Five things Hollywood gets wrong about the UK

Hollywood movies have often taken a trip out of their native California to the United Kingdom. But once they get here, just like anyone travelling to a new place, there are a few things they don't get quite right.

Here are five things Hollywood gets a bit wrong when it visits the UK.

The UK isn’t just London

We’ve all seen those movies. A title card appears on the screen: ‘England’ (rarely ‘Great Britain’ or ‘The UK’). It’s inevitably accompanied by a shot of Piccadilly Circus or Buckingham Palace complete with plenty of black cabs and red buses.

Frankly, if you’d never visited the UK, and had only Hollywood movies and TV to rely on, you’d be forgiven for thinking the entire country was composed of about ten square miles of central London.

Take 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, in which Peter Parker journeys around Europe, but in the UK doesn’t seem to get much further afield than England's capital city, and spends most of his time swinging around Tower Bridge.

Action flick London Has Fallen (2016), obviously concerns itself with the fall of London, rather than say, Birmingham. Fast And Furious 6 (2013) took the car-racing franchise to the UK, but even though they had the transportation, they didn’t get much further afield than Downing Street and Trafalgar Square.

What about the majestic Lake District, the spectacular Welsh valleys or the magnificent Scottish Highlands? Hollywood needs to get a better travel agent.

We don’t all have bad teeth

From Austin Powers’ famously chaotic gnashers to The Simpsons' ‘Big Book of British Smiles’ (which a suitably horrified Lisa Simpson is shown by her orthodontist and which features Prince Charles with a highly unrealistic wonky grin), Hollywood has often poked fun at the supposed dreadful state of British teeth.

When Ricky Gervais was interviewed about his role in the film Ghost Town, American journalists refused to believe that the "horrible teeth" he sported in the movie were in fact his own, and not the work of the special effects department.

Ouch!

As a matter of fact, according to the British Dental Association, we Brits have slightly better teeth than our American cousins, or at least more of them. A study by researchers at UCL and others conducted in 2015 found that on average, a British citizen is missing 6.97 teeth to the average American’s 7.31.

So, when Hollywood is unkind about our mouths, that’s an extra third of a tooth to smile politely back with.

None of us talk like that

There’s a long and (un)distinguished history of American actors delivering hopeless British accents on film. The most notorious is probably Dick Van Dyke’s unfortunate attempt at what was apparently meant to be a cockney accent in Mary Poppins in 1964. It was so terrible that the then 91 year-old actor apologised for it while accepting a Bafta in 2017. “I appreciate this opportunity to apologise to the members of Bafta for inflicting on them the most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema,” he joked.

But he’s far from alone in the hall of British accent shame. Keanu Reeves delivered an unrecognisable English accent in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992. Russell Crowe’s accent in Robin Hood (2010) bemused British audiences. And more recently Robert Downey Jr. delivered what was later discovered to be a Welsh accent in his flop Doctor Dolittle in 2020.

We’re not all posh

Films made by Hollywood directors in or about about Britain have always tended to concentrate on the upper end of the social class scale. Take Woody Allen’s Match Point. When the filmmaker made his first film set in Britain he chose a distinctly upper-class set of characters to populate his drama.

Then there’s 2014’s Paddington (middle-class Londoners) and 2001’s Gosford Park (aristocrats on their country estate). Even Mary Poppins (1964) is about a family rich enough to afford a nanny.

Many British film directors have taken a look at less privileged British lives (for instance Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold), but the British films that tend to do well in the US are often concerned with the upper crust. Think Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill (1999) or Love Actually (2003).

So, we might be our own worst enemies when it comes to representing British people from all walks of life to American audiences.

The geography’s all wrong

If you happen to live in London it’s great fun watching characters in movies make impossible journeys, turning from one street into another that’s in fact half a mile away. There’s Robert Downey Jnr. covering the two and a half miles from the Houses of Parliament to Tower Bridge in an impressive two minute run in Sherlock Holmes (2009). Or there’s the bit in Thor: The Dark World (2013) where the muscle bound superhero finds himself at Charing Cross underground station and is told it’s only three stops from Greenwich. (Nowhere near. Did they think nobody in London would, y’know, notice?)

But Hollywood’s shaky grasp of British geography extends to the whole country. Take Kevin Costner, who in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves bewilderingly announces that he can walk from Dover to Loxley (near Sheffield) “by nightfall”. Given that it’s a journey of around 250 miles, he’s going to be walking pretty fast.

May we suggest Hollywood invest in a good map?

This article was published in September 2020