Joe Strummer was right. We really are 'so bored with the U.S.A.'
And so we fill our pages and TV and radio broadcasts with Americana on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, every day.
On Tuesday, for example, America was front and centre for the return of Jim Al-Khalili's The Life Scientific series on Radio 4. Dr Anthony Fauci, physician and former Chief Advisor to the President, and someone who had his own run-ins with Trump, was this week's guest.
This interview should have happened last October, Al-Khalili revealed. It was delayed because Fauci had gone down with West Nile Virus. 'I was deathly ill,' Fauci admitted. 'It seems somewhat ironic - if you want to call it that - that the chief infectious disease person in the United States winds up getting bit by a mosquito in his own backyard,' he added.
Fauci was getting his photograph taken by the Times when it happened. So, newspapers nearly killed him. And people think social media is dangerous.
Actually, it is. The toxic impact of social media was one of the main themes of the programme. Fauci was sent death threats because he dared push back against Trump's unscientific outbursts during the pandemic.
And he is currently worried that the impact of anti-vaxxers could lead to a measles outbreak in the US which in turn will lead to infant deaths.
'I hope that speaking truthfully and openly about the dangers of this will overcome the disinformation that says don't worry about it.'
Good luck with that, Anthony.
Of course you could argue that we're all Americans to some degree or other these days. And for some time now. The story of The Clash is as much a story of their American success as their impact in the UK, after all. And I'm no different. There's a huge American flavour to my favourite music and my favourite movies.
And my favourite book is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the subject of Archive on 4 on Radio 4 on Saturday night. American academic and author Sarah Churchwell went on a deep dive into the language, meaning and symbolism of the novel and came up with answers that included Kantian philosophy, broken clocks and seismographs and the idea that the book is an anti-love story.
'It's a great cure for romance, The Great Gatsby,' the late Christopher Hitchens argued in one of the archive clips. 'Lovers do not give each other copies of The Great Gatsby.'
In passing, the programme was also an account of the book's growing reputation over the years. In 1940, the year F Scott Fitzgerald died, aged just 44, there were seven copies of the book sold. Not a misprint. Seven.
'My God, I am a forgotten man,' Fitzgerald told his wife Zelda in his last years.
'He could hardly have imagined that today the novel sells over 500,000 copies annually,' Churchill noted.
I still have my Penguin 1981 paperback edition with its green spine and a sticker telling me I bought it in the NUU bookshop - on Coleraine's New University of Ulster campus - a few weeks before I moved to Scotland. It remains one of my most cherished possessions.
Best radio anecdote of the week? Maybe that was Elaine Paige recounting her experience of appearing naked onstage in the late 1960s musical Hair
Elaine Paige (Image: PA)
'I was a bit of a wimp about it as I remember,' Paige admitted on Zoe Ball Meets Elaine Paige on Sunday afternoon on Radio 2. 'I had a friend in the show called Gary Hamilton and he was tall, dark and handsome. And he said to me, 'We'll stand at the back and I'll hold your hand for moral support.'
'We had to disrobe under this sort of mesh sheeting thing and then given the right moment we had to stand up as we did in our birthday suits. And I tell you the shock of standing onstage stark naked was such that I reached out to grab hold of his hand, only to find it wasn't his hand I was holding.'
Listen Out For: Don Black, Boom Radio, Monday, 8pm
The legendary lyricist (Diamonds Are Forever, Born Free) was last heard on Radio 2 back in 2020. Now 86, he returns to the role of the DJ on Boom Radio. Expect to hear Matt Monro and Frank Sinatra and a few choice anecdotes no doubt.
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