NyLon out but LaLon in!

As you all know this blog takes considerable pride in keeping right up to date with the very latest examples of 'in-hip-cool-lingo', if you get my meaning.  (Er, you  do get it, don't you?  Oh, for goodness sake, how are you ever going to get on in this world if you don't keep right up to date with sophisticated, world-traveller mod-speak?)  Anyway, as my heading states, NyLon is very definitely on the way out but LaLon is on the up and up.  Oh dear, I can see from your puzzled faces that you haven't a clue.  Let me explain.

According to Dan Jones in The Spectator (no link yet - so go and buy a copy and keep my favourite magazine going!) not the least of Obama's mistakes was to insult the Brits on his very first day in office by returning the bust of Winston Churchill which had hitherto occupied pride of place in the Oval Office.  Thus, from the off, he indicated a distinct cooling, not to say, frosting, in Anglo-American relations.  However, in this as in other things he totally misjudged the mood of his own people who are becoming ever more enamoured of all things British, or to be exact, English.  According to Jones, the Middleton-Windsor marriage has captured the American imagination particularly in what he calls "the Oprah-watching barbecue belt" who are enraptured with the notion of a commoner marrying a prince - the stuff of every little girl's dream - er, well, it is if she is either very little or very dim!  The extraordinary success of The King's Speech film is yet another example.

However, this manifestation of pro-Brit feeling is merely the latest in a long and steady process which began, as so much does 'over there', in Hollywood.  In a memorable sentence Jones describes the infestation of Brit talent thus:

Hollywood Brits have gone viral.  Just as bedbugs have infested New York, so the Brits have overrun LA, crawling around town like lice, sinking their bad teeth into the city's skin and sucking for all their worth.

He goes on to list all the British actors who have broken into the film and TV business in LA, including the remarkably talented Hugh Laurie whose dark performances in the TV series House seem a universe away from his days of playing silly asses in Jeeves & Wooster and Blackadder.  He is, apparently, the highest paid TV actor in America.

Jones insists that there is still much that connects New York and London, even if it is only the "rudeness, filth, perpetual drunkeness, an excellent public transportation network and generally dismal weather" but increasingly it is the Los Angeles-London axis which is thriving as never before.  So, as I said before NyLon out, LaLon in!

 

Comments

[dearieme]

I suspect that all this sort of thing is tosh. Most Americans' interests are entirely parochial. Being, however, a generous and hospitable people, they refrain from disabusing emotionally needy Brits about their unimportance in the American scheme of things. That's why Obama's gestures are disliked by the few who know about them - they are ill-mannered, not to say loutish.

I'd like to see no further reference, ever, to a "special relationship", just as in an American context I pray for no further use of the expression "the American dream". Silly sentimentalism is no aid to clear thinking.

[Dom]

"Most Americans' interests are entirely parochial." It's surprising how true that is, but you have to understand that no one even knows these Brits are Brits. The vast majority of Americans are surprised to find that Hugh Laurie is British, or the leads in The Wire, or most of the actors, as well as the director and writers, in the Batman movies. There just too good at this sort of thing.

[David Duff]

Well, you are, of course, a dreadful old grouch, DM, but as so often you are also almost entirely right! In geo-political terms there is, and can be, no 'special relationship', and yet, and yet, I, as an Englishman, do have an emotional attachment to America which I do not share with any other country, even Australia and Canada. I cannot explain it but it exists because I do believe that at the base level we share some fundamental values eventhough we are both inept and careless in practicing them.

You, too, are right, Dom, even I sometimes forget that Laurie is a Brit (not that I watch too much of his hospital series); and you could have knocked me down with a feather when I found out how many of those actors in The Wire were Brits from all stratas of our society from the playing fields of Eton to the East End of London. Proper acting, that is, wish I could have done it!

[H]

It seems to me that there have been Britons in Hollywood pretty well since they started making movies there. Charlie Chaplin? Stan Laurel? So, how can they tell if there are more there now than usual?

[David Duff]

You have a point, H, even Cary Grant was a Brit, if I recall correctly.