ABSTRACT
In 2001, the year White Teeth appeared in paperback, a global burger corporation ran a series of commercials on British television. The format was the same for each in the series. Recognisable urban landmarks signifying London, Newcastle and Liverpool, were accompanied by a soundtrack of appropriate popular songs: ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’, ‘Fog on the Tyne’, ‘Ferry ’Cross the Mersey’. Sung tunelessly and heavily marked by local dialect, the songs underlined familiar regional differences of place, class and popular culture. Multinational advertising, it seemed, recognised national and regional differences. There was a further twist of conventional advertising expectations as the commercials panned down from their respective cityscapes to present the singers in their usual urban context: all came from Asian ethnic backgrounds. Sound and vision, which up to that point had been stereotypically concordant in matching traditional popular song with a familiar image of a city, might have jarred somewhat in the adding of a perfectly accurate, if normally under-represented, image of British urban identity. Chirpy Cockneys, canny Geordies and Scouse scallies all come in a variety of colours.
