I finally picked the bananas from the back garden today. It's four months since they reached full size, and only now have they started to turn yellow - we were starting to think that they might never do so.

They are the best I've ever tasted - the small, intensely sweet Caribbean kind rather than the larger and less flavoursome bananas grown by big, evil multinationals in Latin America.

Pam is cooking dinner for friends this evening, and she's going to flambé them to make New Orleans' most famous dessert, bananas Foster.

Anyone watching channel 264 on DIRECTV would get a pretty peculiar picture of life in modern Britain.

If BBC America is anything to go by (fortunately, it's not), we spend our weekends taking Lamborghinis on tyre-shredding 200-mph test drives along deserted, lava-strewn Icelandic roads.

When our squalid, cockroach-infested houses become uninhabitable, we call in the divas of dirt, a former MI6 spy and her matronly sidekick, who share the contents of our unflushed toilets with millions of viewers.

We open restaurants, but nobody comes. Salvation arrives in the form of an ex-soccer player who says "fuck" a lot to prove that being a chef is no job for pansies, and before long the phone is ringing off the hook.

All this is because BBC America only ever shows about three programmes: Top Gear, How Clean is Your House?, and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

I have no idea why the world's greatest broadcasting organisation is so parsimonious about sharing its bounty with the people of America. Complain, and you get a letter from a computer saying that the channel is committed to maintaining a diverse range of entertaining and educational programmes. Which is a joke.

That said, they are very good programmes.

For many years, I completely missed the point of Top Gear, which is about cars. I had little interest in the subject, and none at all in its presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who has now assumed George W. Bush's mantle as the world's leading climate change denier. He has little time for people like me: lefties, environmentalists, cyclists, expats:

Anyone who emigrates from Britain, no matter where they end up, is a bit of a dimwit... Every single expat I've ever met is the same: hunched at a bar in a stupid shirt, at 10 in the morning, desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not alcoholics, that the barman really is their friend and that it's only eleven hours till bedtime.

Then, when they clock your accent, they launch into a slurred tirade about Gordon Brown and the British weather and how their prawns are the size of Volkswagens.*

The trouble is, Jeremy Clarkson is a comic genius, and Top Gear is wonderful. What I didn't realise until I started watching it on BBC America is that it's essentially one gigantic pisstake.

Every so often, the programme gets a bit po-faced for a few minutes ("Of course the V6 version does have the added benefits of a tilt-and-telescope steering wheel, electroluminescent gauges and power mirrors"), but if you're watching a recording you can always fast-forward these bits, like the first five boringly easy questions in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Clarkson could have been a cult hero in this country too, but the US version of the show never got past the starting grid. This was partly because with its spectacular, elegantly choreographed set pieces, it costs a king's ransom to make. A Bugatti Veyron does battle against a Eurofighter jet; Clarkson turns up in a Rolls-Royce to open a public swimming pool and accidentally-on-purpose drives into the deep end; a snowmobile goes hurtling off the end of a ski jump.

The other reason is that the BBC is publicly funded, so it doesn't have to worry about putting sponsors' noses out of joint. Which is fortunate, because Clarkson and his co-presenters administer brutal tongue-lashings to any vehicle which doesn't come up to scratch: "This is a monumentally crappy car. Do not buy it even if the dealer gets down on his knees and implores you to."

We keep telling our American friends that Top Gear is the best thing on TV, but they just nod politely and uncomprehendingly. Jeremy Clarkson himself said that the programme had gone down poorly with focus groups on this side of the Atlantic: "They just don't understand a single word we're on about. They just don't get it really." Well, he was wrong. Pam is American, and she gets it.

* They are.

I also like to keep an eye on the weather back in London - in the past week or so, it's been almost as steamy as New Orleans. I've just discovered this extremely addictive way of finding out whether it's raining in Trafalgar Square.