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Filmy
Page 34
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The Americans have long believed that Britain is full of men in bowler hats living in Hathaway cottages and chatting superciliously with butlers, beefeaters and cheery old coppers. When the new travel film produced jointly by NBC, Barclays, British Caledonian and Strand Hotel Group hits the major US television networks they will add to these fixed images of our wunnerful li'l country the conviction that big white coaches are the dominant form of road vehicle.
The couple who spend the film wandering around London keep encountering these gleaming white leviathians of the road and eventually, in a curiously empty Victoria Coach Station, board one of them, smile at the friendly old driver and set off for the heart of Olde England, where the pace of life remains unchanged in the midst of the fastmoving Seventies. To whit, a strangely depopulated village — the only inhabitants noted by my colleague through his misty tears of nostalgia being an old man and a baby.
Bidding farewell to these fleeting pleasures. Mr and Mrs Typical Tourist board a coach (NBC of course) and return to a different kind of quaintness; cut to the "quiet streets" of Olde Southwarke — "lanes known only to the few".
We leave our two holidaymakers wistfully contemplating the view east down that "ecological marvel" the Thames. (Was that an NBC bus we saw crossing that historic edifice Tower Bridge over that historic waterway?) Monty Python, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
The Hawk