London’s made a great backdrop for numerous Hollywood films, particularly recently. It has enough landmarks to be instantly recognisable, is drenched in history and gives us the chance to laugh at some of the worst accents ever attempted (that’s another list altogether).
Unlike New York, walking around London doesn’t feel like it does in the movies. Maybe it’s subjective, but Hollywood needs London to be a certain way, a romanticised version of course evoking Jack the Ripper or Twiggy.
I’m all for the suspension of disbelief, but there are some things that irk so much, that my disbelief isn’t so much suspended as mocked.
Here are a few observations from the point of view of a jaded and London-based realist:
1. No one uses cockney rhyming slang
Maybe the blame here lies at the door of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and other forays into the London underworld by mockneys or maybe Austin Powers but, as colourful and fun it is, most people in London will tell you it’s a bit like Latin: dead as a form of communication.
These days, it’s surprising to get two words out of someone in London. Most people have their heads buried in their phone, can manage a grunt as you open a door and the closest you get to a conversation is a “Tut” or maybe an eyeroll.
In movies, rhyming slang tends to be flung into a script just make sure the watching audience will think, ‘Ooh, that’s authentic’. Sadly, it’s not, and is probably just disguising the appalling car crash that is the actor’s attempt at cockney. Which brings me to…
2. Literally no one talks like that
Oh it’s easy to take the p*** out of Al Pacino’s accent in The Local Stigmatic (and we should — endlessly, it’s amazing) or Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, but there are so many examples of appalling London / cockney accents it’s hard to know where to start.
It’s not something that’s exclusive to American performers, oh no, there are plenty of UK-raised actors demonstrating a turn of phrase that most of us natives just furrow our brow at and mouth ‘What the…?’
Drama school kids seem to have this weird, pleading, Artful Dodger lilt when they speak in character, while Americans go full Eliza Doolittle.
Shia Labeouf in Nymphomaniac is kind of a classic and, as with so many, seems to throw in what sounds like “Cor!” at the beginning of any speech, and Natalie Portman’s bizarre accent in V For Vendetta deserves a category all of its own.
One of the worst ever may be the inexplicably ill-judged attempt from Don Cheadle that he hawks around Ocean’s 11 with, made worse by the ‘rhyming slang’.
There are exceptions, like Renee Zelwegger’s Bridget Jones (a home counties accent that is now the most commonly heard in London), but with all that money, you’d think they’d get it right more often. Can’t there be a CGI invented, but for accents?
3. It always snows at Christmas and it’s beautiful
Since 1960 we have had a white Christmas ten times in the south east of England. The probability of London having snow at that time is 6%. That’s pretty slim. For most Londoners, rather than the crisp white snow covering orange-lit, cobbled Dickensian streets, snow means other things. Streams of disease-ridden sludge and a massive and hopeless breakdown of all transport (despite most of it being under ground).
On the up side, because we’re so woefully ill-prepared for weather (despite it being a national obsession) it does mean we get to ‘work from home’.
4. Londoners are part of huge social networks
London is huge, nearly 9 million people live there, and thousands more travel in every week day. Despite or perhaps because of these numbers and its sprawling expansion, most newer Londoners will talk about their liking for the anonymity of the place, the fact that they can wander around and not see someone they know. Ever.
Until that point where they tire of it, want to add to the globe’s population and move out to the suburbs to stop being quite so concerned with diversity and street food.
Anecdotal as it is, most of us don’t seem to move around in groups of like-minded friends hanging out all weekend and having endless dinner parties. Unless you include the rise of gangs, it’s just not a London thing. Now, if scurrying off home from a job you hate to sit staring at your phone, passive-aggressively updating on Facebook, posting carefully orchestrated photos on Instagram with one eye on X Factor counts as a social group, then yeah, we’re all over that.
5. People with low paid jobs don’t live in mansions
London is a pretty expensive place to live. Whether you buy or rent. It ranks just behind Monaco at the moment but apparently, in Richard Curtis’ world at least, people with what are clearly low-paid or non-existent jobs are able to live in town houses and mansion blocks on tree-lined avenues (and always by the river).
It’s not a thing, at least not without massive inheritance or mummy and daddy paying so you can ‘have a bookshop’. And that doesn’t help the narrative.
When I’m forced to watch something like Notting Hill, I like to invent my own backstory that the main character, played by Hugh Grant, is in fact the actor Hugh Grant, and is a millionaire and so able to live in what looks like Russell Square.
See? Works now.
6. There are way more weirdos
Certainly something that affects women more than men is the overabundance of mentally deranged people marauding the streets of London, yet in many a Hollywood movie, these people don’t exist, and if they do, they’re just a bit ‘The End is Nigh!’ rather than, ‘Come back here I want to kill you’.
You get young, beautiful women in the movies travelling home at night on a tube and they NEVER get some strange f*cker come and sot opposite them in an empty carriage and just stare at them.
The witching hour in London isn’t witchy really, it’s more shouty threateningy and mostly, stare crazy.
Take the night bus (or just bus in fact), or the tube, and you stand a good chance of being near some feckless bastard who wants to make you uncomfortable. It goes without saying these are nearly all men and guess what, they tend to focus their ‘madness’ at women.
Are they really mad? Strange how their madness manifests in that way.
That or they are in fact nasty little bullies whose madness miraculously disappears when they’re sat opposite a couple of lads with arms like legs.
More movie fantasies about London that just missed the cut:
- No one uses red phone boxes, they’re just photo opps for tourists or noticeboards for ‘escort ads’
- We don’t call our football teams by generic terms like ‘the blues’
- It’s not homogenous
- There are ‘bobbies’ everywhere
