So I just started rewatching the show. Many of the gentle jokes about Britishness work, but they drop a huge clanger in episode 1 that, if I recall, continues.
Rebecca offers Ted tea, the joke being his sequence of coffee requests are ignored. The owner of a football team would absolutely have the means to provide someone with a cappucinno. We drink a ton of coffee here.
What’s worse, however, is that they repeatedly show Rebecca drinking black tea out of a glass. Anyone who has spent any time in the UK would know that this practice, while not unheard of (drinking black tea is a bit more common in other parts of Europe) would be extremely unusual.
I like the show a lot, but feel a bit sad that jokes about the British drinking tea, such low-hanging leaves (hur hur), were bungled.
Just thought I’d mention this!
One of the other things about the Tea gag that bugged me, is that even if hot tea isn’t as prevalent in the US, there is a huge ice tea and sweet tea business, espcially in the south.
I could see a bit where Ted makes a joke about needing a cup of sugar for the cup of tea, but not that he doesn’t know enough about hot tea to the point that he takes a sip and spits it out.
Finding out later that his Mom is a huge Tea fan when she comes to visit helps showcase that he knows darn-tooting-well about Tea and its likely varieties.
I have a theory that Ted played up his American-ignorant-of-all-things-British schtick a little bit. Not in a malicious or manipulative way, but just because he thought it was funny, and being funny is part of his toolkit for disarming people. Maybe also because he was actually quite sharp, and he sometimes found it useful to let people think he was a bit dumb.
It’s similar to the way he pretends to not know that George and John are dead, or is pretends to be amazed that his son has teeth and can talk. In those cases we know he’s teasing, but I like to imagine he did it lot, on the quiet. Like I bet he’d learned the offside rule a lot sooner than he let on. And I reckon he’d heard of Zava (Zava was so super famous even people with no interest in football, like Colin’s boyfriend Michael, had heard of him - it seems like you’d have to work pretty hard not to know who he was), but he pretended not to. Ted committed to the bit :)