The noise you can hear screeching across the Atlantic isn't a cat being dropped into a blender. It's just a young man with an unusually high-pitched voice named Adam Lambert. He's one of the last two contestants appearing on the finale tonight of American Idol - Simon Fuller's all-conquering stateside version of Britain's Pop Idol - and he's widely expected to prevail over his blander rival, Kris Allen.

This is noteworthy for two reasons, the first being that Lambert is gay. Well, not openly gay, but not openly not-gay, either. Oh, and there's a picture of him on the internet snogging another bloke.

No biggie, you might think. But this is the wholesome, air-brushed, all-American universe of Idol - a show where teary-eyed renditions of Jesus Take the Wheel are as ubiquitous as Simon Cowell's distressingly tight-fitting T-shirts.

What's even more amazing is that if Lambert wins the contest, he'll have to get about as many votes as it took one Barack H. Obama to become President. Not as many voters, mind you, but votes. (Most Idol fans vote multiple times via telephone. Some even try to skew the results with “robo-diallers” - not that anyone entirely trusts the results anyway.) For a proudly camp, eyeliner-wearing male contestant to win would be a pretty remarkable coup, given that only last year several American states, including liberal California, were busy introducing special laws to outlaw gay marriage.

As for the second noteworthy thing about American Idol (which is broadcast by Fox, owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times) although the show's ratings have slipped from a high of 30 million viewers per episode to 25 million over its eight-year run, the franchise is more dominant than ever, to the point where its lead over the runner-up programme is a whopping 66 per cent.

It's an absolute monster of a show. And it gets better for Simon Fuller, who created Idol through his London company, 19 Entertainment. Recently filed documents suggest that, in spite of the falling ratings, the Idol franchise is now more profitable than ever, largely thanks to contestants' performances being sold via iTunes, and hundreds of product tie-ins, from ice cream to trading cards. It would be easy to find all this a bit galling, given the current recession, if it wasn't for the fact that Idol is such a rare thing these days: a British financial success story based on genuine entrepreneurialism - not dodgy mortgages.

Cutting remarks

Speaking of Brits who make it in LA, it's always interesting to hear from Angelenos who head in the opposite direction. One such fish out of water is Chris Erskine, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, who has recently been filing light-hearted dispatches from London.

Ever been curious about How They See Us? Well, brace yourself, Britain. “You have never seen so many sickly-looking people as here in London,” reports the LA Times's man on the ground (this is a powerful statement, incidentally, from someone who has just arrived from that newspaper's bankruptcy-stricken newsroom). As for those Londoners who don't look as though they're about to kick the bucket, Erskine describes them as “pink and well-scrubbed... like baby mice”. He goes on to marvel at the absence of mini-malls and tanning salons, and the thousands of drinking establishments. He also remarks, in passing: “I'd be beheading people too if all it did was rain all the time.” Now whatever you make of Erskine's observations, you've got to admit: it's pretty cool if Americans think we still do that. No wonder George W. Bush never seemed keen to visit.

Home truths

There are, of course, many perils involved in pointing out the absurdities of a foreign land to your compatriots - largely because we now live in an age when the inhabitants of said foreign land can read your stuff on Google. If it's any consolation for Erskine, there are a great many Angelenos who get tremendously upset when non-Angelenos such as myself observe that it's sunny most of the time, that everything keeps catching fire, that lots of hilariously rich and vain people live here, and that once in a blue moon the entire place rumbles and shakes and falls to pieces.

Less than shocking

The trouble is, the place where you live always tends to seem normal, even if it's insane.

When I lived in Clapham, for example, I never gave much thought as to what the average Swede must make of the Royal Family. Likewise, on Sunday night, my entire house here in Hollywood shook to the foundations for a solid ten seconds thanks to a 4.7-magnitude “rumbler”. I got up, went downstairs, made sure my cat hadn't been impaled by a roof tile, then went back to watching an episode of 24.

I think I might even have yawned.

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