Brits happy to leave optimism to the Aussies
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Tourism Australia announced last week that its new tourism campaign will ask ordinary Australians to share their views of the country. ‘There’s nothing like Australia’ offers Aussies the chance to give their opinions about the best elements of their beloved ‘Oz’. Fantastic; a campaign that steers away from the traditional tourist board gloss and garners genuine views from real people. I wonder however, how well this idea would work in other countries.
Australians are lucky. They have a warm climate, sandy beaches, year-round, barbeques and successful sports teams. On the whole, Aussies are proud to be Australian. I however, am not Australian (contrary to the belief of many Americans I meet). I am British. We have eleven months of drizzle, brown muddy beaches and Andy Murray. Our barbeque season amounts to one afternoon in July, when men up and down the country try to blacken a couple of cheap sausages before it starts raining again. For us Brits, national pastimes include moaning about the weather and getting stuck on tricky crossword puzzles.
So I’d be really interested to see if VisitBritain, the UK’s tourism board, would like to follow Tourism Australia’s example and ask its citizens what they think are the best elements of the UK. I can imagine a broad range of responses, from the broad northern “You’re ‘avin a laff”, to smirking cockney comedians nominating the London Underground’s Northern Line, or the Hangar Lane gyratory in rush hour.
That’s not to say that Brits don’t love their country; we do. Brits are proud of the
White Cliffs of Dover, of the Humber Bridge, of the Cotswolds and its quaint country cottages. We’re proud of our history, of the industrial revolution, and our ‘Dunkirk Spirit’. But we also have a high level of cynicism and a bone-dry sense of humour, which tends to revel in misfortune and ‘bringing people down a peg or two’, including ourselves. I sense that VisitBritain would never embark on the same path as Tourism Australia, because it knows the British national character all too well. We’ll leave the patriotic optimism to the Aussies; Brits would much rather revel in the joy of misery.
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