Spare us these nostalgic cliches, Mr Marr
I try hard to understand the English and their peculiarities; being married to a true son of England only deepens the mystery. So it was with inordinate excitement that I tuned into Andrew Marr's new Radio 4 series this week, Unmasking the English.
Marr is a matchless radio and television broadcaster. His comments on our national identity are always fresh and revealing. But not so this time, at least not so far.
Instead of acute observations and sharp analysis, we got bouquets of clichés. You could smell the lavender on the airwaves, taste WI jam and hear stereotypes marching in step round the village green.
I have more than a dozen books on England and Englishness, including bestsellers by Jeremy Paxman and Bill Bryson. Too many, like Marr's programme, are sweetly indulgent, funny, nostalgic and unreal. Imagined England is always rural, white and "unspoilt" like a vicar's wife.
The problem is that even the most incisive of observers still get lost in the mist of nostalgia. They fail to find the country as it is, its extraordinary and gritty realities, the mix and madness. Perhaps it is because this is a land a of stark contrasts and contradictions. It is hard to generalise about. Pomp and punk, courtesy and belligerence are all essentially English. The old English realm of empires, castles and sleepy hamlets cohabits with rebellious modern architecture and ruthless urban drive.
The nation is also changeable. Culturally and biologically the English have always been the most voraciously hungry of European tribes. London is the global capital because millions are drawn to satisfy these hearty appetites.
This is also a pivotal moment, as the English self-consciously redefine themselves. They are nervous though still proud; incredibly successful yet restive; magnificently sure and visibly unsure at the same time; uniquely open but pathologically afraid of strangers and Europe.
But Marr ignores this cacophony and flux and goes instead on a flight of fancy. The mild, pootling and deceptively modest Miss Marple was, he claimed, the quintessential English character - and Boris Johnson the latest avatar of that eternal Englander.
Boris is no latter-day Miss Marple: he should immediately, and in his own inimitable style, protest against the slur. He is like England, our England today - edgy, energetic, hard to read, elusive, voraciously hungry and irreversibly cosmopolitan.
A part of me thinks perhaps England cannot be packaged and programmed, and to try is to fail. But another part passionately believes it is time to do justice to this complex and vivacious land so many of us from all over now call home. Forget the clichés: show us ourselves as we are.
