The pantomime season.

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Unlike the English, the Italians don’t put on pantomimes at Christmas. With Berlusconi providing  an endless supply of corny gags, why would they? This year’s annual pantomime in Ambridge is proving unusually absorbing. The BBC itself has announced that Sunday’s episode will “change the Archers for ever” and everything seems to point to some catastrophic event at the Village Hall which will decimate the cast. Something along the lines of Tony Hancock’s The Bowmans.

   This morning Radio 4’s Today programme introduced its own edgy pantomime which inspired me to offer the following item to the spoof web-site News Thump (formerly known as Newsarse) which Sophy had drawn my attention to earlier this year:

     “Instead of a man dressed as a woman, this morning's featured Pantomime Dame was a  Dutchwoman born in Canada pretending to be British. ‘Dame’ Clara Furse wowed the audience with her insights into British culture and ‘foods’. Radio 4 listener Signor Grandicoglioni - ‘Hey you canna call me Don’ - here on a business trip from Sicily said, ‘Wadda fica. She no Breeteesh. Me, yes. Porca madonna, we Italians rulla your poxy little island for 400 years until those bloody English eemmigrants arrive and take alla da good jobs.’”

    

Don’t get me wrong, like Defoe I not only recognise that we’re a mongrel race but rejoice in the fact. When I read Hugo Rifkind’s article in today’s Spectator, ‘Nothing makes me feel as Scottish as an English New Year’s Eve’ I didn’t sneer and think ‘You’re not Scottish, you’re an Eastern European Jew’. Like his father, the former Scottish Secretary, Rifkind was born in this country which in my book makes him as British as any of the successive waves of immigrants - Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans - who’ve colonised or - Romans, Scandinavians, French, Dutch and Germans - ruled this island. Dame Clara, though, is a different kettle of fish.  Being naturalised, she’s technically British, but only someone with the complacent arrogance and lack of self-irony which this former head of the Stock Exchange displayed today would pick Britishness as a theme when invited to guest-edit Today. Like the banker she is, she thinks everything’s for sale in the globalised world she extolled in the programme. ‘Hey, I fancied being British, so I bought it!’ She’s no more British, than living in Italy for another twenty years and getting naturalised would turned me into Signor Grandicoglioni.