As a nation our flops are world-class. What they can’t achieve in sheer vulgarity they make up for in dizzying lights and solemn-faced MCs. There’s Countdown, Golden Balls, Win My Wage and the unsurpassable Weakest Link, a certain Anne Robinson. It would of course be unfair to forget University Challenge with a down-market Paxman: UK Gameshows.Com boasts that ‘Very few quiz programmes could be said to make up part of the fabric of the nation, but [this] is certainly a contender’. A fabric so coarse, let me add, that it’s not for sensitive skins. And you’ll say I’ve forgotten Big Brother. Have I, hell!
     So much for our flops. I’m not so concerned about them as about our readiness to watch them and what this says about our national psychology. Are the reasons genetic or simply historical? – Are we born brutish, or did we become so over centuries of isolated development like the Tasmanian devil?
     And it’s not only what we watch. It’s our immature attitude to life in general and alcohol in particular; it’s our insistence on gumming up our pavements with spent chewing gum; it’s our delight in mob violence and our curious affection for everything that’s vulgar. British and brutish may not be synonyms, but their close union is scarcely accidental: think of one, and you think of the other.
     Then there’s the famous British brick. Its menorrhoeal hue casts a bloody stain over Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’; but that’s where, given the choice, we want to live.
     This may all have something to do with the weather. Under the present biblical rain – the first three weeks of July – our geraniums are blackening, so I ask myself whether centuries of such weather might mildew our souls, blacken them like these flowers.
      Naturally you will ask why I live in so brutish a place. The answer is clear: I too am a brute, born and bred.