Prescience

What do Hugh Laurie, Tim Roth, Joseph Fiennes, Stephen Moyer, Dominic West, Cat Deeley and Marianne Jean-Baptiste all have in common?

They are all British and they all star in american hit TV series all (with the noble exception of Cat Deeley's proud Brummie) with flawless american accents. In fact I suspect that the vast majority of americans do not even know that they are not US natives.

In 1982 Collin Welland on picking up his Best Original Screenplay Oscar for "Chariots of Fire" proclaimed "The British are coming!" at the time we all thought he was a bit over excited, possibly overlunched and definitely talking rot! Now it seems like he was just a little bit ahead of his time.

It is not only british actors finding favour, or should that be favor, in the US, british producers are doing rather well too. Simon Cowell and his associated shows are a phenomenon, but there are plenty of other examples of British originated shows transferring with huge success stateside. "Strictly Come Dancing" for instance has become "Dancing with the Stars" beating all comers and apparently the UK's latest export "Undercover Boss" from channel 4 debuted on CBS with more than 38m viewers – the highest for any US series opener since 1987 and for the whole season has been the sixth-highest rated show of all time.

Who knows how long it can continue but it must be doing an awful lot for the UK television industry which despite constant pleas of poverty and imminent extinction is still one of the world's largest and most successful.

Of course switching from television to politics there was someone else who displayed remarkable prescience: when back in 1981 a boyish leader of the Liberal Party David Steel proclaimed "Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!" David Steel's Speech Excerpt

Maybe Sir Clive Sinclair was right and there is hope for the C5 yet?