When a woman is tired of dirty old Britain...

In many ways, Joan Collins is a hero of contemporary life. As an actress, she has finessed her modest talent into a profitable career which has lasted almost half a century. As a novelist, she struck a mighty blow for authors when she successfully sued the American publishers Random House after they tried to wriggle out of an expensive contract on the heartless and bogus grounds that they had belatedly discovered that she was not a terribly good writer. As a person, she has given hope to pensioners by living life to the full in her late sixties, skipping about the West End stage in her underwear and marrying a man 40 years her junior.

Tough, sensible, ambitious and fun-loving, she clearly has claims to be one of the great Englishwomen of recent times.

Now she is leaving. This weekend she announced that she and her young beau are to relocate to Manhattan where the streets are safe and clean, there is less swearing and scruffy dressing and – something of a surprise here – the people are "more polite, more respectful". The woman who humiliated one of the biggest publishers in the world is now afraid to walk 400 yards from her flat to her hairdresser in Ebury Street because, apparently, groups of muggers are working the area.

The rest of Joan's case against her country has a drearily familiar, Meldrewish ring to it: litter, yobbery, envy of success, over-crowding, rudeness on TV where "the F-word" – something of a horror of hers, it seems – is heard more and more frequently. In contrast, America, where she will shortly be appearing in a daytime soap, is full of what she calls "positivity".

It is not exactly heartbreaking news, but all the same it is rather sad. One has become used to seeing fading stars like Rod Stewart, Sean Connery or Salman Rushdie dragging their ageing bones to a foreign land, moaning as they go, but, even at 69, Joan Collins clearly had so much still to offer her country. And the problem is not ours – there is no shortage of ageing actresses prepared to expose themselves on stage – but hers.

Something odd seems to happen to the emigré English. They leave the country believing that escaping from the undeniable grimness of some aspects of national life will somehow give them more space to fulfil their potential. Away from the tension and squalor, their talent will bloom and they will generally become more themselves.

Yet, for reasons no one quite understands, the very opposite happens. They become crashing bores, gleefully reading the latest bad news from Britain and congratulating themselves on their "quality of life", becoming tanned, dried-up parodies of what they once were, cranking up their accents a notch in a doomed attempt to make themselves interesting to the locals.

This process of decline seems to be peculiar to the British. Australians abroad – Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries, Kathy Lette – are invigorated and energised by the experience, becoming wittier, edgier and more substantial than they would ever had been had they stayed at home. Moving abroad has always proved to be an excellent career move for the ambitious Irish person. Americans are invariably improved by a healthy dose of foreignness.

Perhaps the awkward truth is that the impulse to move away from Britain is a sign, not of weariness with these islands, but of some inner malaise – boredom, a loss of curiosity, originality, libido, or a general sense of life slipping away from within.

It seems that Joan Collins is part of a general trend. According to the Australian High Commission in London, applications for residency are likely to have increased by a quarter this year, while other statistics suggest that more Britons are now planning to live abroad than at any other time recent history, including the post-war years or even the 1970s. Inevitably, blame has been attached to the weather, the trains, the traffic jams, Mr Blair but these dreams of leaving are more likely to be symptoms of more intimate crises.

One worries for these people because it is the very pressures of life in Britain – the overcrowding, the back-biting, the incivility, the morally compromised character of our media – which actually sharpen the experience of living here. It was presumably this that caused that great advocate of emigration, Martin Amis, to change his position since announcing that his future was in New York. Serious writers, he said, must be on the cutting edge of the culture; Britain leads the world in nothing but decline. He is still here. Maybe the cutting edge moved; perhaps he decided it would merely blunt him as a writer.

Sun, quality of life, a refuge from the F-word, "positivity", may appeal to the restless spirit but, more often than not, they have a tendency to pickle the British brain, desiccate the British spirit. It seems that we need to have something to moan about in order for us to feel truly alive.

Terblacker@aol.com