HIGNFY

A new series of Have I Got News For You started last night and I decided I'd maybe come to the end of my patience with this programme when the first anti-German joke kicked in.

I've enjoyed a long friendship with HIGNFY over the years but tonight's programme (well, I watched it tonight) came over as tired. Paul Merton is obviously going through one of his depressive phases and had nothing to say. The UKIP woman, invited on - as they all are - for Merton and Ian Hyslop to have a go at, got an easy ride. Stephen Mangan as host seemed to have a poor script to work with. Only Henning Wenn seemed to have any life about him, but the cliched we-won-world-war-two script he had to work to was pretty lame.

I've travelled widely in Europe for almost 50 years and have talked to people who have lived through events of various kinds: French, Dutch, Greek and Belgian people whose villages have been occupied by the Nazis, Catalans terrorised by Franco's troops, East Germans overwhelmed by Russians, Bosnians caught up in civil war. All of them remembered the events from their past, although none of them hated the nations that had made them suffer and all of them were happy to be living in an EU where such human catastrophes would never happen again.

It's only the English - never occupied since 1066 - who seem to harbour outright hatred for other nations. According to them, the Germans lost the war but seem to have done better from the peace (which is unfair). The French: surrender monkeys, useless in a fight. The Spanish, Greeks and Italians: cowards all. And the peoples of Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. In fact, anybody outside the UK - and a lot of us inside the UK who seem to have forgotten that the English are top dog here.

It's a sad world view that your nation has to be the boss and you can only do well if someone else is doing badly.

But till we can change the world, we've got HIGNFY which should be a cutting edge, radical, satirical programme. It used to be, and I have to ask, what went wrong?