On the 25 April, 2001, the following article by Tom Utley, appeared in The Telegraph. Its title: “The mountains of Norfolk and other Hollywood myths”. In it he cited our County of Norfolk, England, UK – not Norfolk, Virginia in the States by the way. For that reason readers of this Blog, who might have missed the article the first time round, might like to read it for themselves. They may, or may not, agree with his views which were written some eighteen years ago. Apologies for a few minor tweaks to the article, and for leaving out the advertising and other extraneous matter which only detracts from an interesting article. Read on:
Most of us will have felt a pang of sympathy for Claudia Neira. She was the American who arrived in Guangzhou, China, after an exhausting flight from New York, only to find that the White Swan hotel had no record of the booking that she had made over the internet. Further inquiries revealed that she had actually booked her eight nights at the White Swan hotel in Pickering, on the other side of the world, in North Yorkshire. The charitable among us will say that this was an easy mistake to make. The two hotels share a name, after all, and there is no telling where a website hails from on the internet.
But we should not be too quick to acquit Mrs Neira of stupidity. For there are a number of clues on the two websites to suggest the whereabouts of the hotels they advertise. There are photographs, for a start. The Chinese White Swan is shown as a 34-storey skyscraper towering over banyan gardens at the water’s edge on Shamian Island. The photograph of the Pickering White Swan shows a two-storey, 16th-century coaching inn, unmistakably English in appearance. The Chinese hotel boasts on its website of its specialised regional cuisine from Beijing, Sichuan and Shanghai. The Yorkshire hotel is proud to announce that its chef makes his own sausages and bread. The address at the top of the English website is a bit of a giveaway, too: “Pickering, Ryedale, North Yorkshire, YO18 7AA” – Perhaps it was the “YO” that threw Mrs Neira: it does look vaguely Chinese!!
I blame the American film and television industry for Mrs Neira’s unhappy plight. For instance, the Disney corporation did set its £50 million thriller, ‘Reign of Fire’, in the mountains of Norfolk, England! Now, the one thing that most of us know about Norfolk, was summed up succinctly by Noel Coward in Private Lives: “Very flat, Norfolk”. Disney’s location scouts must have discovered as much, when they came to have a look at the County. But rather than admit that they got it wrong, they took their cameras off to the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, and went on pretending that the action of their film was set in East Anglia – and Norfolk in particular!
No wonder Mrs Neira was confused when she clicked on the Pickering White Swan’s website, thinking that she was booking a room in China. I suspect that, in the course of her childhood, she must have seen a Disney film set beneath the banyan trees by the banks of the Pearl River in North Yorkshire, in which an American hero defeated Attila the Hun’s air force. Or perhaps she saw a film set among the flat-capped, bangers – and – mash – scoffing pigeon-fanciers of Guangzhou, in which another American hero beat off an invasion from outer space. How is a poor New York girl to tell the difference between Europe and Asia, Pickering and Guangzhou, when she has been fed all her life on a diet of inane fantasy?
Some will say that all this is just a lot of fuss about nothing, and that it does not really matter; so what if Disney chooses to pretend that there are mountains in Norfolk? It is just a bit of escapism, they will say – poetic licence, and all that. Nor would it matter very much, if this were an exceptional case. But the fact is that nearly every single film churned out by Hollywood is based on some kind of lie. The world’s greatest democracy, and its only remaining superpower, has shut its eyes and blocked its ears to any consideration of the truth, retreating into a fantasy world of its own.
I am not thinking only of geography and topography. Hollywood takes the most breathtaking liberties with history, too. Braveheart, Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, Patriot, U 571, Michael Collins, Thirteen Days – just show any American film made over the past 20 [now 38] years that claims to have some basis in historical fact, and I will show you a pack of lies from beginning to end. Yet for most of the people who watch them – people with votes to cast for heaven’s sake! – these films are the only exposition of history that they will ever see.
The past troubles in Northern Ireland? A case of British imperialists oppressing a subject people. Simple as that. Cracking the Enigma code? All down to the heroism of the Yanks, wasn’t it? The Irish potato famine? An act of genocide by Queen Victoria. The Cuban missile crisis? A triumph of statesmanship for J F K.
How we all sneer at those Soviet propaganda films of the 1930s, showing happy peasants bringing in their abundant harvests in accordance with their glorious leader’s latest five-year plan. But Stalin’s film-makers have nothing to teach modern Hollywood about perverting or ignoring the facts to suit their masters’ ends. Hollywood cannot even tell the truth about what Americans call “interpersonal relationships”. If you believed the movies, you would think that every child who had ever breathed was a little ball of sugar-coated candy – capable of naughtiness, certainly, but just as cute as pie underneath. Even the villainess of ‘The Exorcist’ turned out to be a sweetie in the end.
They have shown Mrs Doubtfire repeatedly on television – as disgusting a piece of trash as anything produced by the porno industry in Los Angeles, made all the more revolting by Robin Williams’s brilliant, schmaltzy performance in the title role. The final scene showed our hero’s ex-wife and children wiping away tears of admiration as they watched him on television, dressed as an elderly woman, delivering a little homily about how kiddies shouldn’t feel bad when their parents divorced. Yeurrgh!! Life just isn’t like that. Never has been, never will be.
In his final refusal to accept reality, Walt Disney left instructions that his dead body should be frozen until medical science came up with a way of bringing him back to life. The time has surely come to thaw the old swine out, and put him on trial at the Hague for crimes against Western civilisation and the truth!
THE END
Sources:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4261557/The-mountains-of-Norfolk-and-other-Hollywood-myths.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/united-kingdom/england/yorkshire/north/hotels/the-white-swan-inn-hotel/
https://www.agoda.com/en-gb/white-swan-hotel/hotel/guangzhou-cn.html?cid=-217
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