You might not know this, but Britain is a small country and America is a huge one. It's not immediately obvious because one can only see a little bit of either at a time, but I am slowly getting my head around it. It is a shock.
This gulf in size is being exaggerated though I think because it is no longer merely geography that makes a country diffuse. I have accidentally moved from the UK to the US at a time when the very idea of national consensus is being shredded, and any sense of shared cultural cohesion is falling by the wayside.
Although we occupy the same streets and cities as each other, it is entirely possible for us to occupy a different world to our neighbours. We can use different shops, go to different churches, use different schools and hospitals to each other. Not only can we vote differently and hold different opinions to each other as we have done for decades, but we now we can draw these opinions from totally different news sources. Perhaps they use some of the same names, but there's little overlap between, say, the Muslim Kenyan Obama presented by Fox News and the Christian American President that appears on MSNBC.
News or entertainment, our media options are endlessly dividing and multiplying, like cells, so that we can now spend our lives in divergent realities, sharing only weather and a post code.
The same process is at work in Britain, but its very smallness mitigates against it splintering so quickly into parallel realms, as does having a non-political head of state. But even here, TV channels have proliferated and appointment viewing has become a Holy Grail, much sought after by programme schedulers.
But television still has an almost magic power to pull people together and last weekend saw a remarkable example of it, not just in one country but across the world.
Comic Relief, a charity founded by British comedians in the 1980s to raise money for people in Africa and the UK, has become an institution, entering the national consciousness at the same time as becoming, perhaps, part of the national conscience.
As part of preparations for its 2011 BBC telethon, Comic Relief staged a 24 hour marathon of panel shows over the weekend, with David Walliams (Little Britain) taking part in every one. The resulting episodes of classic (and mostly defunct) shows like QI, Give Us A Clue, Blankety Blank and Call My Bluff will be broadcast later, but a live feed of all the recordings was streamed over the BBC website. It was incredible and most importantly unifying television.
Because it was live, complete with audience rotation and set changes, it was unmissable in the way that television used to be before VCRs let alone TiVo and the internet allowed us to start mixing up our own TV schedules. But there was also something gripping about seeing the pauses or the calm hurriedness of Floor Managers and Make-up Artists as they worked. The tense silence of an audience behaving itself whilst presenters were given their marks or mics were adjusted gave everything a frisson that has long since dissipated from normal programming.
Being streamed, free, for 24 hours meant that the online audience was massive and global. The reputation of the BBC helped pull in and raise money from viewers across the world. And of course, being for charity, these viewers were politely, insistently shown the reason why everyone was doing this. Regardless of language or politics or faith or geographical location, in between the jokes we were shown the appalling and preventable hardships that blight the lives of people in developing societies.
For those 24 hours Comic Relief let us all see the bigger picture.
Regardless of where you live on the planet, you can donate money to Comic Relief here.
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