! People who are in a home! I found it glamorous, Khachaturian, butso, it's more this idea of speed and that you could bring back the tea harvest so quickly - it captures the public imagination.
The golden age of the tea clippers didn't last long the Cutty Sark only made a handful of tea-bearing trips, before it was seen off by the steamship and the Suez Canal and, by that time we'd started growing our own tea on British soil, by which I mean Indian soil and it was becoming a mass market drink.
The Cutty Sark is associated with this, kind of, changeover from Chinese tea to black teafrom Assam, in particular.
And one of the things that the marketers get on to very, very quickly is the idea of the brand, and the trust in things like Lipton's, Brooke Bond.
You get this whole, kind of, packaging of the working class diet and the British start to put their trust in a label.
Tea time won't be the same without bananas.
So, as we've heard, tea was the first commodity to be packaged and branded.
So you would go to a shop and, instead of just asking for tea from your grocer, you would say, "I want Typhoo," which is the Chinese for doctor, or because you'd seen the advert on the station platform, you might say, "I want Mazawattee," or you might, although I have my doubts, you might ask for Twinings Blue Tips, at 1.
9d, which is a very strange name for tea and sounds like a below-the-waist disorder.
And so tea just became one of those things, you had your own brand, and you would be brand loyal.
So while, in one part of our Empire we were happily planting tea, we were losing our grip on another part of the Empire.
While tea was soothing us down on these shores, across the Atlantic it was stirring us up.
MUSIC: "Block Rockin' Beats" by Chemical Brothers Tea is a funny old drink, it has given us the teasmaid and the tea cosy but it has got this dramatically bloodstained history.
We never really think about it but it has taken us to war, it has underwritten the Empire and it's even sparked a revolution.
Hear, ye! Hear, ye! Huzzah! The story of the Boston Tea Party is taught to every American school child.
It took place nearly 250 years ago, when, of course, America was still British.
Just.
In the winter of 1773, three ships belonging to the East India Company sailed into Boston Harbour loaded with tea and that would spark one of the most iconic events in world history.
Of course, the events of that December night in 1773 were really about tax rather than tea.
Americans liked tea, they drank lots of tea, what they didn't like was the 3d tax on every pound imposed on them by the British government.
And so it was here, in the Old South Meeting House, that nearly 7,000 angry Bostonians gathered, determined to stop the tea landing.
"No taxation without representation," was their battle cry and, as historian Benjamin Carp explains, as the meeting broke up it all kicked off.
OK, so there is a big angry crowd, here, there's three ships in the harbour, so everybody just high tails it down to the harbour and jumps on the ships? Yeah, I mean, a huge crowd goes down to watch and then there was a select group of maybe 100, maybe 150 men, who start swarming over the decks of these three ships and they take these hundreds of crates of tea, and they chop them open and dump it all into Boston harbour.
ALL: Drop the tea into the sea! Drop the tea into the sea! 'And now, of course, the battle cry is, '"No insurrection without a reconstruction.
" 'This is the Boston Tea Party Museum 'and I think I'm going to have to pretend to throw pretend tea 'into the harbour in a minute.
' Now, my friends, these are not mere tea chests, no.
These represent something far greater.
These represent a tyrant across the seas who would tell us how to lead our futures! ALL: Boo! Step on up to commit treason! One, two, three! Over the side, patriots! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah? Huzzah.
'It's quite a dilemma, isn't it? For a British person.
'Should I have hung on to the tea 'and demanded three shillings and sixpence tax, 'that's assuming my pretend tea chest weighed 14lbs, 'not that I'm taking it too seriously.
' That was a very difficult situation for me, I wanted to join in as part of the reconstruction.
I felt I was, you know, condoning the oppression of the American people.
I didn't know whether to throw it in or not and, actuallyI'm depressed now.
I think I've played it all wrong.
'Luckily I was only depressed for seven seconds 'because then I remembered there was a gift shop!' Three years after the tea hit the water, the Americans inexplicably embarked on the war of Independence and within ten years they were no longer British.
And that's the end of my interest in them.
They were obviously spoiling for a fight, the tea was just an excuse, but I wonder if it all could have kicked off over something else.
It might have been something else but the thing is that tea was so important to Americans.
I mean, the Americans all want to be like Britons in the 1770s, they really loved tea, they loved what it signified and so it was the fact that Americans loved tea so much that made this such a significant event.
