American TV and film’s obsession with a British fantasy shows no sign of abating

She’s not alone. Such pastoral idylls, along with dreaming spires, spooky Highland castles and bright red buses, have long been equally catnippy for American film and TV makers, an obsession that shows no sign of abating. Recently topping Netflix’s film chart, My Oxford Year sees US Rhodes Scholar Anna enrol to study Victorian poetry before taking up a job back home at Goldman Sachs. The message is clear: these are the best of both worlds.

Anna’s carefully penned wish list for her sojourn is no less on the nose: fish and chips, punting, afternoon tea, real tennis… she should have added “emotionally stunted English gent” because, following in the footsteps of Andie MacDowell, Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz – in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and The Holiday respectively – plus all of Edith Wharton’s Buccaneers before them, she soon falls for the charms of a pretty average English chap.

Is it the accent? After all, as Too Much’s Jessica explains to her Shoreditch squeeze Felix: “Everything you say sounds really sexy and cute.”

The Too Much pair – and its American writer Lena Dunham, who based the show on her own experience of moving to London and falling for a Brit – have a lot of fun with such well-worn fare, including a you’ll-guess-the-punchline gag about Jessica’s plan to “live on an estate” – inevitably this turns out to be more Peckham than Pemberley.

After she chirps one too many ’ello guv’nors, Felix tells her there’s no strain of American humour more annoying than “just saying what we’ve said back to us in a weird EastEnders voice”. When she waxes lyrical about the real Notting Hill, he reminds her he grew up nearby: “More The Shining than Richard Curtis.”

Despite this, none of these titles, nor others like them – even Dempsey and Makepeace, a rare inversion when a female British toff proves irresistible to a gruff New Yorker – stray too far from what viewers, particularly American ones, expect. It’s not exactly Ken Loach’s Britain on show, and these characters are all more unified by class than they are separated by an ocean.

What they do offer, as they have since the days of Wharton and co, is a shorthand for a clash of sensibilities, a way of exploring cultural differences without the bother of subtitles. Jessica’s 13-year-old nephew sums it up for her: “Americans think British people are snotty and pretentious but smart. British people think Americans are stupid and vulgar but funny. If you remember that, you should be fine.” Henry James couldn’t have put it better.

It’s all thoroughly out of date, of course. Downton Abbey accrued such an ardent following in the US that fans’ children in Brooklyn reportedly grew up speaking like Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess. Meanwhile, British babies are born into a world of Kardashian rules and expressions – “amazing, sweetie”.

Our respective cultures are, in reality, about as fenced off as water by a rope in a swimming pool; the osmosis accelerated by those same storytellers who have long fed off the differences and will continue feeding them back to us, along with fish and chips – which is probably ironic… But don’t get me started on that.

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