Think of all those sponging Brits from Primrose Hill piling in to Manhattan.
So there’s a commercial with a star-spangled banner – more precisely an embroidered sampler affair with white stars stitched on a blue background – and some strong words from President George W Bush. He reads them and they come up in the sampler frame like poker-work homilies in a Western bedroom. George W’s first big thought is: “Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”Now this provokes one to exactly the kind of nit-picking pedantry that makes the Republican Party believe all Europeans are probably Commie perverts, just like the ghastly French But I’m going to have to do it, George. I’m going to have to ask exactly who “we” are in this instance? (Picking George Bush up on the verbals is a very, very bad crime in right-wing circles; it’s snotty, irrelevant, snobbish. No matter that George Bush, in American class terms, is practically royal, absolutely not Forrest Gump.)So what’s with this “we”? Should we be enjoying America in the way Americans want it to be enjoyed? It sounds as welcoming as “Keep Off The Grass”.The commercial, sponsored by the Travel Industry Association of America, shows a lot of uniformed servants of American travel and leisure facilities, clearly suffering from over-capacity and under-utilisation, begging us to visit America It’s air stewards and Avis girls and hotel porters. It doesn’t show us America itself, no scenery, no people, no Golden Gates or golden days, nothing. Just a lot of planes and hire cars and cruise ships and Ritz-Carltonish-looking hotels And they all grin like mad.

The whole thing looks like a collage of early-Eighties corporate conference films.And then President George W Bush says something else: “The world is beginning to see the best of this great land.” There’s a distinctly moanie tone here, a designed-for-home-consumption complaint that the world’s never appreciated America’s gorgeousness, that it’s gone unchampioned. Why doesn’t he say: “Come in, the water’s lovely”? It’s all held together with accordion-based country music. Which makes it sound even more hokey.This commercial doesn’t stir an ounce of must-see spirit in me, and I’ve enjoyed going to America for 25 years. Instead it shows exactly that ancient, corporate, klutzy, scripted world which Europeans usually see as the downside of American life.. We owe a great deal to On the Record

We owe a great deal to On the Record. Back in 1989 the then editor of that programme, a young and gifted chap named David Aaronovitch, gave me a job as a researcher. It was my first break in journalism.
So I was sorry to hear reports that the last credits may soon be about to roll And not just for sentimental reasons.

For, if the rumours are right, the BBC may be about to abandon its last few outposts of serious current affairs.BBC news bosses are said to be dissatisfied with “worthy but dull” political programmes like Despatch Box and On the Record, and there is speculation that they will be replaced by some more funky, “accessible” output. The corporation was, understandably, disturbed at depressed viewing figures for political programmes during the election, especially among the young, and it wants to do something about it.The likes of Andrew Neil and Melvyn Bragg have been attending a conference to tell BBC executives such as Sian Kevill (herself once an editor of On the Record) and Richard Sambrook (head of BBC News) what’s wrong. Ms Kevill will be submitting a report to the Director General, Greg Dyke, in the new year.She has said that the BBC needs to experiment with “not only new kinds of programmes but new ways of presenting information in existing programmes. We have been doing politics the same way for too long.”The model, so it is whispered, is the Sunday morning Radio 5 Live show hosted by the former spin doctor Charlie Whelan and the iconoclastic journalist Andrew Pierce It has an irreverent, chatty manner.

When I’ve caught it, it is has been an excellent show and is certainly not “dumbed down”.Sticking a camera in front of Mr Whelan and Mr Pierce’s entertaining knockabout might well make for better TV than John Humphrys grilling David Willetts over the meaning of Conservatism. That sort of thing, it has to be admitted, can get tedious.But that is not the point. The point is that without programmes like On the Record you will never, never, never find politicians being held properly to account for their actions. True, the politicians, most of them at any rate, are incredibly skilled at not answering the question and concentrating instead on getting their wretched soundbites “clipped” on the later news bulletins and quoted in the newspapers.That problem, however, is unlikely to be solved by replacing the interviewer with someone younger or sexier, or pulling in a studio audience, or having “yoof” reporters asking 16-year-olds what they want, or any of the other tricks that have been tried and have failed.A few years ago BBC bosses had a similarly disastrous “get-with-it-daddy-o” turn and got Ulrika Jonsson to interview Gordon Brown. He proved impervious to her Nordic charms, and Labour’s fiscal plans emerged unscathed.Jonathan Dimbleby’s Sunday show on ITV has a large cross-section of the public bussed in, but they do little more than dress the set.