Just over two years ago, Barack Obama delivered a calculated insult to Britain. He returned the Epstein bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to America by the British government as a token of solidarity following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Churchill had pride of place in the Oval Office between 2001 and 2009, a symbol of the tight-knit transatlantic relationship that had flourished under Tony Blair and George W. Bush. The rejection of the greatest Anglo-American in modern history in favour of a bust of Abraham Lincoln therefore seemed to mark a profound moment. It signalled the intent of a new and iconoclastic American regime to loosen the diplomatic, cultural and political ties between Britain and America; to distance itself from a country tainted by colonialism and class.
After the Brokeback Mountain epic that was the Blair-Bush years, it seemed as though the Obama administration was determined to throw a pail of cold water on the Special Relationship.
It is pleasing to say that in this, as in so many other aspects of his presidency, Obama has failed. He may have rejected the mother country, but even at his most popular, even when he seemed to many as if he really might be a messiah, Obama’s people baulked at his antipathy to Britain. After the bust made the news, the British ambassador to the United States received endless apologetic letters from regular Americans, reassuring him that Churchill was still their hero.
Two years later, as America’s love for Obama has dwindled, she has become open about her passion for Britain. If you spend any time in America now you will swiftly come to realise that our cousins across the pond have the raging hots for us like never before. With a royal wedding obsessing middle America and Hollywood falling to its knees before anyone with a hint of home counties in their accent, you might even say the Brits are taking over.
It’s William and Kate that have hooked them. From coast to coast — and especially in the Oprah-watching barbecue belt — there is a fascination with the story of Kate Middleton’s rise from lowly commoner to queen-in-waiting. The tabloids are full of the details of the 29 April ceremony. It is predicted that as many Americans will watch the royal wedding as watched last month’s Super Bowl. It’s as if the revolution is in reverse.
The Middletons’ story is portrayed in the American media as a sign that the British class system is modernising. The contrast with Charles and Diana’s wedding 30 years ago is frequently noted. ‘Miss Middleton’s emergence may be… a vivid confirmation that social mobility does exist in this class-conscious society,’ wrote the New York Times, a couple of months back. In December the LA Times was more forthright about the unashamed love of monarchy for its own sake: ‘Kate Middleton is the envy of every girl who has ever dreamed of being a real-life princess.’
Now, cynics among you may argue that little girls who dream of princesses have thoughts of lounging about in beautiful palaces, wearing minks and diamonds and eating swans all day, whereas Princess Catherine is more likely to end up christening lifeboats and attending military parades. But that’s neither here nor there to an American audience, who look at the British royal family and see an impossible glamour that simply does not exist on their side of the Atlantic.
The royal fixation has been manifested in other ways, too. How else do we explain, for example, the astonishing success of Tom Hooper’s box-office topping film The King’s Speech? The movie dominated the 83rd Academy Awards last weekend, winning four of the most prestigious Oscars, including the award for Best Actor, given to Colin Firth. It is not a great film — although that hardly marks it out from Oscar winners of the past — but like the royal wedding, it has truly captivated American audiences with its sheer, unapologetic Britishness.
You have to laugh. Obama may have given back the Churchill bust, but he can’t stop his fellow Americans going loopy about a film starring the king who twice made Winston Prime Minister. For all the small-R republican guff, I rather suspect that there are many Yanks who secretly hanker to have a king back, their parliamentary voting rights suspended and the local police department replaced with redcoats. Yet The King’s Speech is only one example among many of Hollywood’s growing obsession with all things British. Like lots of other Londoners, I spend a good chunk of my time these days in Hollywood. It used to be the case that Londoners felt their closest affinity with New York. There was, and still is, much that connects the Big Apple with the Big Smoke. Rudeness, filth, perpetual drunkenness, an excellent public transportation network and generally dismal weather were cultural touchpoints in two cities driven by finance and advertising.
But in the last couple of years the NyLon thing has been overtaken by a LaLon thing. Masters of the Universe are out, and hipsters of Sunset Boulevard are in. As the world recoils from the global financial crisis of 2008, entertainment, not economics, has become the strongest thread binding the special relationship. London and Los Angeles — two cities between which you’d be hard pressed to note a single similarity — are moving closer than ever before.
Hollywood’s 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 they’re worth.Every TV and movie producer knows that these days you need a Brit to make a show successful. They’re lining up to sign them. Next year’s three biggest action films will all star Brits in the title roles: Henry Cavill (last seen as the duke of Suffolk in The Tudors) has signed up to play Superman; Surrey boy Andrew Garfield is currently filming The Amazing Spider-Man (in which Rhys Ifans plays the supervillain); and Christian Bale is set to reprise his role as Batman for the second time in The Dark Knight Rises. He’ll be directed by the British director Christopher Nolan, and will appear opposite another British villain, played by another brilliant Brit, Tom Hardy.
Likewise, American television has been enriched in recent years by two old Etonians: Dominic West, who starred in The Wire, and Hugh Laurie, who is rumoured to be the highest-paid TV star in America for his lead role in the Fox medical drama House. The acclaimed zombie series Walking Dead stars Andrew Lincoln, once a nerdy solicitor in the 1990s BBC series This Life, while Essex boy Stephen Moyer has led the cast of the last four seasons of the wildly popular vampire drama True Blood.
These are some of the biggest gigs in Hollywood. But it’s not just the established stars that are British. Grab a seat by the pool at every decent hotel in West Hollywood — from the London to the Mondrian — and every other accent will be loaded with home counties vowels. Ditto every seat at the front of Air New Zealand Flight 1 from Heathrow to LAX. (Forget BA — every Brit who does the route regularly knows the Kiwis have the best flight times, the best service, the only decent lounge in LAX and the cheapest business-class seats.)
You’d have thought the locals would be getting sick of it. But in fact, the opposite is true. A casting director friend assures me that the Brit-festation has been great for the industry: British actors are the best trained, she says, and if they can master an American accent the sky is the limit. Our TV producers, says another pal in the business, are recognised as among the best in the world. That would explain why we have managed to export some of the biggest show s on American TV — the democratic karaoke contests of American Idol and The X Factor compete with Dancing With The Stars, an exported version of the British show Strictly Come Dancing.
And you can see the pull for the Brits making the trip out west. For the actors, there’s precious little work anywhere else, now that the government has yanked the plug on the British film industry’s life-support machine, the UK Film Council. For the liggers, there’s 300 days of sunshine a year, beaches, pools, hardbodies to ogle, and shops selling medical marijuana to anyone who can convince their doc that they get depressed if they go for more than ten minutes without smoking a bowl.
Yes, there have been some bum notes struck recently. Piers Morgan has yet to convince Manhattan that he is the true heir to Larry King on CNN. And Ricky Gervais was practically accused of treason for his ner-ner, irreverent hosting of the Golden Globe awards last month. But these are mere specks of sand in the tanning lotion. Whatever President Obama intended for Anglo-American relations when he gave Churchill’s bust back, the people are still in favour of the Special Relationship. Very long may it continue.