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Warning: this article contains spoilers for Industry season four, episode six.
If you’re up to date with Industry (if you’re not, proceed with caution) then you’ll know that Kit Harington’s character Henry Muck has spent season four being even more of a nightmare than usual. He has been depressed, intoxicated, suicidal and horny in equal measure, all of which was topped off in the most recent episode with a sweaty bunk-up with a guy in a club.
How do we know he’s fully going off the rails? That’s easy: the club scene was directly preceded by a shot of Muck in the shower, singing For He is an Englishman from HMS Pinafore. And he hasn’t been the only one lately. In The Night Manager, Hugh Laurie burst into a rousing verse of the song. You probably don’t need reminding that his character Richard Roper is, to put it mildly, a bit of a bad egg.
Perhaps this is to be expected. Although the works of Gilbert and Sullivan have gained a reputation for being chummy, collegiate and a little pompous, For He is an Englishman is in fact a bitingly satirical piece of faux-patriotism. Although it sounds like something to be bellowed by tipsy Last Night of the Proms poshos, the song speaks to the kind of blind nationalism that bases exceptionalism purely on the location of one’s birth. “For he might have been a Roosian, a French, or Turk or Proosian,” it goes, “But in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman.”
No wonder the song has become the rallying cry of the rich and horrible. Both Muck and Roper’s sense of superiority by birthright drips out of them. There aren’t many songs that can nail this precise feeling with the sheer accuracy of For He is an Englishman.
What’s interesting, though, is how its use has evolved over time. Prior to this year’s sudden burst, the song has been used here and there on television, and not always to denote villainy. Perhaps the best-known example is the episode of The West Wing that paraphrases the song in its title, season two’s And It’s Surely to their Credit. Here, a couple of characters bicker about the song, unable to decide whether it is from HMS Pinafore or The Pirates of Penzance, before the episode concludes with most of the main cast singing it together
In all honesty it’s a little empty. The song is performed without any real thematic cohesion; it is simply a reference that allows some vaguely insufferable people to show everyone how well versed in musicals they are.
Another show to feature the song without much meaning is House; in the opening episode of season six Dr House sings the song to mask the noise of him faking a urine sample. The wink here, of course, is that the actor who played House was actually an Englishman, Hugh Laurie, who clearly likes this song more than anything else on Earth. In fact, it is highly possible that Laurie is now the only actor to have performed this song twice on two different shows. He is almost certainly the only actor who has performed it in two different accents; in his native English in The Night Manager, and in the chewy, geographically nonspecific American accent he had to adopt for House.
However, despite this rush of new renditions, the gold standard for televisual For He is an Englishman usage remains The Simpsons’s Cape Feare, arguably the best episode of the best series ever made. After the rake joke, and the tattoo joke, and the “Bart, you want some brownie?” joke comes the moment where Bart Simpson stalls for time by flattering Sideshow Bob’s ego, asking him to perform HMS Pinafore in its entirety. He obliges, and his performance ends with a rousing blast of For He is an Englishman, concluding with a round of applause and a drop-down union jack.
It’s perfect because it hits every aspect of the song with total ease. It has the pomposity of The West Wing, and exposes Sideshow Bob’s anglophile pretensions. Also, let’s not forget that Sideshow Bob is an utter bastard, so it covers the villain quadrant too.
Obviously the fact that so many baddies are singing the song in 2026 speaks to how the UK is perceived at the moment – isolated, stuck in the past and out of touch, yet still oddly full of itself – but we still have some way to go before we can top The Simpsons. Perhaps let’s make Hugh Laurie stand on a rake when The Night Manager returns.
