Welcome to the rural idyll ... Jam and Jerusalem. Photograph: Tim Cuff/BBC
London, as anyone can tell you, isn't actually England. It's much more like New York or Sydney than, say, Sutton Coldfield or St Neots. So as a Scottish person who's lived in London for nearly 15 years, I still don't actually feel I understand the real England any more than when I first moved to the city.
In particular I don't understand the countryside. I think it's the place where people believe that killing foxes is worth hitting other people for, and where they go on long marches to complain about people closing local shops that they don't actually use. There also seem to be an awful lot of Countryside Alliance stickers stuck on huge 4x4s that spend their lives stuck in Chelsea.
So I was looking forward to Jennifer Saunders' and Dawn French's new sitcom, Jam and Jerusalem - starring Sue Johnstone, Joanna Lumley, David Mitchell, Pauline McLynn and Sally Phillips - as some sort of insight into English country life.
But there are a couple of worrying antecedents to this project: Wild West, which was Dawn French and Catherine Tate as two women in a village, and that grim preachy church one, also set in a village and starring Dawn French, that ran for years and years without ever being funny. Making a third sitcom set in an English country village and starring Dawn French is just asking for trouble.
Furthermore, Jam and Jerusalem joins a huge run of cosy English countryside-set shows that suggest that everything rural is just lovely. Everyone is white, lives in picturesque cottages, and has dogs. Occasionally of course there'll be a brutal murder (Miss Marple, Rosemary & Thyme), but usually it's all about the heartwarming neighbourliness and beautiful landscapes (Dibley, Heartbeat, Last of the Summer Wine, Open All Hours, Calendar Girls).
I like the idea of harassed TV execs sitting in their smog-polluted city offices fantasizing about apple-cheeked ladies who serve fresh cream with scones, but is it actually true?
Most of my friends who disappeared from the city a couple of years ago in search of a "better life" are now back, haggard from the 5am milking, the scary country noises, the bored teens sniffing glue at the solitary bus stop and the stress of having to drive 17 miles in the pitch dark every time they wanted a pint of milk. So what came first, the perfect rural idyll or the TV show?
After all, in America, the suburbs are depicted as a living hell with a seamy underside (American Beauty, Desperate Housewives, Blue Velvet), while the countryside is dull farming country in which you either starve to death (Grapes of Wrath, In Country) or are eaten by inbred mutants (Deliverance). And in France, Jean de Florette is just waiting to bop you over the head to steal your land. But in merrie England, jauntiness reigns.
So help me out stout yeoman. The English countryside - is it really like on TV?
