Benjamin Zephaniah once wrote a genial little recipe-poem called The British (Serves 60 Million). It begins deep in the mists of antiquity — Picts, Celts, Romans, Normans — and then, with the delicacy of a microwave ping in a fine restaurant, leaps straight to “add some Jamaicans, Dominicans, and Sudanese.” As though England spent the intervening millennium politely waiting for the next ingredients to arrive.

It’s hard to think of a more jarring chronological pratfall. A thousand years of history skipped like a scratched dub-plate. The English go to bed medieval and wake up multicultural, blinking at the kettle.

To be fair, Zephaniah wasn’t writing a sociology textbook. His poem is a celebration of modern Britain as a recipe: cheerful, inclusive, and a bit spicy. But the jump is revealing. We have become oddly shy of our own continuity. To be English is to exist between two embarrassments: a past that is too imperial to boast about, and a present too fragile to believe in. So we skip the awkward middle, stir in some global ingredients, and tell ourselves we’ve always been a melting pot. It’s comforting, but untrue. We did not appear fully cooked in 1950, we slow-roasted over hundreds of years.

But, the poem raises a curious question: if everyone in Britain today is a blend, does anyone get to be indigenous? The term itself has become radioactive. To describe oneself as “indigenous English” sounds, depending on the audience, either reactionary or ridiculous. Yet surely we are of this land in some real sense. Our ethnogenesis — the moment when “we” became recognisably English — happened here on this soggy archipelago, amid the fog and hedgerows, before empire, before tea, and even before Marmite-flavoured Monster Munch.

So, to avoid further outrage, let’s approach the issue methodically by devising a diagnostic tool; a sort of pub-friendly anthropology test. After all, if you can’t quantify your existential confusion in numbered stages, are you even British?

The Five Types of Indigenousness

A guide for the confused.

Type 1: The Palaeo-Realist

You were literally here first. You have blood-memory of ice floes and mammoths.

By this measure, no one in modern Britain really qualifies; our Mesolithic cousins packed up long ago, leaving behind arrowheads and and very little in the way of continuity. The English get a “nice try” sticker and a complimentary fossil from Lyme Regis.

Score: 0 / 5.

Type 2: The Ethnogenesis Enthusiast

Your people became “a people” here.

This one we pass. The English identity wasn’t imported like a flat-pack from Saxony; it was assembled clumsily on site. Our ancestors — those Germanic settlers, Norse raiders, and Norman HR managers — merged into something distinct on this island. The language, the habits, the fatalism, all of it fermented locally.

Score: 5 / 5.

Type 3: The Legal Anthropologist

You descend from a pre-colonial population, now marginalised by a dominant one.

Here the English flunk magnificently…at least for now. We were always the dominant one. Nothing kills your claim to indigeneity like inventing the East India Company. Applying the UN definition to the English is like letting the referee call themselves the underdog.

Score: 0 / 5.

Type 4: The Romantic Ecologist

Indigenousness as emotional bond: a deep, mossy, Wordsworthian intimacy with the land.

Here, the English shine again. We’ve written more love poetry to mud than any people alive. Hardy’s Dorset, Tolkien’s Shire, Housman’s blue forgotten hills, and even the BBC shipping forecast — all hymns to the temperate melancholy of home.

The problem is the industrial hangover. It’s hard to claim sacred kinship with the soil when you covered much of it with Tarmac and Barratt Homes. And so our national spirit oscillates between pastoral reverence and planning permission.

Score: 4 / 5

Type 5: The Postmodern Ironist

Everybody came from somewhere else; identity is performance; indigenousness is a marketing term.

Here we simultaneously pass and fail. We are both coloniser and colonised, ancient and amnesiac, proud and mortified. The language of Shakespeare conquered half the planet but came home speaking MLE.

Score 3 / 5.

By my calculation we score a gentlemanly 12 out of 25. Not bad. Indigenous enough to say we truly belong, but we don’t want to make a scene. We sometimes seem to be both the host and an intruder at our own dinner party.

