World war twee: the hideous triviality of our times

I remember the moment I first understood that we, the British, had a national character. It was in the mid-1970s and my family and I were watching a clip from an American TV show which was being shown to us by ITV for a giggle. It was a celebration of the love between mothers and daughters. A hyper-glamorous mother walked down a marble stairway on the left, her young daughter descended an identical stair to the right, and they met at a gently tinkling plastic fountain.

Over the soothing sound of the water they took it in turns to stare gooily into each other’s eyes and emote. The daughter lisped something along the lines of ‘You are my guiding light, Mommy’; the mother said something like: ‘You are the light of my life and I bless each day.’ This was repeated several times, to hoots of derisive laughter from the ITV British studio audience and from my own folks in the living room. I could only have been seven or eight but I was cracking up too. Somehow, I already just knew.

‘Why are Americans like that?’ I asked. ‘We’re just different to them,’ my own ‘mom’ replied. But 50 years on, we have entirely lost this aversion to glutinous sentimentality. There is slush and syrup and cutesiness all around. We are bombarded by twee.

Let’s take a walk though the capital. There is a mural of St Paddington Bear on the South Bank. ‘Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in,’ it reads. In October, the BBC reported that Paddington Bear had ‘finally been issued with a British passport, 66 years after he was first said to have arrived in London’.