RAP: Yeah, I'm up at Brooklyn now I'm down in Tribeca Right next to De Niro but I'll be hood forever I'm the new Sinatra And since I made it here I can make it anywhere Yeah, they love me everywhere There was no going back after the Tea Party - you think of old American movies - the waitress in the diner coming round with the coffee pot, Friends, Frasier - it's coffee all the way.
Actually, that's not true, Americans drink loads of tea, they are the sixth biggest consumers of tea in the world, they drink 65 billion cups a year they just don't want you to know about it.
New York, concrete jungle I don't think it's about how much tea you drink but how much you care about it.
Coffee is part of America's image and tea is part of ours, like red telephone boxes and black cabs.
This is Tea & Sympathy, an old-fashioned English tea shop on the Lower West Side and an old-fashioned grocery shop next door.
Both were set up by Nicky Perry, who in a previous existence was a tea lady in London.
When I first came here I couldn't believe that - a) you couldn't get a cup of tea and, b) all these Americans were being very disparaging about English food, which enraged me.
So, I decided, "Right, I'm having myself "a nice little English restaurant "and I am going to show these Americans," and this is how you have a cup of tea.
But what is it about tea that makes us feel so British? Why tea, of all things, it's just in our blood, do you think? It's in our blood, it's ingrained in our being.
I mean, what is it when you go to somebody's house, the first thing that happens in England is the kettle goes on.
I have to tell you, I've had people in here looking at teapots, "Can you put this in the microwave?" I'm like, you're going to put a teapot in the microwave? "Yeah.
" I'm not selling you a teapot, I'm just not.
I have got a whole list on my tea list of how to make the tea! There we go.
Yep, "Good quality tea, freshly drawn water," yeah, we knew that.
"Warm the pot," we knew that.
"One teaspoon of tea and one for the pot," yeah.
"Leave for two to six mins.
" You've got it all here.
You need to because I will tell you, in my opinion, the tea that you get served in most places in America, tastes like someone has lent over and put the old spoon in the Boston Harbour and then just put it in the microwave and served it to you.
It's vile.
I might not say that to them.
THEY LAUGH While I'm over here, I'm going to meet someone for a cuppa and I'm very late, I don't like to be late, and I'm actually 22 two years late.
I was doing a season of stand-up in London in 1990 and I had a letter from Morrissey inviting me for a cup of tea, anyway I couldn't go.
To make amends, I've brought him a tea cosy knitted by my friend Norah.
I've seen Morrissey on a documentary having tea with Nancy Sinatra and he has a plain white teapot.
It's a black and white tea cosy, so it's going to look great.
Oh Is this your own teapot? This is mine, this travels with me, I bought it in Rome but it's Parisian.
What sort of tea is this that we are drinking? We are drinking Ceylon tea and it is very weak.
I mean the bag skims the surface of the water and is removed.
(The bag.
) The bag, yes.
I mean, I know that you are a caddy person but I was hoping you might come out with a caddy.
Yeah, but some of us don't remember World War II.
I am a teaholic, even though I don't have very strong tea.
How often? What time do you kick off with it? Well, as soon as I wake up I must have tea.
I think one day, because I have never had coffee, you see, one dayI decided to try to have a complete day without tea and I was quite shaken, I was quite disturbed.
It is interesting, we just went to see this tea shop, Tea & Sympathy where the whole point of it is to encapsulate Britishness and people go and think they are having a British experience but, actually, if you went to Britain there wouldn't be a tea shop like that.
No, but there was once Yes.
There was once and it was a very British thing, and it was a very stoic thing, and it was the solution to everything.
Calm you down, a nice cup of tea.
I mean, nobody ever said, "I'll make you a horrible cup of tea," it was always, "I'll make you a nice cup of tea.
" I mean, why does it have to be nice? I want to make you a really RAUNCHY cup of tea! I think it was very British and part of the British resolve, and the reason why Hitler couldn't get us was because of tea and nothing else.
I know, but that is so strange, isn't it, when you think about it.
It is just a hot drink and, you know, why not cocoa? Why not coffee? Why not cocoa? There is bound to be a reason! I am going to give you something but you don't have to have it.
Please, don't say it's a tea caddy! It's not a tea caddy.
Does it look like a tea caddy? A cosy? A tea cosy? Yes, it was, forget it, it doesn't matter, I'm not going to give it you now.
It doesn't matter.
Cut.
I knew it was a tea cosy.
Come on, let's see it, now.
We don't want to waste further film.
No, cos it's not going to match your teapot.
I don't care what you say about it now.
This is a beanie hat! It has got holes for the spout! This is what the skateboarding kids wear.
"Reduced to clear, made in Morecambe.
" Just give it me back, I'll give it back to Norah.
