The American dream

Welcome to America Stretch limos, Hitchcock country, roller-skating Central Park and Johnny Depp in the bar: Dom Joly opens our Stars and Stripes special by explaining why he's happiest across the pond I can still picture every trembling step of my first moments in America. It was the summer of 1987 and I'd taken a train from Toronto to New York. I'd just left school and this was my first big solo adventure.

I was almost giddy with excitement. The train slowly pulled into Grand Central station, very early on a crystal-clear-skied New York morning. I can remember tentatively dragging my little black suitcase through the breathtaking central hall of the station. It was like stepping onto the set of a thousand familiar movies.

There was something unique about the place - a discernible energy in the air that you could almost touch. All around me an ethnic kaleidoscope of New Yorkers rushed from destination to destination as though their lives depended on it. It was the "Wall Street" movie era - greed was good and lunch was for wimps. As a visiting teenager, I felt out of place, like the only living boy in New York without a job.

It was curious. Fuelled by excitement and disorientation, my first responses to the city were almost an out-of-body experience, floating high above the Big Apple.

I drifted out of the station into the sprawling expanse of the Manhattan jungle. It was a world of huge shadows - the sun blanked out by the sheer enormousness of the Manhattan skyline. I rode the Staten Island ferry, conquered the Empire State Building, roller-skated in Central Park.

It was astonishing, like meeting one of your childhood heroes and finding out that not only did they not disappoint, but they were far, far cooler than you'd ever dared hope. From that moment on I've been hooked.

America, wherever I've found her, harnesses an excitement that I've never found anywhere else. One of the most common insults thrown at Americans of late is that they are insular, disconnected from the rest of the world, with apparently only 20% of the population in possession of a passport.

To us this seems unthinkable. When you travel in America it all makes sense. There's not that European need to travel "abroad" when it'll take you a lifetime to discover your own country. Want to go skiing? Head for the Rockies. City break? You're spoilt for choice. Beach holiday? Miami, Hawaii any one? Fancy something exotic? Try Alaska.

To begin with, I, like most visitors, only really flirted with the place - skirting the periphery, visiting all the oh-so cosmopolitan cities around her edges: New York, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco.

Individual character

Every one with its own individual character and complicated identity - enough to keep you busy, stimulated and entertained for years. I first went to Miami by chance. I had to film some American Trigger Happy clips down there and wasn't really looking forward to it.

To me, Florida was all about neon tackiness, Miami Vice and hideous theme parks. In a way I was right. There is a kind of gloriously confident kitsch to Miami. That's part of its appeal. This is, after all, the only city in the world where a yellow Ferrari makes sense.

The gorgeous combination of fabulous climate, art-deco architecture and an uber-mellow Cuban-Hispanic influence instantly made it one of my favourite cities in the world. Nothing quite beats sitting on the terrace of the Tides Hotel, mojito in hand, watching a perfectly toned world glide by.

One breakfast, I was joined by the rapper Jah Rule and his pet lion: only in Miami, only in America. People warned me about Los Angeles: "Nobody walks anywhere, it's not a real city, it's all so fake, so artificial." Once again, they were right.

It is all those things and you need to embrace them wholeheartedly really to enjoy the place. When the wheels of my plane first touched down at LAX, I got the same weird feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'd had way back in 1987 upon first arriving in New York.

Here I was in Los Angeles: LA, Sunset Strip, Ventura Boulevard, Venice Beach, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu - such familiar places to me, yet I'd never been before. It was like doja vu. Of course, in a way, it was: I'd been there through TJ Hooker and Chips and a thousand and one other films and TV shows, but the difference was that now I'd actually stepped through the screen. It was weird.

My first time in LA, I did the place the way it should be done. I was there for meetings at Comedy Central and they really pushed the boat out. I got sent a stretch limo that whisked me in air-conditioned splendour to my suite at the famous Chateau Marmont - the Sunset hotel that's borne witness to the worst of Hollywood excess.

