Sarah Jessica Parker is the latest A-lister to lavish our fair isles with praise, from the transport networks to the eggs. I guess it’s easy to overlook problems when you’re a wealthy tourist
‘I want to know Jubilee, Piccadilly, Northern, I want to know Edgware … Your system here is exquisite.” That is Sarah Jessica Parker raving about the tube. “Goodge” she added, in wonderment, rolling the word around in her mouth like a mint humbug. She is in London, appearing in Plaza Suite at the Savoy theatre, having the time of her life and appreciating breakfast foods. “There’s these eggs here … that I go mad for, they’re called Burford, they have those orange yolks … oh my God … I love your rashers here,” she told the chef Ruth Rogers on Rogers’ podcast. Her Instagram features black cabs, graffiti and her learning which bus “gets me where I need to go. On time.”
Meanwhile, Zendaya has been “spotted patiently queueing for a Gail’s coffee and pastry” and doing a big shop in New Malden Waitrose; Vogue has declared her “one sausage roll away” from honorary Briton status.
They join an august canon of Americans seduced by meal deals, tea and scones and non-mixer taps. Remember Taylor Swift’s London Boy era, when everyone was baffled by her nightmarish Shoreditch–Brixton-Highgate itinerary and her claim to “enjoy” afternoons in Camden market? Madonna’s tweed, flat cap and mockney phase is, of course, the stuff of celeb infamy.
And it’s not just women. There is Stanley Tucci, raving about Quo Vadis and Lina Stores. Timothée Chalamet loves a “sexy” Hull accent and Tom Cruise is always (OK, very occasionally) in North Yorkshire because he can’t get enough of fat rascals, or something.
What do they see that we don’t in this island where ecologically dead rivers run with sewage, three in 10 children live in poverty and 1 million experience destitution? A Ukrainian woman returned to her “very dangerous” war-torn home town to access adequate dental treatment. It’s not like our problems are well-hidden. Surely Parker read the New Yorker’s depressingly comprehensive recent piece about 2024 Britain: the “worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic wars”; stalled life expectancy; the return of rickets. How can you be “deeply in love” with that?
It’s easy to be charmed by difference, I suppose. When my American friend visited, she got the full baptism of British fire: LNER trains, weather, heart-in-mouth driving on rough, single-lane roads, a bizarre encounter with some Richard III, erm, eccentrics and unwelcoming pubs peopled with ominously silent men. She loved it (except our road collision with a “garbage can”).
Crucially, too, A-list anglophiles can live in a perfect British bubble they have the means to maintain: Ted Lasso’s London of charming stuccoed houses and chirpy pub-goers; country idylls in Cornwall or the Cotswolds. Their 1% experience has little – basically nothing – in common with life for households on the UK’s average income of £32,500.
Plus, even when you are not stratospherically wealthy, being in a country that isn’t your own can foster a sense of childlike acceptance of how things are. Living in Belgium did this to me – I left the UK before the 2008 recession, lived a shamefully politically oblivious life over there and, returning in 2018, became instantly appalled and angry at the state of everything. It felt viscerally my problem – personal in a way Belgium’s defects never were.
But is there anything we can take from the sincere but skewed admiration of celebrity visitors from American A-listers taking off our glasses and telling us that, actually, we are beautiful? We are truly in the pit of national despair, understandably, and I wonder if it’s helpful to see through their eyes that there are good bits of Britain: Rob Delaney calling the NHS “the pinnacle of human achievement”, say, or Parker being thrilled by London’s diversity.
It’s hard not to fixate on how awful everything is, so I appreciate being reminded that there are still things worth fighting for, if only because that is a more productive feeling than hopelessness. Could other people admiring us give us the energy and focus we will need to recover from the past 14 years? I’m not sure I believe in that Hollywood ending, but it would be nice; maybe even nicer than a scone or a bang-on-time bus.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