No, I will keep it and I shall cherish it because I don't want you to.
I didn't say I was going to use it, I said I was going to keep it in a bottom drawer In a bottom drawer for when you get marriedwhere nobody goes! Thank you for your generosity.
You know what? I love Morrissey! And he has a point about Hitler and the British, and tea.
All those things that made us seem rather dull before the war - our love of routine, our reluctance to engage in hysterics, our faith in a nice cup of tea and a sit down - in the Second World War we were able to embrace those qualities, and be proud of them.
Were we downhearted? Well, probably, but never mind let's put the kettle on.
I will always remember that day that war was declared my wife come out to me in the garden and told me the ghastly news about the outbreak of hostilities.
"Never mind, my dear," I said to her, "you put on the kettle, we'll have a nice cup of tea.
" AIR RAID SIREN BLARES And we're off.
'Hold on tight, everybody!' I've been let loose in a rain storm driving a NAAFI van near priceless aircraft.
I've come to talk to some men and women who, unlike myself, thank you, Morrissey, do remember the war.
Ha-ha! Jeremy Clarkson, eat your heart out! OK! Yay! Tea was so important to morale in the war, that stocks were dispersed around the country to protect them from attack.
And hot tea was doled out from vans, like this one.
This is one of five surviving NAAFI vans and they went everywhere, and they were even at Dunkirk.
Tea fortified the troops on the front line and it was there for the blitz victims on the home front.
Tea expert Henrietta Lovell recently did a special blend for the Royal Air Force and she's going to help me recreate some genuine NAAFI tea.
It was absolutely important to national moral - we couldn't get through the war without tea.
In fact, it was so important the Government took over supply.
So the three things that we needed to get thorough the war were food, fuel and tea, and they were all rationed.
Churchill knew the value of tea, they say he called it more important than ammunition.
But with everything in short supply we were going to have to improvise.
If you didn't have anything, you used one of these.
Ha-ha! If she didn't have anything, of course you had a silk stocking! You wouldn't have, probably, used a brand new one but you might use an old one that you had.
You probably had to sleep with somebody to get it, so it does make the tea-making process a little bit longer! Because of the sexual intercourse having to happen first.
Or you took a piece of muslin, then you take some NAAFI tea, that would have been like this.
NAAFI tea, so that's a smaller A more industrial grade and then we make a tea bag, which we are going to pop in, and you want to make as much room as possible so the tea can unfurl a little bit, you don't want to do it tightly, like that.
So, I need your help with some string.
Yeah, I'm here.
That's my finger! Oh, sorry! So, is this the first time we had tea urns? Did we have tea urns in the First World War? Yeah, absolutely, we are British, we can't get through life without tea.
It wasn't just the NAAFI, of course, the WVS, the Red Cross, even Gracie Fields chipped in to keep Britain topped up with tannin.
I am swooshing it about a bit.
Oh, my God, look at all the lovely dark colours coming off straight away.
Looks like tea.
Smells like tea! Oh, my LORD! That is practically purple! When I made this for some pilots, they used there Bic pens to Of course they were.
And you know the RAF man often had a moustache? Mm.
Sometimes they didn't have time to make the tea in the urn, they just made it in the cup and there was leaf everywhere, and they couldn't strain it, so they used their moustache to strain the tea! How on earth did we win the war? It's probably not easy for the current generation of Facebooking smoothie-sippers to get what tea meant to people fighting that war - for RAF pilots, like Harry Mottershead, it was crucial.
Oh, it played a big part, let me tell you.
To be without tea was to be without life, flying, you know? Tea warmed up the sailors who were manning the Atlantic convoys, like Ray Ashby.
Tea was pretty strong - I mean, the spoon would stand up in the tin, it was that thick! You, sometimesmetaphorically speaking! And in the ration packs of soldiers, like John Ainsworth, on the Normandy beaches, there was always tea.
Tea is essential and tea is also a great comfort when you are in stress, and you feel as though things are not going your way.
You get a nice cup of tea, it helps you to calm down, and I'll never change - not now I'm 91! Problem is the butter.
Knife's coming.
I think this is when tea became more than a drink, it became a symbol.
Somehow it combined ordinariness and courage, while physically pulling us together as we were served tea, or someone served us, it pulled our morale together.
A drop of, you know what.
I'm coming round your way, don't you worry.
It gave us an identity, as a nation, it was shorthand for what we were fighting for.
Eva Rowland is 98, and as a young Salvation Army officer she dished out tea for the troops.
I saw more military men than I ever thought existed.
