A Horse With No Name

I’ve just spent three, very enjoyable weeks in the USA which, as you may not know, stands for Ubiquitous Singing from Adele .

Everywhere I went in Florida the London singer was exercising her lungs on radio, TV shows, commercials, bars and restaurants. They have gone lady gaga for her and will probably now trace her roots back to Calamity Jane, qualifying her to sing the Star Spangled Banner at the Superbowl next year in a cowboy hat.

I love visiting America where the “great service” in retail is all a myth as supermarket check out staff find new ways to ignore you while waiters fake their bonhomie and politeness, a fakeness that’s at least sincere as they sincerely want a big tip. No one waits for you in America or says “you first” as you stand in line, and it’s such a change from our polite culture shown last week as we Brits queued up to be charged in court for rioting.

While Brit lawyers were tied up in court defending the undefensible, American lawyers were advertising at the side of the road. They are the usual, ambulance chasing, chancers we get here, but they’re more inventive. They take out huge road side adverts inviting us to dial 1-400-I-AM HURT, or 1-400-ITS-SORE. I even saw one that read 1-800-OUCH-MAD.

The natives, for some reason, are obsessed with where every other American they meet was born and the second sentence uttered is always “where are you from?”. They then get the answer Tulsa or New Jersey and, no matter what they’ve heard, always answer with “Oh, OK.” Are they all secretly conducting a cost saving census for the government?

As well as Adele, Brits seem everywhere in the American media just now, voicing adverts or appearing on shows. I watched America’s Got Talent with Brit Sharon Osborne showing off her new face and, surprisingly, her new voice too as she currently sounds like an extra from The Exorcist. Piers Morgan was another judge, praising a man for belly flopping off a diving board then later talking politics on CNN. Or maybe it was the other way round. With Piers I never hear what he says above my cries of “how does he get away with this rubbish?”.

TV adverts are dominated by food and medicine. With drug laws the Americans have to put all the side effects on screen too, so a cream for flaky skin will have a voice over that says “can also cause cancer, leukaemia and death, check with your doctor” over happy pictures of people having a picnic in a boat.

As they’re very religious I was not surprised to see a commercial that was shown in almost every TV break for an agency called ChristianMingle.com, a dating site for the religious which had a message that “it’s what God would want”. The Lutheran church along the road from where I was staying had an electronic message board with inspirational messages like “Chew on the bible. It stops truth decay,” and my own favourite “Dusty bibles lead to dirty lives.”

But the religious majority won’t be happy with me as I discovered a great new vice. It’s called Nestle’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and comes in a tube shape ready to be cut up and placed in a baking tray. For those who remember scraping the cooking bowl when mum was making cakes, this is incredibly evocative stuff. I bought a tube and ate the whole thing raw. It’s brilliant. Can we get it here soon please?

My daughters, of course, just wanted to go to McDonalds all the time for hot fudge sundaes but I’m a bit worried about what my youngest has been reading as she slipped up and asked for “a hot flush sundae”. But I think she may have inadvertently hit on something. Maybe we could have a global awareness day for women of a certain age and call it Hot Flush Sunday?

It’s good to be back home for a while. In the past four weeks I’ve travelled to Dubai, Nepal and Florida so it’s relief not to be carrying bags around or constantly taking my shoes off at airport security. I really did enjoy my trip to the U.S. but, as Dorothy almost said in the Wizard of Oz,” East West Home’s Best”.

Apart from the lack of cookie dough of course.

American Pie

I spent part of Easter Sunday catching up on the last episode of series one of Glee. As an admission designed to shatter any image I might have of being macho, I realise this is up there with being word perfect in Judy Garland’s role in Meet Me In St Louis, having posters on my wall of Audrey Hepburn, and just slightly behind choosing Elton John, Ricky Martin, Edith Piaf and Tinkerbell as my all time fantasy band. But I can’t help it. I love it.

Poor old America gets some really bad programmes on television, as we do, but we’re lucky in the UK as we usually get the best of their stuff because that’s what sells abroad. I exempt from this, of course, anything with the word “Model” in it and everything that includes Paris Hilton.

My weekly viewing seems more and more to lean towards Americana with my faves including Mad Men, Glee and True Blood along with comedies like 30 Rock, Modern Family and Fox News. Except, of course, Fox News is supposed to be serious.

Being a news anchor is one of the cheesiest, most shameful jobs in television when you take yourself seriously and, my goodness, they take themselves seriously on American News. The bad acting as they read distressing stories, the forced, unfunny jollity between co anchors as they fill between stories, and the over rehearsed questions and answers with reporters live from a scene, are beyond parody. These nylon headed tailor’s dummies make a fortune and are hammier than Animal Farm during Pork Festival week.

Think of the worst programme idea you can come up with and it’s already been done in America. Just this year “One Thousand Ways To Lie”, an American show where people share the biggest lies they have ever told, was cancelled after just one outing. “The Will”, a show that followed bereaved families attending the reading of loved ones’ wills, premiered in December and was cancelled after the pilot. Also cancelled after just a few shows this month were Past Lives, a detective story based on reincarnation, and Ruby And The Rockits, in which David Cassidy played a “past it” pop star.

But all these lasted longer than a show called Blonde Charity Mafia which followed three blonde twenty somethings who think work is something servants do to feel useful. These princesses worship the Bank Of Daddy and were such poor company the networks hid their embarrassment and it never aired at all. Ditto with Our Little Genius, where child prodigies competed for money by answering questions like “name five Trojan asteroids around Neptune”. No one understood the questions, no one liked the kids.

But before we all start to feel sanctimonious we must remember that because we get a filtered version of American TV, they also get an unrepresentatively good version of ours. They watch The Office or whatever and think all our TV is like that, blissfully unaware of Nick Knowles, My Family, or Last Of The Summer Wine.

We saw off Michael Winner’s Dinners, but you may think a country that allows Ian Wright on Channel Five, or Amanda Holden on anything, or lets Jeremy Kyle earn a living rather than putting him in a cage with Loose Women and a pride of starving lions, is in no position to comment at all.

You may think that. I of course couldn’t possibly comment.