Mediaboss Marketing

By Brian Viner

PUBLISHED: 20:19 EST, 11 March 2012 | UPDATED: 05:21 EST, 12 March 2012

Not content with millions of visitors due to arrive for the Queens Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games, the tourist boards of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are doing their best to entice us all to take our holidays here by knocking overseas destinations as well as lauding our own in a 5million advertising campaign.

The four domestic tourist boards each have some of their most splendid wares on show - including the Lake District, the Western Highlands, Anglesey and the Giants Causeway - which are showcased in the television commercial spearheading the campaign.

It has been running since last Thursday and features Stephen Fry, Julie Walters, the Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbeys Lady Mary Crawley), all taking turns to rhapsodise about Britain and undermine the Algarve, the Med, Corfu, even Australia.

Irritating: Stephen Fry has become unshakeable from our lives

Why on earth would anyone want to go abroad in 2012? asks Fry, to which some might say, to avoid Stephen Fry, the tweedy Tweeter having become as ubiquitous and unshakeable in our national life as the common cold.

Lets just hope that he and the rest of the patriotic quartet have forsworn overseas holidays this year as part of their contract. Commercials like these are embarrassments waiting to happen - as when a celebrity chef becomes the face of one supermarket chain, only to be spotted buying his cherry tomatoes from another.

Why go all the way to Bondi when you can come here to Bridlington? asks Grint, a question which will have the folk at Tourism Australia laughing into their didgeridoos. If Grint, worth an estimated 24million after playing Ron Weasley for all those years, takes his hols on the east coast of Yorkshire this summer, then Im Lord Voldemort.

Read more:
BRIAN VINER says he doesn't need smug (and jet-setting) celebs to tell him Bridlington is better than Bondi