Where were you? I was stationed in Portland, with the Royal Navy, and that was the finest experience of my life.
Really?! Believe me.
Yes.
Did you like the sailors? Oh, what, they were grand! Were they? Yes.
You think tea was important? Oh, yes, it was the greatest asset.
A good, hot cup of tea worked wonders.
Right, cup of tea? Please, dear.
'And at Bletchley Park, 'where Alan Turing and his team were working day and night 'to crack the German U-boat codes - tea again, was keeping them going.
'Ruth Bourne was a Wren working at Bletchley.
' It was on a trolley and you could hear it rattling down the corridor, and we would all shout, "Tea boat! Tea boat!" And we would all run out, and we all had our own mugs, and it was particularly good for us in the middle of the night, about three in the morning you were really flagging.
And then you had this wonderful cup of tea.
Is that your own mug? This is my own mug, we all had our own mugs.
That was painted with my own fair hands, using paint stolen from the paint store up the corridor.
It's original wiring from the Turing bomb.
From the actual machine? Yes.
But Alan Turing also had his own mug, we all did.
Did you? What did Alan's look like? Well, if you were to go into Alan Turing's office you will see a mug chained to the radiator cos that's what he did.
He chained his mug to the radiator? Oh, yes.
In case someone took it? Absolutely.
Can we say that tea cracked the code at Bletchley? Without tea you wouldn't have been able to do it? Without the tea, we would have lost the war! No doubt we would have all been drinking ersatz coffee.
Exactly, and we would all be speaking German.
So, we won the war, hooray for us.
Back to work, everybody.
CHATTERING AND SHOUTING Well, they say everything stops for tea and now the tea break was enshrined in British law.
Wait! Andrew! And enshrined in British comedy we had the tea lady, dispensing not just tea but common sense.
What's wrong now?! Nothing, just a rather mysterious phone call from the Far East.
Well, sometimes that's God's way of telling you to think on and look sharp! But the tea lady would, sadly, eventually be replaced by something much less amusing - the vending machine.
The cup will drop down into what we term the cup station.
And I always liked doing a blind tasting between the hot chocolate and the chicken soup.
But while we were all merrily pressing the normal button tea was sneakily giving itself a makeover and very funky new look.
The biggest revolution in tea's history started in New York, in the early 1900s, where one man had an extraordinary piece of luck.
His name was Thomas Sullivan and, like lots of other inventions, none of which I can think of at this minute, it happened by accident and it would change the world of tea drinking, as far as English-speaking countries were concerned, for ever.
It happened on Front Street, in Lower Manhattan, in the early 1900s, where Sullivan worked as a tea merchant, sending out samples of his tea in tin boxes.
Tea historian Elizabeth Knight says we have a lot to thank him for - and his wife.
So what did Sullivan actually do that we are remembering him for now? Thomas Sullivan invented the tea bag and the story is that Mrs Sullivan is the one who got the bright idea of cutting costs.
No surprise there.
No surprise there! Well, it was expensive to send the samples out in the tins of the day and Mrs Sullivan supposedly got the bright idea to zip up a few little mesh silk bags and pack the samples that way.
So the customers thought that they were intended to be dropped into to the boiling hot water and brew the tea.
But that's not what he intended No, but his customers began writing back saying, send more, send more of the samples in those great, wonderful tea bags.
Sullivan never patented his invention, so everyone could just copy it.
The first paper tea bags arrived in 1930 and we didn't have rectangular tea bags until 1940.
By the '70s we'd just about got the idea and we loved them - even Welsh people love them! Well, I think tea pot tea is a bit messier, I prefer it don't block up the sink and things like that.
It tastes nicer, that's why.
You don't want tea leaves in your cup, do you? Tea bags totally changed the way we drank our tea - all the stuff like the caddy and the teapot, and the strainer, that was SO yesterday.
We went tea-bag bonkers.
There's been a revolution in tea-bag technology in the last decade.
What? There's one cup, for if you just want one cup.
Pot size.
Drawstring.
Pyramid.
And they are bringing one out for osteoporosis! LAUGHTER Today, nine and a half out of every ten cups we drink comes from a bag and the rise of the tea bag coincided with the rise of another British addiction - television.
Commercial television began broadcasting in 1955 and viewers were introduced to the ad break - that two-minute opportunity to put the kettle on.
And TV wouldn't just encourage you to make tea, it would urge you to buy it with some of the most memorable ads ever created.
Oh, look and see! Tell me that monkey isn't happy.
I'm telling you, that monkey is not happy.
Oh, the classic.
