We were talking about America yesterday when a thought suddenly struck me: while we have always presumed that the US embodies our soon-to-come future – extreme plastic surgery, the ability to customise a sandwich or cup of coffee to an infinitesimal point – what if, instead, it actually represents our past, and everything we have progressed from? Religious fundamentalism, imperialism, belief in angels, the continuing popularity of the slip-on shoe?

I say this because the latest hot news from the States, as reported in last week’s Times, suggests that the Americans are now actually looking to us for pointers to their future. Britain! Bad Teeth And Lard Land! Apparently, this season of American Idol– it’s like The X Factor, but with Americans – has taken on a distinctly British tinge. On the previous five seasons, American Idol has worked as a phenomenally successful fast-track to genuinely big careers. A season three finalist, Jennifer Hudson, won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Dreamgirls last month. An Oscar. This is something that even the most cautious gambler in the world would be comfortable in, say, staking the lives of each single living thing on the planet on not happening to the UK’s Ray Quinn.

But this year, on American Idol, something has changed. One contestant, Sanjaya Malakar, is turning every precept of what it is to be American on its head. A preternaturally cheerful 17-year-old boy with admirably wide hair – imagine the holy halo of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but made from alfalfa – Malakar has a very small, pleasant, slightly mewing voice. He is, to cut to the chase, wholly average. The judging panel, including our very own Simon Cowell, weekly refer to him as a “loser”. He is a classic five out of ten. A vocal minnow on a show of confident, bellowing whales.

Yet, at the time of writing, he is the subject of a huge campaign to win the competition, spearheaded by the website votefortheworst.com. The influential DJ Howard Stern is backing the project and, by all accounts, the loser is now a serious contender to win. If he does, critics argue, the show will never be taken seriously again. Cowell – not a man who seems to appreciate a joke, unless that joke is “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Simon Cowell, the richest and most powerful man in the universe, so don’t bother saying ‘Simon Cowell who?’, you peasant” – has threatened to quit should Malakar win.

So, to recap: in the States there is now a national campaign to vote for a loser, as a joke. This is, surely, the biggest outbreak of un-American behaviour since the McCarthy era. It’s positively British. This is the kind of thing we do. We, after all, pioneered the wry celebration of lacklustre or downright awful things (Spam, Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, Little Chef, Chico, Margate, Kate Thornton).

However, I’ve always suspected that enjoying awful things isn’t, as one might presume, the slightly cringing action of a country in decline but, perhaps, actually the action of a country with a surfeit of cultural excellence. Consider: in the 21st century, we can now, at any point, access any moment of artistic brilliance. Elvis’s Sun recordings. The Beatles working through early versions of Strawberry Fields Forever. The Muppets doing Ma Na Ma Na. Given this, then, it is, perhaps, understandable why we might, eventually, tire of things that are good. There are too many of them! You can get them as a polyphonic ringtone for £1! Good things are everywhere!

Things that are bad, on the other hand – genuinely awful, as upsetting as watching an orphanage burn to the ground on Christmas Eve while Santa struggles on the roof with a broken leg – are rare. In a culture where we can hold for British Gas customer services while listening to Uptown Top Ranking by Althea and Donna, it’s a thrilling shock to the system to hear something as awful as, say, Cow by Linda McCartney, in which the late, lovely, yet undeniably unmusical Mrs Macca laments the fate of her bovine friends, most notably with the line “Placid creature/ He will eat you”. Let’s be honest. Which of these would be more likely to engender a memorable conversation, should you crank it up on the iStereo: Bob Dylan’s faultless masterpiece John Wesley Harding or Rape by Peter Wyngarde, in which the star of the 1970s cop show Jason King notes that “French women are a little more seedy/ And rape is hardly ever necessary”.

Because while iTunes, YouTube and a thousand illegal download sites make acquiring a 1,000-strong playlist of undisputed genius an afternoon’s work, finding awful stuff is a great deal harder. Really awful records still have to be tracked down in dusty record shops. They never make the Top 75. They need, to be frank, the eye of a connoisseur.

Given this, it’s fair to say that, these days, it’s the bad stuff you’re into that defines you – and far more eloquently than the good stuff. It requires effort. It requires discipline. It requires, oddly, taste. Therefore, any American voting for the ridiculous, cheerful, doomed galoot Sanjaya Malakar to be the winner of 2007’s American Idol is, paradoxically, making the US a more culturally refined place. I think you know what I’m going to say: yes, I’ll vote for that.

Aping Mosley? I was monkeying around!

I think I’m going to have to acknowledge that my builder reckons I’m racist. Obviously the 600-page history of the Ku Klux Klan in the front room was an initial queering of my pitch – “It’s for research!” I cried, which, in retrospect, wasn’t the immediate, total exoneration that I thought it would be – but since the Monkey Man Incident, I’m sure that he despises me as being a junior version of Sir Oswald Mosley in a bra.

While the builder was away we got a sad-faced Cockney to template our worktops, which he did by climbing all over our cupboards to get the perfect angles, hence his nickname, “Monkey Man”. When our builder returned I cheerfully told him that “Monkey Man came and did the worktops” – a sentence that was greeted with an icy perturbation. Moments later, I realised that this must be because he thought the worktop guy was black, and that I was calling him a monkey. Horrified and slightly flustered, I made a split-second decision to resolve the problem subtly.

Alas, my subtle plan was to mention Monkey Man as often as possible – a tactic, I reasoned, that would surely and swiftly yield an opportunity for me to casually mention both how very white he was, and how very nonracist I am.

Of course – as the more aware reader will have realised straight away – this gambit simply made me look as if I had a genuinely demented loathing of the imaginary nonCaucasian workman who had never existed, and just could not stop referring to him in a derogatory manner. Then the builder asked me how I like my coffee . . .

Liz quiz

Has Liz Hurley’s divorce started yet?

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us