A couple of nights ago, I started watching some programme about the Romans. There was the usual academic (older, modest, probably a genius in his field), a reporter and… an American.

OK she might have also been a precocious genius but I suspect something more sinister: she was the token Yank in a growing number who steal in and become part of our entertainment.

They’re in our cooking programmes, our films (playing English people sometimes – sorry, I just don’t understand that), our cultural shows and every genre on our screen.

They add such an air of… hype and downgrading. The programme in question would have survived (for people my age) with just the academic.

But the woman only seemed to add the now mandatory ‘Wow!’ and ‘No, really?’ I suspect that after I switched her off with a violent press of the remote control she’d have put in an ‘Oh. My. God.’

We’re talking about Rome. Not shopping in the morl for a designer handbag: Oh my God.

On bended knees (clutching the remote control firmly) I ask that we make do with sober, staid English academics for this sort of thing.

History doesn’t need sexing up. It’s pretty racy and exciting anyway. Blood, sex, guts and gore. Power, poverty, murder, horror, injustice, thinkers, little people getting their way…

If it’s to attract the young to watch history I think it’ll fail. Until they get rid of the clever bearded man and his pondering, decades of research.

Young people will watch history if they’re interested. And you can’t urge them to watch by giving programmes hot appendages to the real stars of the show (the historians).

Programme makers still haven’t realised that older people who’ve been around and already know some quite interesting things, want knowledge, not just the equivalent of visual doping.

Do classy British thinkers get to make programmes in the US about their own country or people? I think not.

Part of this quiet invasion seems to be to continually reinforce language and cultural changes: we mustn’t forget how to talk American now that it’s so part of our society, eh guys?

The drip, drip repetition of all things Stateside is like a brainwashing.

And for anyone who has a growing girl in the household? Think about this.

Seen the Pop Girl channel? Hour after hour of maple-skinned girls hopping about in shorts and heavy make-up (to give them an entirely natural and healthy look) is highly dubious.

There’s a sort of uniform set of personalities in these teen programmes.

The fat black girl/guy (earthy, matter of fact, slightly funny); the default girls and boys (fit, tanned, they eat fruit and help each other); the geek (yes, the clever character – always wear glasses) and the grown-ups (who know nothing at all and need the youngsters to sort them out).

When this is how Americans make programmes (and export it to our clever, often troubled youth), I want nothing to do with Yanks contributing to any of our serious programmes.

Keep your tans and your hair mousse and your vile Hershey bars (hey, you, stuff some Lindt 90% chocolate into your mouth – that’s0 what chocolate tasted like!) and yr cool guys and yr Disney and burgers and badly put together clothes.

As for me, I suppose I need to stop watching tele. I should know better. Except I’m proved wrong when some genuinely fascinating people come on and tell me things in their modest, unashamedly knowledgeable way.

Minus the American to sweeten it and make it all look ‘not so geeky’ heh?