What the Zephaniah skip really exposes is our refusal to narrate ourselves. Between the Norman invasion and the Windrush arrivals, we have a millennium of cultural continuity that we treat as either boring or shameful.

But identity is a story we must keep telling or it falls apart. When we deny our roots, we don’t become cosmopolitan; we become forgetful. A people unsure whether it has the right to exist cannot create anything lasting, least of all the stories about themselves.

This is never more apparent than on our national day, when armies of commentators take to social media to remind everyone of the lack of indigenousness of our national patron. “Saint George was Turkish!”, they cry. “He came from Palesteine, he was a migrant” they chant in chorus. And although it’s tempting to counter by insisting St George was an Englishman who played cricket, enjoyed a full English Breakfast and a pint of mild, sadly non of these things are true. What we need is a better story.

Instead, all we have is a sense that Britain is a once-great garden now left to seed. “Managed decline” is our new national myth. We perform our decay with a kind of weary dignity, as if the Blitz spirit now applies to the slow-motion collapse of the high street.

But decline isn’t destiny. It’s a habit, and habits can be broken. The English once built cathedrals that took centuries and railways that crossed continents, but now we can’t build a bypass without a lengthy public inquiry. Somewhere along the way we traded ambition and stewardship for excessive self-consciousness.

So let’s drop the nostalgia, and have some nerve, and the kind of pride that’s based in hope and responsibility rather than tribes and genes (we can leave that to others). To call ourselves indigenous should not be a matter of purity and exclusion, but of care — for this island, its language, its weather, its withered towns, and its people, with their peculiar genius for muddling through.

As for St George, perhaps he really was a Palestinian cricketer who liked hummus and marmalade. But wherever he came from, he can uniquely represent us. For we are a people who, when presented with a problem, are just too polite to fuss—until the problem becomes the size of a fire-breathing dragon which drags off the town’s fair maidens. And at that point…well, let’s see.

I am writing this article on the strict understanding that I am not, in any way inciting you to read it. If you feel stirred, piqued, riled or even mildly curious—stop. Your arousal is not in any way down to these words, I am merely typing. What you do with this article is down to your own free will and I disavow all responsibility.

Let’s talk about Lucy Connolly.

A year-and-a-bit ago Lucy was jailed for posting a furious, and unhinged tweet in response to the horrific killing and maiming of numerous young girls at the hands of an imported mass murderer. You can read all about the wider disturbances following the Southport murders on Wikipedia which, at the time of writing, fails to name the perpetrator of said attack, so neither will I.

“Mass deportations now,” Connolly raged. “Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care,” and signing off “If that makes me a racist then so be it.”

Blimey.

The tweet reached around 300,000 people before she thought better of it and deleted it a few hours later — but not before the entire nation had exploded into scenes of violence and devastation.

The judge decided she had intended to incite serious violence sentenced her to 31 months in prison.

But here’s the problem: “incitement” is inexact. UK law allows for conviction for incitement to racial hatred even if no one is actually incited; the words alone are enough. And in some cases, even the intent is not required as a basis of prosecution. But Connolly was charged under section 19(1)(a) of the Public Order Act 1986, meaning the prosecution decided she had intended to stir up racial hatred in other people. And they only had to rely on the content of her tweet for prosecution, since it’s not required to demonstrate that anyone acted on her words, nor that anyone had even read them.

But for me the curious thing is the addition of the words “for all I care” and “so be it” to her message. Clearly her words were not any sort of direct command to action which lead me to think: how can we gauge the level of incitement?

And so I present the Incitement Intensity Scale—ranging from full-throated command to the kind of passive-aggressive muttering that still might get you locked up in an English jail if your timing is off.

Level 10: Imperative Hysteria

“Burn it all down. Do it now!”

Outcome: immediate arrest, straight prison, no trial, little hope of ever being released.

Level 9: Incendiary Suggestion

“Someone ought to burn this down.”

Still very much an incitement. You didn’t say to do it, but you’d be delighted if someone did.

Level 8: Implied Approval

“I’m not saying we should burn it down, but I wouldn’t cry if someone did”

Congratulations, you’re both an unreliable narrator and the newest inmate of HMP Peterborough.

