You know those adverts? The ones that are advertising just a country, a minute-long piece of fly paper trying to trap you and your holiday pounds. They consist of sometimes singing, always annoying groups of people, enjoying the wondrous activities available in their particular country, smiling their tits off, eyes wide with a heady blend of patriotism and emotional fulfilment. Y'know, those ones? They end with a catchy tag line like 'There's Nowhere Quite Like Lebanon' or 'Chad: Africa's Forehead'. I've just watched one of those for Australia and it featured all the usual stuff: Great Barrier Reef, Kangaroos, Opera House. Aboriginal Child Playing in Billabong. And it struck me that one of these things must surely exist for Britain. We need tourism as much as anyone, so it only follows that somewhere, in some far-flung corner of what is probably a former colony of ours, there is now showing an advert with lots of English people looking at nice English things, like the Houses of Parliament and Stone Henge, pointing and smiling. I imagine there's a lot of stately home action, and surely a dozen or so red London buses performing acrobatic stunts atop the white cliffs of Dover. Unfortunately I'm having to imagine all this, because I can't find a video on the internet. I haven't looked that hard, because early on I found this: the Lyme Regis tourism video, and I haven't been able to move on.
To a haunting three-and-a-half minute instrumental guitar track, it shows all that can be done in Lyme Regis. Lyme Regis, incidentally, is the Latin for 'King Lemon'. No one knows how a small seaside town on the Devon coast came to be named in such a way. If you're unwilling to sit through the whole video, that's fair enough - after the first minute the fun tails off a bit really. Lyme Regis, it would seem, is a place where old people go to walk along grey seafronts, and where pale families sit on stony, wind-swept beaches. There's a lot of grey in Lyme Regis. And a lighthouse. And some old men sitting on deckchairs. To be honest it looks pretty niche, maybe even boring if I'm being harsh, but oddly it's the first Youtube result when you search for 'UK tourism video', which I found odd. Come on Foreign Office, sort it out!
Anyway, I don't really have anything else to say about this video. Like an observational comedian, I've 'noticed' something and drawn it to your attention. I've said "what's that all about, ey?!" and moved on. But I feel hollow and disappointed; I'm no Michael Mcintyre, that's for sure.
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