Worst depiction of Britain in a US series
Jaycee Dove
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Over on the ER thread we have just been discussing the recently repeated episode partly set in London.
It featured that well known NHS trauma hospital on Tower Bridge and had some deeply unpleasant NHS staff that drove Alex Kingston to want to return to the civility of downtown Chicago to escape the snobbery of London.
There were absurd lines about patients being ill after eating Pork Cutlets, Mash and several pints. And sloppy filming such as boarding a first class London to Scotland express train at Kings Cross when the story said she was heading on a local train for Heathrow!
In a series usually so very well written it was an awful attempt to reflect the UK and so stood out.
Must run close the infamous Frasier episodes featuring Daphne's brother supposedly from Manchester (via Dick Van Dyke's London and Mars).
So I wondered if you had your own favourite terrible attempts within a US series to depict life in the UK?
This is not an anti American rant BTW. Just for fun - and I am well aware that UK shows will have reflected visits to America in similarly dire fashion (indeed add them in if you like).
It featured that well known NHS trauma hospital on Tower Bridge and had some deeply unpleasant NHS staff that drove Alex Kingston to want to return to the civility of downtown Chicago to escape the snobbery of London.
There were absurd lines about patients being ill after eating Pork Cutlets, Mash and several pints. And sloppy filming such as boarding a first class London to Scotland express train at Kings Cross when the story said she was heading on a local train for Heathrow!
In a series usually so very well written it was an awful attempt to reflect the UK and so stood out.
Must run close the infamous Frasier episodes featuring Daphne's brother supposedly from Manchester (via Dick Van Dyke's London and Mars).
So I wondered if you had your own favourite terrible attempts within a US series to depict life in the UK?
This is not an anti American rant BTW. Just for fun - and I am well aware that UK shows will have reflected visits to America in similarly dire fashion (indeed add them in if you like).
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Oh, yes the Mini as a hire car.
Though I think to be fair that was partly intended to be funny.
It certainly was humorous and not seemingly intentionally derogatory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUnbJAWk6gM
I say! Spiffing stuff!
That's odd considering Channel 4 worked closely with Warner Bros. to make the Friends episodes, and the UK episodes were made because of the large UK fan base in the first place. There aren't any stereotypes are there, just well-known figures like Richard Branson, Sarah Ferguson, Hugh Laurie.
Supposedly, Victorian era English novels refer to the Thames freezing over in winter -- according to stuff I have read on the subject of global warming. Perhaps the Nikita writers were simply recalling what they remember from English literature courses in university.:)
Actually, this last happened in the early 60's.
What's strange is that the Harvard alumni who write The Simpsons should be so ignorant (and not just about Britain, all the ones set abroad are like this).
The worse one was Murder She Wrote set in Ireland not Britain though, so bad it's good.
priceless
That episode was fun, it also had a cafe that had its own Canadian website, the traffic lights were all wrong and so was the signage.
It was funny spotting these inaccuracies, although at times I thought they had travelled to somewhere else after the London trip.
Ah yes! the dodgy accents and blatent stereotyping, i half expected a leprechaun to emerge from behind a rainbow carrying a pot of gold doing an irish jig.
How did they get it wrong?
When they went to Belfast, the accents, the fact they seemed to think it was still the 70s.
They tempered it by doing some actual filming in London though, because Alan Dale was in Spamalot and couldn't fly to Hawaii. There was a nice scene near Tower Bridge.
Americans don't think you all talk that way -- it is just that your "upper class morons" are the only people among your lot whose accents are reliably intelligible to us (yes, Canadians too) on my side of the Atlantic. American TV producers make a calculated choice to go for intelligibility over accuracy, and that is the RIGHT choice, especially given that the programmes are made for Americans, not -- well -- you.:)
But isn't that just patronising American viewers?
Wasn't it 101 Dalmatians where they had wild Raccoons in England? lol
How many British shows are abundant in characters whose speech is difficult to understand? With all the choices Americans have for things to watch on TV, with audiences for any particular programme shrinking year by year, there is no point in giving members of the target audience (Americans) one more reason to switch the channel. These prgrammes live or die by American ratings, not by what British people think of them.