LONDON: Perhaps the only downside to the imminent return of Desperate Housewives will be the renewal of those why-oh-whys about British (vs American) television. Why can’t our scriptwriters do dialogue as well as The West Wing at its best? Why don’t the British have a Daily Show or anything close to it? Why is there no one to touch Jon Stewart or Larry David et al?

What much of this whingeing (and its rebuttal) overlooks is that we are not on a level playing field here. Politics trumps culture. America is a global superpower. Britain, a foggy archipelago off the north-west coast of Europe, may be the home of a lingua franca, but, like it or loathe it, America’s story is the world’s top story. Or, to put it another way, American creativity naturally engages with a bigger picture. And the producers of Desperate Housewives know that their production will find responsive audiences from Aberdeen to Panama.

It used to be the other way round. One hundred and fifty years ago, British culture set the global cultural agenda. Carlyle, Darwin, Disraeli, Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens: the English-speaking world looked to London for its opinions, politics, sensibility, style and even its jokes. A great imperial capital had a secure place in the world’s imagination. Its writers and artists had a guaranteed international audience and with a starring role in the drama called History, there was an appetite for big scenes, big speeches, an appetite we’ve grown weary of.

Now it’s New York and Los Angeles that tell the stories we can’t live without. Dickens has been supplanted by Tom Wolfe, Lionel Shriver and, dare one say, JT LeRoy. American movie stars and movies have colonized the English imagination. A current US airline ad says it all: ‘You’ve seen the movie. Now visit the set.’—Dawn/The Observer News Service