There
is nothing very much I miss about England. Since I've been
spending so much time in Los Angeles making The Colbys,
people are always asking me what I miss about the place. The
answer, I'm afraid, is nothing very much.
Maybe
that's being harsh. Certainly there are a few things that are in
England that I miss: a I few friends, a shared sense of
background with everyone else and not a moment goes by when I
don't miss my daughters, Phoebe and Chloe. But as for England
itself - frankly, I'm glad to get out of it. I love it, and I'll
go back to it happily, when the time comes. But I'm glad to have
had the break, glad to have seen how things work in America. I
feel strongly that America could teach Britain a very valuable
lesson indeed.
The
England I left was a gloomy place. There was a no-hope feeling
about it, which saddened and maddened me, and I place the
responsibility for it directly on the shoulders of our Prime
Minister, Mrs. Thatcher. We'd just been through the miners'
strike, seeing their pain and their pride - and, yes, I'd seen a
lot of it at first hand while I was filming the TV rag-trade
drama Connie. I'd never felt so keenly, or with such
embarrassment, the privilege of my own position in life when we
saw what our Government had done to those miners. The whole
nation was depressed. What was worse was that you saw that
depression most in the teenagers. Oh, not in my daughters,
because I'm working extremely hard to make sure that they get
the very best of an English upbringing: an upper-class boarding
school education in England's green and pleasant land. Very nice
for them. But it doesn't mean that I don't notice other young
people, the less fortunate ones.
When
I came to America, I found an incredibly marked difference in
attitude. There is actual enterprise here, actual enthusiasm to
make things go. The whole idea behind Connie was the
struggle a small business had in contemporary Britain. In
America there just isn't that struggle. You invent something
wonderfully silly, an upright toothpaste tube, Just anything at
all, you market it, it catches on and you make a fortune.
Not
everybody is able to do that, of course, but there's still the
attitude that you might. And if you do, and you make a success
of it, then you aren't penalised by being taxed out of
existence. And they don't slap VAT onto everything, either, as
they do in Britain.
I
know America is often criticised for its poor social services,
but when you look at them, I don't think ours are all that
perfect either. Besides, I don't think you should support people
who won't get off their backsides to work. I don't expect anyone
to support me. I don't think anybody owes anybody else a living.
I
do think, however (especially having seen miners pawning their
grandmothers' watches to support a strike to keep their jobs),
that people have a right to work. Americans work harder than we
in Britain even begin to know about.
And
they all seem to have in their work a sense of joy, of pride and
of optimism. All the qualities that we sadly seem to have lost
sight of.
I
just wish that we could find those qualities again.
