One of the most depressing things in the UK is the way in which culture has been completely colonised by the US. It's so pervasive it's part of the background noise, and no one notices.

A trivial example - at a local open microphone night, with exactly one exception, all of the singers sang with a fake US accent.

One even sang a song he'd written about Vietnam, even though I'm pretty sure the closest he'd ever been to Vietnam was his DVD copy of Apocalypse Now.

30-40 years a folk night would have British folk songs - some of which are aggressively socialist and populist - and people would have dared to sing them with a British accent.

Now we have an endless wave of poor Bob Dylan clones.

That's what I mean by meddling. Of course, there's no Central Secratariat of Cultural Propaganda in the US which has made this happen. (Or maybe there is - I don't know.)

But if it's subtle enough, it happens by osmosis. And it has a huge effect on what people who absorb culture and media are able to imagine about the world.