American tourists - 5 December 1997

A week or two ago, we woke up to read a prominent despatch from London which has been syndicated and published in many cities throughout the country.

It was a rousing appeal from Prime Minister Blair to arise and go now, not to Innisfree or any other romantic relic of the past, but to come and see modern Britain. In short, to forget the old sentimental tourists' image of England, cute villages and thatched cottages, and tea and crumpets and Lord Peter Wimsey with his butler poking around in somebody's garden looking for the character who killed the vicar's wife.

Britain today, Mr Blair rightly declared, is a country thoroughly at home in the late 20th Century. A leader in some science research, pulsing with modern technology, and bustling, forward-looking, entrepreneur and go-getting can-do businessmen. No more pokey old red pillar boxes, or was it telephone booths? No more judges with white wigs. Everywhere you go in the New Britain, he maintained, you'd see something modern. Even post-post-modern.

He might have been quoting a stirring line from WH Auden, "Look shining on new styles of architecture, a change of heart". Incidentally, WH Auden left that line out of a later printing of the poem. He explained in a footnote that he must have been swept away by a gust of romantic emotion. In fact, he wrote, "I hate new styles of architecture, I greatly prefer the old". There he put his finger on what I suspect is going to be the point of this talk.

My wife put it in a blunter way as soon as she'd finished reading Mr Blair's appeal to come and see the brave New Britain. She said, "Going to lose a million tourists." The mention in that appeal of thatched cottages made me think of Monday evenings on the national network of public television in this country. One of the perennial, seemingly never-dying series is Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories and I believe, indeed I know from surveys that have been taken, that its lasting appeal here is not so much the ingenuity of the plots or even the familiar characters who play them out, but the picture of rural England that is more firmly and endearingly impressed every week. Those winding lanes and thatched cottages and the smoke rising from the old chimney of an old inn with Tudor beams and a crackling wood fire. And the genial bobbies with helmets coming on a footprint and saying, "Hello!"

To its devoted and middle-aged audience, it's the Britain they used to know, or want to know. And Americans who've never been to England are only vaguely aware, if at all, that it's England in the 1920s and early '30s. This attitude, a preconception, about a foreign country that you want to hold on to is surely the central appeal of tourism.

I'm sure I have only to call on certain capitals of the world to have a vivid single picture that's been filed away at the back of your mind, flash into the front of it. If I say Paris, I doubt any listeners would at once picture the medical lab where the foremost AIDS research in the world is being done. Does India immediately suggest the University of Calcutta? Or the sleeping or the dead people on the streets? No, it happily suggests the Taj Mahal. And the most popular sport in Spain? Soccer, by far. Most Spaniards have never seen a bullfight. And when I say American, do you at once remember that more Americans buy season tickets to symphony concerts than to baseball? All this may be enlightening, but I'm sure it's jarring to people looking over a travel folder.

I've often been asked by listeners to send them an advisory tour of the United States and at one time these requests were so frequent that I thought to get out a printed list which I now see was based on the assumption that travellers, tourists anyway, want to see varieties of beautiful landscapes.

But I've noticed that with the travelling young, landscape is not a primary interest, however majestic and awesome. It makes, they say, pretty pictures. Certainly since the twilight of the English Georgian poets, there's been a drastic decline into nothingness of what was called pastoral poetry. For the past, I suppose, 40 years or so, English and American poetry seems to be mostly about "me", the author and his/her troubled psyche. But I'm pretty sure that few poets today write about the shifting light on a canyon wall or a high tide on a beach or a flower. But I have to believe that there are, among intending visitors to the United States, many, probably most, who have retained this old-fashioned purpose in travelling. To see what is special about the cities and to see what is beautiful about the land outside the cities.

