Saturday, February 28, 2009

Has American cultural imperialism already gone this far?

You may have gathered from the links on the left that I occasionally follow the blog of Rachel Lucas - an extremely right-wing American who I naturally disagree with on just about everything, but she's brilliantly witty and a very entertaining read. She's currently on this side of the Atlantic, and is delighting her readers with a daily account of the alien world that is "England". (England is exactly where she is, but I put the word in inverted commas because I have no great confidence she's mastered the distinction between England and the UK yet - in fact I'm quite certain she hasn't.)

Anyway, in her latest post she assures her loyal fans that there's no danger of her returning to Texas with an English accent - a) because she spends the bulk of her time with her husband 'Rupert', and b) because 75% of British TV is made up of American programmes anyway. This is quite a startling estimate, and I've been trying to get my head round it. Can it possibly be true? I can only assume she's mainly been flicking through some of the more obscure cable/satellite channels, because it seems to me the main channels are still predominantly British. Or have I not been paying enough attention? Admittedly, children's programming now seems to be hideously Americanised.

4 comments:

  1. I remember in the early sixties an aunt who was about sixteen at the time started saying "yeah" instead of aye. The films, the music, the tele - yeah - it really has gone that far dude.

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  2. Aww shucks, thanks for your two cents, dude. I appreciate there's a fair bit of it about - but 75%? On primetime BBC1, for instance, you'd very rarely see an American show.

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  3. Think of the last ten films you saw. How many were from the US?

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  4. Oh absolutely, nobody would dispute that. But I was thinking specifically of television.

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