While unpacking, I was unable to keep my eyes off the smoggy LA skyline through my french windows, it seemed so unreal. I wandered into the chateau's small courtyard garden to find Johnny Depp nursing a Tom Collins. It really was a celluloid fairyland. Even the urinals, for some extraordinary reason, had crushed ice in them instead of the usual, oh-so common, blue cubes.

I'd never be content being anywhere else again. Every sharp-suited executive at every meeting promised me the earth was mine - it was a merry-go-round of broad smiles and green lights. Of course, nothing came of any of this, but, my God, it was fun at the time. I was living the clich‚, the American dream. San Francisco had always seemed to be the most European, the most free-thinking of American cities.

The American dream

I visited it two years ago and spent a fascinating two weeks drifting from area to area - Gay, Cuban, Psychedelic, Italian, Chinese, Artistic - it was like an international theme park, but with credibility. I stayed off Haight-Ashbury, in The Red Victorian, a fantastically over-the-top hippie throwback hotel with goldfish in the glass cisterns and open-mike vegetarian poetry readings in the vegan cafe below.

Driving a classic lime-green convertible over the Golden Gate Bridge and up Highway One, I disappeared into a Hitchcock movie. I headed for the badlands of northern California, I was free, free to... do whatever it is I wanted to do... I even think that I saw Bigfoot, but my judgment might have been affected by an intensive, day-long, wine-tasting visit to Napa Valley.

All of this and nothing... I've only dipped my toes in some of the coastal outlets of this enormous entity. I can't begin to describe the sinful delights of Las Vegas, musical adventures in Austin, Texas, or storm-chasing in Kansas.

The list is endless. Politically, America is two countries: one, the big coastal cosmopolitan cities that encircle, the second, the more insular and, to our eyes, more unsophisticated heartland - the Republic of Middle America.

For an upcoming television series, I recently drove from Atlanta through the Southern states to New Orleans. Growing up, America's Deep South was always a slightly scary place, brimming with old hatreds and prejudices and men in pointed sheets. To my delight, what I predominantly found was an exciting, emerging "New South" - multiracial and confident of her position in 21st-century America.

It was a weird feeling crossing over the state line from Georgia into Alabama. I mean: Alabama - Jesus, the things I'd read about this state... yet the place wrong-footed me from the start. We crossed over into the north of the state and it wasn't fields and fields of cotton but beautiful hilly country peppered with golden lakes and shady wooden homes.

Driving on towards Birmingham, we passed through areas that were still not allowed to sell alcohol and where God was still very much in charge. It was exciting to travel through somewhere so alien from modern-day secular Britain.

We were constantly confronted with nothing but "good ol' fashioned Southern hospitality" and groaning tables of deep-fried, uber-calorific fare. In Mississippi I spent a day as a deputy sheriff with the police. I'd always equated them with brutal, lynch-happy, big bubbas and I was a tad nervous.

They turned out to be far more enlightened than the police I've met in the West Country. One got the feeling that things were changing for the good in the "New South" and I loved the place. Eight months after Hurricane Katrina, we arrived in New Orleans. We drove through miles and miles of completely deserted American suburbia, like going through Harlow after a nuclear holocaust. It was mind-blowing.

When we eventually reached the stricken city centre it was to find a population bowed but not quite broken. Most of the trappings of a modern American city were still not functioning - traffic lights, air conditioning, dry-cleaning - but the can-do American attitude to life was in full swing.

Late at night, wandering down a backstreet of the French Quarter, the maudlin strains of a lone blues guitarist took on a completely new meaning - a paean to a sunken city. To me, America's like a candy store and I'm the sweet-toothed kid waiting at the door every day eager to sample new treats.

I want to go to Hawaii and learn to surf, hang out in Minneapolis and stalk Prince, go to Texas and become a cowboy, burn up on chillies in New Mexico, fly to Maine for a lobster pig-out, but then there's Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde... STOP. ENOUGH. I can't take any more.

Well, I can actually. I've never, ever been bored for a single second in America. I've been there more times than to any other country and I've still only scratched the surface. Every time I look out of a window... outside is America.

Courtesy: www.timeonline.co.uk