My tour used to suggest as "must see" places as cities – New York, Washington, San Francisco – landscape, the fall of New England at its most splendid and unbelievable in central Vermont. Out west, there is of course the Grand Canyon though a million people have said it's incomparable, breathtaking, they're right. But, to me, America's two incomparable sights, the jewels of the canyon country, are in southern Utah. Zion Canyon, an unmatched example of wind erosion, and the exquisite Bryce Canyon where you look down on a 13-mile curving canyon floor from which rise a thousand Salisbury cathedrals made of rock, in colour running from scarlet to bone white.

These were my irreducible minimum of special places to visit in America. And for a time I had the reward of grateful notes from people who'd more or less followed Cooke's tour. But down the years I've had many, many more notes from Britons just to say how much they'd enjoyed their American trip which invariably took in New York City, Miami, Disneyland, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Now, to me, who owed nothing to the Chamber of Commerce of any city, the mere thought of dropping down through that veil of yellow smog into the 500 sprawling square miles of Los Angeles or to land at the nightmare of Miami airport and then thread your human way through a half-dressed population swarming over a huge Coney Island by-the-sea. Well, it makes me marvel more than ever at the variety of human tastes.

I'm stressing the country, any country, the tourists go to see, because tourism was what Mr Blair's appeal was all about. And before you make a pitch to a tourist, you have, I think, not to tell him so much what he ought to see as to discover what he wants to see. I've found it useless to tell foreigners that a very fine holiday may be spent in New York State, that here are many lakes and majestic mountains and waterfalls and forests for hiking, and a large island to explore, or sail around. The mere mention of New York does not call up to a stranger a picture of lovely white beaches, of mountains and waterfalls. It suggests skyscrapers, nightlife, theatres.

Just after the Second World War, one of the most distinguished visitors to New York City was the author Cyril Connolly. And when he got here, he called on me and wondered what he ought to see. This was startling, coming from a very literary Englishman who'd already made connections with the rising and risen literati of the city and was already at home in Greenwich Village.

I, with frank diffidence, mentioned the Statue of Liberty, going up to the top of the Empire State building at sunset, taking the regular cruise around the two rivers that enclose Manhattan Island. He didn't seem impressed. So I said, apologetically, "But, I'm afraid, that's the usual tourist trek". He came alive. "But", he said, "I am a tourist! That's just what I wanted to hear! None of my friends here mentioned any of these sites." He took out a little notebook and put down the suggestions and was smilingly on his way.

It was good to have a very superior person say so simply, "But I am a tourist!" And I think Mr Blair would find, if he set some disinterested research people to work, if there are any such, I think he'd find that this is the great age of tourism because, well firstly, of course, the jet plane has made the countries of the Earth accessible, but mainly because there is an urge, even in the most sophisticated people, to get away from it all. That's to say to get away from the dinning realities of their familiar life and go off into another country. But, a country of the mind, in the shape and colour they'd imagined it to be.

Towards the end of the Second World War when American tourism to Europe was obviously verboten, there was a popular move to go on holiday in the tropical islands of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, partly in response to President Roosevelt's plea to get to know Central and South America as our good neighbours. A lot of wounded or released soldiers had rest and recreation there, and the natives soon found that Americans didn't want them to be inhabitants of the 20th Century, to see people dressed like themselves, with the same dances, drinks, ways of entertainment.

They wanted them to put on the old traditional costumes, dance the carioca, sing calypso songs. And the natives obliged with a mocking song that celebrated a hybrid drink. "They were drinking", the song said, to a calypso beat, "rum and Coca Co-la working for the Yankee dol-lar". In other, more brutal plain words, sir, Americans of all degrees of sophistication, don't want to go to England to see skyscrapers, the latest cyclotron, or bright young account executives, or the latest buildings of the latest chic British architect. They have all these things at home.

In their secret heart, what they want are not new styles of architecture, a change of heart, but old styles of architecture, no change of heart. Tea and crumpets, which they've never seen. The Changing of the Guard. Soldiers with plumed helmets cantering along Rotten Row. Judges with wigs. Beefeaters and castles, and ye olde pubs.

So, please, don't strip the thatch off the cottage, Mr Blair. Give a second thought to the Yankee dol-lar.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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