An Englishman Looks at the U.S.

Lots of Englishmen take to the U.S. like ducks to water, but few learn to quack the idiom as fast or as well as Geoffrey Bridson has. Redhaired, red-mustached, bouncy little Bridson (pronounced Brideson), 33, has for the past four months been interpreting the U.S. to Britons via BBC. He has done so with uncommon perception and success. Onetime insurance salesman, poet, at present Geoffrey Bridson is BBC's best known writer-producer-director.

Bridson spent three months banging about the U.S. before doing his first show: An Englishman Looks at Chicago. His half-hour script, presented by professional actors, was a notable job of interpreting a city known mainly to Englishmen for 1) gangsters, 2) rudeness. Wrote he:

". . . New York ain't America, John. But Chicago is. . . . Well, I guess it's much the same way with us. Manchester, Bradford, or Newcastle -- they'll tell you London's all right, but they're the places where the jobs get done. . . . Down here back of the Loop and among these warehouses -- well, it might be most any place in England. Salford or Sunderland or Wapping, I guess. It looks kinda grey and squalid, doesn't it? Chicago's not all beautiful like the lake shore. It's far too big for that. . . ."

Swinging the Bottle.

The British, who got the program by transcription after its initial broadcast over the NBC network, ate it up. They also liked An Englishman Looks at San Francisco ("All that Britain means to the war in Europe, San Francisco means to the war out there in the Pacific") --especially the gag about how fast Henry Kaiser's shipyards build ships:

Englishman: "A 4,000-ton ship in four days?"

Woman: "Sure. Didn't you hear the story--Bing Crosby, I think it was. They gave him a bottle of champagne and asked him to christen a Liberty ship. He said O.K. but where was it? He couldn't see any ship. So they said, 'Start swinging the bottle, brother--it'll be there.'"

The Alaska Highway ("a highway that would stretch from Paris to Moscow") was covered by Bridson in a first-rate script that caught the U.S. idiom ("Boy, I never knew anything could be so cold. It must be about a thousand below"), the feel of the country ("Spring . . . the air's full of the sound of running water, the gurgle of streams and the chatter of rivers below the ice"), and the temper of the men who built it ("Eight miles a day--and only a thousand miles to go").

Brooklyn Speaks.

When Bridson got around to Brooklyn last week, he was stymied. After investigation he had decided that "in some ways Brooklyn seems to me the most English place in America." He gave the professional actors a rest and let the Brooklynites speak for themselves. He was about as successful as anyone could be at trying to seize such a slippery phenomenon. Star of the program was an unreconstructed drugstore-lunch-counterman, who spoke his mind in profound Brooklynese regarding some of his more rugged customers.

"Wise guys! I open up the doors at six o'clock in the morning. One day I'm making coffee. A maniac comes in. 'Hey, jerk,' he says, 'gimme a cupa coffee.' Jerk! You're not in business to fight, right? A physical altercation can spoil the nickels. 'Derelict,' I say, 'don't disturb my equanimity.' So again he insults me--a hollow hulk like that. So I say to him: 'Your idiocy is very refreshing.' So he gets sore and wants to fight. So I say to him nice and polite: 'Hey, bum,' I said, 'stop knocking yourself out. The door's open. Beat it.'"

Basic Rums.

A Manchester-born Englishman who could not go to college because he had to earn a living, Geoffrey Bridson got so bored selling insurance that "I just found myself starting poetry." He became a protege of T. S. Eliot, began writing for BBC eight years ago. One of BBC's most prolific writer-producers, he has many a notable show (The March of the '45, Transatlantic Call, etc.) to his credit.

The U.S. excites and amazes him, and he says he never wants to go home ("I'm not so healthy as I was in England, but I find life more interesting"). Of all U.S. citizens, the Negroes interest him most, and he wants to do an opera about and with them. U.S. drinks fascinate him, too, though he can find few bartenders who ever heard of his favorite: a White Plains Special, composed basically of four kinds of rums.

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