I am, however, often struck by the gap between what Britons think they know of America and the reality. Take the matter of race. Many British pundits apparently think that America in the 21st century is Alabama in 1963 writ large. Perhaps the fact that America has elected a black president (when enlightened Britain can only manage a handful of MPs) may shift this perception, but it is one that should have shifted long ago. The US, after all, has had two black secretaries of state - in a conservative republican administration. It had its first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, in 1967 and its first black general as far back as1954. It has had black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies like Kenneth Chennault of American Express, Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, Ronald Williams of Aetna and Richard Parsons of Time Warner. It will be a long time before Britain or any Western European country with a large ethnic minority population can even approach such achievements.

False familiarity is the besetting sin of British commentary on America, whether on the TV and radio or around the dinner table. Many people seem to think they know the US because they watch a lot of American TV (even if they affect to despise it). Of course, they are generally sensible enough not to assume that the programmes they watch present a completely rounded picture of the US - they are aware that crime scene investigators, despite their dominance on the box, are actually a very small percentage of the population. They may not be aware, however, of social realities that aren't important to the makers of TV police series. To appreciate just how absurd it is to draw one's sense of America from US TV, you just have to imagine the picture of Britain that an American might come up with if he or she built it up from episodes of Spooks, Little Britain, EastEnders, The Glittering Prizes and Casualty, with its relentless whining about NHS cuts.

False familiarity often leads to a kind of laziness in British approaches to American culture. You can see or rather hear this most obviously on the stage. Like my American father before me, I often find it unbearable to watch American plays performed in the West End or to listen to English actors mangling American writing on Radio 4. There are notable exceptions, like Emily Mortimer and Hugh Laurie, but even our best actors seem to think there is a single received "American accent" and then come out with some awful combination of Brooklyn, Alabama and Texas.