Level 7: Grief-tinged rageposting

“After what happened, I wouldn’t blame anyone who torched a hotel or two.”

Still liable, especially during a “sensitive social climate,” which is always.

Level 6: Conditional Vitriol

“Mass deportations now. Set fire to the hotels for all I care. If that makes me a racist, so be it.”

Lucy Connolly’s actual tweet. You get 31 months in prison and a footnote in British legal history.

Level 5: Passive Voice Provocation

“Mistakes were made, buildings were burned, people were upset.”

Probably OK if you're presenting The Rest Is History podcast, but far too risky to post on social media.

Level 4: Satirical Deniability

“Of course, we would never burn anything down (wink).”

Depending on the context, could still count (it always will — wink).

Level 3: Rhetorical Hypotheticals

“What if someone….hypothetically….just took a flamethrower to the immigration office?”

A very clever way to get yourself arrested by trying to sound clever.

Level 2: Artistic License

“In this performance piece, the hotel symbolises oppression, and the fire represents catharsis.”

If you’re a BBC-celebrated musician, you’re best advised leaving the country at your earliest convenience.

Level 1: Sheer Nonchalance

“I don’t care if you set fire to anything.”

You’ve done nothing wrong, unless society is sufficiently on the edge, in which case make sure you always have the contact details of the Free Speech Union to hand.

What Connolly’s case confirms, at any rate, is that intent matters, but proving it is a very low bar. You and I can probably tell the difference between a genuine threat, a furious tweet, and an idiot screaming into the void, but the law apparently cannot. It’s not what your words do, it’s what a judge thinks they meant.

And whatever you do, don’t pair your angry words with an image of the Court of Appeal on fire. Judges might take that sort of thing personally.

Note from Management

If you’re reading this, you’ve completed induction day. Congratulations! Most don’t make it this far. You are probably feeling disoriented at this stage. That’s normal. Most inductees report that the headache passes within a few hours. There are some painkillers in the bathroom and comfort items next to the television. Time to watch some classic Beast Mode videos!

We apologize for the manner in which you were brought to this facility. The sleeping pills and blindfold were a necessary precaution for the next phase of your induction. You may have noticed your hotel door is locked from the outside, don’t be alarmed. It’s just a precaution. This is a standard hospitality partner facility and you’ll be released in the morning. Rest while you can, tomorrow will be a long day. And possibly the most important day of your Beast Mode career: you will discover your first commission!

As a way to understand the job, it’s best if everyone becomes a participant first-hand. You’ve already seen how it works. Now you’ll help make it happen. The following advice from our founder and CEO will help you succeed.

Hi there!

I'm Doctor Beast, CEO of Beast Mode Studios. Welcome! You’ve just joined the fastest-growing spectacle production company on the planet. Our goal is simple: make the most watchable, most shareable, most talked-about internet videos ever created. We’re not Hollywood: we’re faster, louder and wilder. If it doesn’t make someone click, watch, and tell a friend, we don’t make it.

We produce a lot of content — giveaways, challenges, endurance stunts, surprise builds — and every project has one thing in common: it has to burn brighter than anything else online. That’s why our slogan is We Feed The Fire.

And yes, the charity work is real. It helps keep our image clean, our inbox full, and our recruitment pipeline steady.

What’s Your Goal Here?

Your job is to make the best internet videos possible. Best means clickable, un-skippable, unforgettable. Our benefactors…our audience…expect impact. They expect to see people pushed beyond their limits. They expect fresh stories, fresh faces. That’s where our outreach programs come in.

We run dozens of community initiatives: scholarships, cash giveaways, housing challenges. They’re great for PR, and they help us connect with people who really need an opportunity. Sometimes they get that opportunity right here on set.

The Three Metrics You Need to Know

CTR: Click-Through Rate. If the premise doesn’t grab instantly, it’s dead. “24 Hours in a Glass Box” is good. “24 Hours in a Glass Box With No Door” is better. “24 Hours in a Glass Box While the Floor Heats Up” is unforgettable.

