Twenty years later, as the Gatt squabbles rumble on to nobody’s satisfaction, it’s a familiar refrain all across the continent By 1980, even the romance was ripe for revisionism. In Bad Timing, when two Americans fall in love in Vienna it turns very sour indeed: Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel’s obsessive fling curdled quickly into necrophilia and attempted suicide.In the Fifties, Hollywood was fond of using the Old World in a steady wave of escapist movies: An American in Paris (1951); Roman Holiday (1953); Three Coins in the Fountain (1954); Summer Madness (1955) – there, tourists and expatriates could enjoy a romantic dalliance well away from the moral handcuffs likely to be clapped on them back home. Wenders’s much-quoted remark at the time that “the Americans had colonised our unconscious,” referred in the mid-Seventies specifically to his own country: a West Germany that had lost confidence in itself after Hitler. But the wind was changing as the vnements of 1968 made them take a more political perspective: in that same year, Jean-Jacques Sevran-Schreiber’s bestseller The American Challenge, warned against the economic invasion of Europe: France had moved a long way from Democracy in America (1835), De Tocqueville’s famous account of the country as a role model.In Wim Wenders’s bleak 1977 thriller The American Friend, Dennis Hopper’s weary, manipulative art forger asked “What’s wrong with a cowboy in Hamburg?” The film’s emphatic answer was: actually quite a lot.

It was probably after the Second World War that the American as villain put in increasing appearances, certainly in films made this side of the Atlantic, into full-blown villains. The Third Man (1949) fields both types in one film: the (Canadian) writer, played by Joseph Cotton, who arrives in Allied-occupied Vienna and, on the other side, Orson Welles’ iconic Harry Lime, a racketeer cynically peddling dodgy penicillin at the price of human lives.
French film-makers were still in love with US pop culture, both in their gangster movies, heavily influenced by the American srie noir, and, later in their young critics’ rediscovery of neglected Hollywood directors in the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinma. But as the series progressed, the line between victims and exploiters began increasingly to blur. When Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers was serialised recently for television, that tension, certainly, seemed at first to underpin the story: a group of high-spirited New Yorkers “invading” Britain at the beginning of the century in search of titled husbands – a trade-off between American brass and English class – and inevitably coming to grief as their mates proved less than ideal. Americans in Europe: are they innocents abroad or cynical despoilers? Even in period pieces seeming to turn on the traditional contrast between American guilelessness and European decadence. And remember, people, while we’re touring, please abide by the rules of Heritage UK Don’t, whatever you do, look out of the windows.”.

The Granada Studio Tour, with its Coronation Street set, is the jewel in the crown. For a sizeable fee, visitors are welcomed inside a centrally-heated, cosy world which holds within its breast the setting for the nation’s best-loved soap. It makes you cry, the gawping at a telly world in the heart of the city on which it is based, cocooned a world away from its real life, dreary streets.”Roll up, roll up, bring the whole family!” goes Salford’s new fiction “We’ll show you a good time. But using him as a centrepiece for tourism is yet another desperate “Heritage UK” effort – “We’re unemployed now, we’ve got time on our hands, we might as well get people to visit.”Motivated by a council that really tries, and hammered out in endless meetings in boardrooms at the Quays, tourism in Salford is still a product of the surrealist school.

The buildings, with acres of space left to let, are supposed to be symbols of regeneration, but they look like modern follies, monuments to industrial collapse and the fallacy of the trickle-down effect.Look at Lowry’s paintings – never mind the “matchstick men” kiddies’ stuff – and they show an underfed, downtrodden population living under grey skies, in the shadows of enormous factories Compassion is what makes his paintings great and haunting. The Ordsall estate still hunches miserably opposite the huge glass office blocks of the Quays. And don’t forget to do some peripheral spending, because it is of statistically proven help to the local residents.”But the local residents are as poor as ever they were. “Lovely holiday,” they’ll tell their neighbours back home in the Cotswolds, showing them slides of Exchange Wharf “You really must go.

You can’t knock him for trying to bring an attraction to the wasteland at pier 8, and you can’t knock the council for hunting “regeneration” money, but what sort of holidays have they got in mind? A couple of nights in one of the new hotels, a trip to the Lowry Centre, a look at Ordsall Hall, the 14th-century house which stands guarded from the surrounding housing estate by staunch railings? You can just imagine Dad suggesting a trip to the site of James Brindley’s 18th-century water pump, the kids shouting “Yippee, a landmark example of early industrial engineering”, and the whole family rounding off an ideal day with supper at Harry Ramsden’s, the most over-hyped chippie of the post-industrial age. He was found a few hours later, 16 years old and stone cold dead.Salford’s always been a place to get out of; that’s the truth Albert Finney can’t deny that. It was where he went to sniff lighter fuel in the park, for kicks All his mates ran off when they saw him convulsing. It was where a schoolfriend lived who became a skinhead at 14, getting into robbing houses and street-fighting with bottles and knives. One is Worsley, home to well-heeled businessmen, lawyers and the urban mega-rich (Manchester United footballers). The other is the place where I grew up, Salford 7, or Broughton Park, a leafy suburb predominantly favoured by a middle-class Jewish population.Salford was where I tasted my first kisses, played football till it was dark, caught conkers and went to birthday parties, and also, periodically, suffered a few good kickings on the Littleton Road playing fields. Now, following the billion-pound developments which have brought designer living in place of the rusting machinery and rotting warehouses of the old docklands, there are still only two.