Coo-ee, Mr Shifter.
Light refreshment? Did you draw inspiration from that? Strangely not, no.
PIANO CLANGS One way of shifting it! These are the best ad's ever! It was the most successful advertising campaign, ever.
The most effective.
Ooh! Ooh, it's a lovely cuppa They made that chimpanzee look like Sue Pollard! Oh, wow! When we want a brew Oh, that looks unsavoury, doesn't it? Very close with her with her donkey friends, there.
THEY LAUGH I wonder if that's what makes you go, "Ooh!" Fellow Britons, let your stiff upper-lips cavort like a wanton gypsy Now, is this the idea that tea is very, very British, so we need Stephen to tell us? Yes, that's right, yes.
.
.
over a mug of Twinings See, I think somebody could re-brand tea.
If somebody decided to, if some big tea company decided to go all Starbucks on tea's ass, I bet you, you could do it.
I get the feeling tea could maybe do with a bit of a rebrand.
The Second World War was a long time ago, I don't think we feel the same about tea.
Everything has to be instant now - we even want our fortunes read quicker Got to make the tea, got to sit down and drink tea with people, which, when you are trying to earn money, you really can't be bothered sitting down drinking tea with people! .
.
and if builders don't drink builder's, the rot really has set in.
If I'm cold I might have a cup of tea in the morning but I'm not one to drink, like, ten cups a day.
I prefer to have an energy drink.
How many do you have a day? I'll probably have three or four off the lady who runs the cafe.
And we all know, cos we're all doing it, what else we're drinking.
I've noticed that the big corporations have come in and took over.
I'm not going to mention the name but the big bean.
Yeah.
The big bean is out there.
The guilty bean.
A lot of the little greasy spoons have disappeared and I think we've lost something, which is a shame.
I have felt, making this programme, that there's a nostalgia about tea.
Really, as if its glory days are over, as if, as young people say it's not, "with it.
" The reality at the moment is that tea's in a long-term decline.
Over the last ten years the overall consumption down by 14.
5% So this is the challenge for the ad men, tea drinkers are getting older and you can't use chimps - discuss.
Alistair Owen at Dare works on the prestigious Tetley's account - and, as soon as he's done this presentation, his mum says he has to do his homework! And then the other thing is coffee shops having a huge influence.
You only have to look at something like that, "frozen grasshopper mocha," to realise quite how diverse the coffee field is now.
Can I just ask you something? Course you can.
Do you think people are switching away from, say 30 years ago, when you would have breakfast.
You would cook your breakfast at home, where you would have it, would you say that generation is just leaving the house? Absolutely, they're going into work early they're getting coffee from a coffee shop and that tea is being directly replaced by a coffee on the go.
"Right, girls, fancy a cuppa?" Great news! This latest Tetley campaign is stressing the pleasures of sharing a cuppa with your real living friends as opposed to just connecting with people online.
And in a celebrity-led culture, as I believe we have now, the hunt is on for a real life tea-drinking role model, like Lady Gaga.
I suppose, what we really need in this country is the new Gracie Fields.
My name's Ria, I drink a lot of tea.
I'm Andrew, I have about one or two cups of tea a week.
I'm Jenny Two cups of tea a week?! No wonder our wars last so long these days! You may not recognise them by this point in the programme but these are young people.
This is a focus group to find out what they think about tea or if they think about tea.
Do you think there is any way that you could do with tea what they have done with coffee? Personally, I think what they need to do is to make tea cool.
If it's embraced by somebody that you really love, would that make a difference? Yeah, if someone did a massive campaign that was very different and Lady Gaga, I think, is an example of that, I think it would change my attitude towards that.
Yeah.
No offence to Lady Gaga but, surely, tea can manage without her? I think it's still got a surprise or two up its leaves.
Hear, ye! Hear, ye! Let's not forget, this is a drink that sparked the American Revolution, that sobered up the workers, drove the British Empire and helped us see off the Nazis.
It has a 5,000-year history - it changed history.
We loved it so much we were prepared to travel half way round the world to get it.
I don't think tea is finished yet.
If a terrible iced bun you can buy for 20p at the school fair can reinvent itself as a four quid cup cake, then surely a brilliant, living plant, like tea, can keep a place in our lives.
I mean, I don't know what - maybe as a gel you rub on or if we can implant it under our skin, like a contraceptive, or maybe, more likely, we'll all be too poor to afford these fancy coffees and we'll end up back round the kitchen table, making our own beverages.
Whatever.
I think that somewhere, someone will always be having a nice cup of tea.