Britain Is Only London: Difference between revisions
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== Film ==
* After being attacked by a lycanthrope on the Yorkshire Moors, David Kessler is inexplicably transported to a hospital 300
* A sequence set in London in ''[[The Mummy Trilogy|The Mummy Returns]]'' opens with an establishing shot that features Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and St. Paul's Cathedral all within a few blocks of each other. Anyone who's actually visited those places can tell you the problem there.
** Given that much of the movie was filmed in London, and given director [[Steve Sommers]], this was certainly deliberate. In the DVD commentary, he specifically states that he knows the view is impossible, but left it in because he thought [[Rule of Cool|it looked cool]].
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* Subverted in Jasper Fforde's ''[[Thursday Next]]'' series. In the first few chapters, Thursday leaves London and returns to her hometown of Swindon, which remains the centre of events in the Outworld (real world) thereafter. In ''Something Rotten'' she visits the vast headquarters of the [[Mega Corp|Goliath Corporation]] on the Isle of Man.
* Played with/discussed in [[The Bartimaeus Trilogy|The Amulet of Samarkand]], when the magicians running the government whine about being forced to attend a conference "in some ghastly place, outside of London, can you imagine?"
* Averted in the [[Night Watch (novel)|Last Watch]]
* This trope is invoked, embraced and gloried in by the [[Rivers of London]] series whose second book starts with the sentence - 'It is a sad fact of modern life that if one drives long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.'
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* Unfortunately even British writers can fall into this - 6 out of the 13 episodes of series 3 of ''[[Doctor Who]]'' take place in London; 5 of them in ''present day'' London. Which wouldn't be so bad if the characters didn't have ''the whole of time and space'' to travel in.
** Series 2 had over half its episodes set in London (four present-day
** Steven Moffat was particularly irritated by this trope's use in ''Doctor Who'', which is why "The Eleventh Hour" takes place in a small English village and Amy is from Scotland, and why his first season only has two episodes set in London (the second also in two other parts of Britain), another with the TARDIS briefly flying over London and a third with a brief, if important, scene with two characters from the first. (Respectively: "Victory of the Daleks", "The Big Bang", "The Eleventh Hour" and "The Pandorica Opens".)
** The first new series lampshaded this by having a hostile alien become mayor of Cardiff; when asked how she's getting away with it, since she's in many ways [[Obviously Evil]], she [[Land of My Fathers and Their Sheep|goes on about how nobody in London would notice if Wales fell into the sea]], then catches herself and realizes she's [[Going Native]]. ([[Truth in Television|She probably has a point.)]]
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