AVD: Average View Duration. Keep them watching. Viewers should want to know who makes it to the end. Patrons want to know who doesn’t.

AVP: Average View Percentage. How much of the content the viewer is watching – the closer to 100%, the more satisfied the audience. Strong openings, unexpected turns, and abrupt endings keep these numbers high.

Critical Components

Every project has at least one. These can include parts of the set, a live prop, but more usually the critical component is a participant. It’s essential to protect them until the final act. Feed them, keep them calm, keep them smiling. Above all, keep them alive and believing they can win. We’ve lost whole shoots because a critical component got spooked or tried to leave. That costs us time, money, and goodwill from our benefactors.

Don’t let it happen to you.

Our Charity Arm

We rebuild playgrounds, refurbish schools, and fund “life-changing experiences.” That work keeps our public image clean and our inbox full of willing applicants. The talent pool feeds both sides of the business: the visible one and the private commissions.

When you’re assigned to a community project, remember: you’re not just helping. You’re scouting. Ask the right questions. Look for spark and resilience. Keep notes and pass them up the chain …they might be our next star!

Formats That Work

Some of our formats are crowd-pleasers: Last to Leave, Endurance House, The Gauntlet. They’re safe for public release. Others are by request only. You won’t be assigned to those until after Induction Week. When you are, you’ll understand why we call them “Night Runs.”

Rule of thumb: public-facing content should keep tension high but never show the alternate ending. For private reels, the alternate ending is the whole point.

Communication Protocols

Do not allow people to speak to critical components on- or off-camera without clearance. Do not allow them to know anything that contradicts the official premise. And never, under any circumstances, confirm that there is a second ending. If they suspect, they fight harder and it can get messy.

When in doubt, escalate. If you can’t reach your supervisor, escalate again. Remember: a problem ignored becomes blood on the floor — often quite literally.

The Alternate Ending

Today you saw your first alternate ending. Let me assure you: everything you saw was real! Nothing was staged, nothing was fabricated, and the blood was human blood.

We know this can come as a bit of a shock and we understand you need some time to process.

Our data shows that 9 out of 10 inductees report negative feelings at this stage, most rating them as “very high” or “extreme.” If that’s you, you’re not alone. These emotions are expected. More importantly, they pass. Within weeks, most new hires describe the alternate ending as “necessary,” “inspiring,” or simply “part of the job.”

You’ll learn to see it differently too. Soon you’ll be creating content just like it — and better! You’ll discover that producing is even more satisfying than watching.

Why We Do What We Do

By now you may be asking yourself: why? Why go further than games, further than spectacle, and further than anything else online? The answer is simple: our benefactors.

Our benefactors are more than viewers. They are patrons, investors, and visionaries. Without them, none of this would exist. You might think that our success at Beast Mode comes from making the world’s leading viral content. In a way, you’d be right, but that’s not the whole story. Without our benefactors, and their paid, private viewings, we could not be where we are today.

The benefactors’ demands are high, but their rewards are higher. They provide the resources to build our sets, fund our outreach, and spread our brand worldwide. In return, they expect something no one else can give them: endings that matter.

Understand this clearly: every commission you work on is for them. Every alternate ending is delivered by request. Every contestant who steps onto our stage does so because the benefactors paid for the chance to watch them tested. Their satisfaction is the engine of our success.

This is what makes Beast Mode Studios unlike any other production company on earth.

Graduation Day

In seven days’ time I hope I’ll be meeting you in person at your very own Beast Mode Graduation! Everyone remembers theirs. It’s the day you stop being a recruit and become part of the family. By then, you’ll have seen every aspect of what we do, unedited. And you’ll understand why failure is not an option.

Final Notes

You’ve seen it unedited. You’ve signed the Pact. From here on, the rules aren’t just about making great content, they’re about survival. Your handler will guide you through your first commission. Don’t miss your cues and don’t disappoint.

Rest now. Sleep if you can. Room service arrives at 06:30.

At 07:00, your handler will knock twice.

Stand in the centre of the room and keep your hands visible.

Welcome to Beast Mode — now make them watch to the very end!