There was a time, many wars ago, when we British complained that American GIs were “overpaid, oversexed and over here”. Now, suddenly, British actors are overpaid, oversexed and over there, stealing all the best television roles from under the noses of slowpoke, gum-chewing Yanks. I speak of House with Hugh Laurie, Lie to Me with Tim Roth, and our two British boys who did service in The Wire. Plus the stealth bombing of Broadway, where almost half of last season’s plays were quietly directed by the British.

Thus it was a terrible mistake for Dominic West to get all shouty this week on the sensitive subject of foreigners pinching prime British roles. West is, of course, the Old Etonian who played the gritty, grotty Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty in The Wire. “I was sort of smarting from Russell Crowe coming over here and playing Robin Hood and all these foreigners coming over here and stealing our great heroes,” West said. “I felt I was striking a blow back by being a Brit playing a foreigner.” (He has a point about Robin Hood — now filming in a pine forest in Surrey — although Crowe is from New Zealand and his Maid Marian co-star Cate Blanchett is Australian, and presumably the Merry Men sing Waltzing Matilda.) West was also upset by Johnny Depp portraying so many British treasures including J. M. Barrie, the Earl of Rochester, Sweeney Todd and Willy Wonka. Then he lashed out some more: “I suppose for someone who made quite a lot of money out of being in an American TV show I shouldn’t moan really, but it does annoy me when Beatrix Potter is played by a Texan [Renée Zellweger]. And Bridget Jones — what’s wrong with our great Kate Winslet; why wasn’t she Bridget Jones?”

But West has failed to examine the two-way thespian traffic — while the United States has a trade deficit, actors have become our only export in the recession. “Our great Kate Winslet” was much better served in the end by trashing the American Dream in Revolutionary Road and snaffling an Oscar for The Reader. Indeed, Winslet and her partner, the director Sam Mendes, could easily be described as the “axis of evil” in this assault on stateside culture. Mendes is all over New York like a rash — a Chekhov here, a Shakespeare there — and with Kevin Spacey running the Bridge Project in London and Brooklyn, viewed by some to be a canny undercover plot to feed yet more British actors into the States. The Britons Simon Russell Beale, Sinéad Cusack and Rebecca Hall, and the Americans Ethan Hawke, Richard Easton and Josh Hamilton are part of a transatlantic cast for The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard. The performances began in Brooklyn and are now at the Old Vic in London.

It is so nice for us to be un-rubbish at something, somewhere. But it also raises the question: why do the Americans want us so much? It cannot simply be the ancient “they’ve got Shakespeare, and we’ve got a chip on our shoulder” cliché. Why is Hugh Laurie (Eton) worth nearly £6 million per series to the makers of House? Why did Anna Friel (Brookside) star in Pushing Daisies? And why did Damian Lewis (Eton, RSC) win roles in two series of Life?

So grim is this state of affairs that America’s National Public Radio interrogated the makers of Life, who confessed: “What we found out about English actors is that they’re funny. We had a hard time finding an American tough guy who will be the butt of the joke, whereas Damian has no problem doing it. He’s like half Stan Morrow and half Steve McQueen.” It turns out that slightly imperfect looks and even British bad teeth are more convincing. The Life producers added: “You could argue that in our system, if you’re a young actor who isn’t leading-man handsome, you’re probably not going to get nurtured the way that you would in England, just based on talent.”

For some actors, such as Idris Elba, the drug gang leader in The Wire, the decent parts are all overseas: “Unlike here, in the US there are lead roles for black actors, and I realised that if I wanted to be all I could be, I would have to go to the US.”

While we provide the actors, the Shakespearean-style epics of modern times are all being written by Americans for televison. In Blighty we lack the ambition and cash to create the brilliance of The Sopranos, The West Wing, Mad Men and Six Feet Under. Also, it seems that we can never make a properly local big-screen Robin Hood. Slings and arrows from the past include Errol Flynn in 1938 and Kevin Costner in 1991, and now the final insult of Crowe’s antipodean outlaw.

Everyone has their own “most-hated foreigner” moment; mine is Nicole Kidman with a big plastic nose playing Virginia Woolf, and if you’ve ever heard a recording of Woolf, you’ll know she had an accent so dreadfully upper class it sounded like a squeaking bandsaw. Kidman got it quite wrong, in every way.

There is more agony to come from the special thespian relationship, in the form of Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes. The Warner Bros blurb promises a “more adventuresome” Holmes, who gets into bare-knuckle fights. We will suffer his performance later this year. At least revenge is being planned: Sacha Baron Cohen is rumoured to be starring in his own version of Sherlock soon — Brüno goes to Baker Street. As we Britons say in times of danger: Keep Calm and Carry On.

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