Red Dwarf memories

Podcasting has to be the biggest boon to Aglophiliacs since PBS started importing Britcoms. Today is Saturday, so a new Jonathan Ross radio show is up. I suggest you subscribe in iTunes immediately.

Ross has been on a roll lately ... a few weeks ago he had David Tenent, then Paul Weller. This week he had Patsy Kensit (ex-wife of both Jim Kerr and Liam Gallagher!) But last week was a real cracker. You can listen to it here.

The show features both Noman Lovett and Hattie Heyridge -- the two "Holly"s from Red Dwarf. Now, as "Wossie" (said with love) describes it, the average Red Dwarf fan is somewhere between the age of 12 and 14 1/2. But what he doesn't realize is that so many of us stateside didn't discover this amazing show until we were proper adults and we still loved it.

For those of you who don't know about it, you're a smeghead (that's meant to be funny to fans of the show). Red Dwarf was an inventive comedy set 3 million years in the future and it follows the adventures of the last human left alive -- a 22nd-century curry-loving Liverpudlian who's been in stasis as the millenia past by.

And since it is Saturday, many of you have seen last night's Doctor Who by now, which was a real cracker, wasn't it?

Straight away

Right. It's an obsession. It's a quirk. A glitch in the old wiring. Something between crossdressing, a penchant for Dungeons and Dragons, and scholarly curiosity. Anglophilia.

For some it's so acute that they move there. For others (to stretch the transvestite metaphor to its limits), we don't want to be British, we just want to act British sometimes.

There are lots of entry points: music, literature, britcoms. For some of us it's an obsession that started with the Beatles and Monty Python reruns. From there it can run into all kinds of estoterica (if can call it that -- I mean everybody should listen to Jonathan Ross's radio show now that you can get it on iTunes).

For me, the moment when I decided to explore this impulse was when I got a special thrill while reading Nick Hornby's book How to be Good (which, of course I was reading because it's so British) and I caught a reference to Melvyn Bragg (he's a presenter on Radio 4) and knew who he is.

Is Doctor Who better than an American scifi show just because of the accents? Or My Hero? Or As Time Goes By? What make you pick up a Hornby or Mark Haddon novel before a Yank equivalent? Do you have a wave of righteous indignation when someone asks you who Paul Weller is? Can you name the current mayor of London? Maybe you sign off emails with "Cheers."

You might have the same disease.

So let the gates open. I'm going to try to explore my crazy interest in all things British, trying to understand the impulse a little better. And you add to the conversation.

Let's see what we see.