A man walks into a pub.
The man is Scottish. The pub is English. The man says: "Do you have any Scottish beer? It's very difficult to get good English beer I find, whereas in Scotland it's practically impossible not to be served a tremendous pint. Everything's better in Scotland. Oh, there's my phone, invented by a Scotsman."
The man is the latest character from Harry Enfield. He's a Scotsman who thinks everything Scottish is wonderful and everything English is rubbish and could that be any more accurate or timely? There are lots and lots of Scots just like this and their voices seem to be getting louder, and suspiciously more Scottish, the more we talk about the referendum on independence.
And that's not surprising because Enfield does this kind of thing well: he spots a clique, or a trend, or an emerging democraphic, and he and Paul Whitehouse send it up gloriously.
One of the other great characters in the new series on BBC 2, is a middle-aged man talking to his neighbours about box sets. "We don't watch TV," he says. "We watch box sets. You must have seen The Killing on box set? Surely? Surely you've seen The Killing on box set?" It's a horrible, self-satisfied, middle-aged, middle-class man who thinks his cultural choices are better than other people's. And I recognise him because he's me.
I'm pleased Enfield is finally taking aim at the middle classes. We know he's good at playing swaggering chavs and gibbering toffs but now the economic downturn has made this the perfect time to laugh at the middle classes. It has exposed us for what we are, and highlighted all those pretentions and possessions we used to think were important. And luckily for us all, Enfield, Britain's professor of sketch comedy, is there to have a laugh at it.
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