Even the most anodyne pop lyrics can tell you a great deal about the culture from which they emerge. The shockingly ignorant refrain to Do They Know It's Christmas, which denies the existence of any water in the continent of Africa, in any form whatsover, be it rain, river or snow, told us all we needed to know about the state of geography teaching when Bob Geldof and Midge Ure were at school.

Similarly High School Musical, whose stage version opened in Britain this weekend (the film having become the fastest-selling DVD ever), proves that, far from being the home of rampant individualism that its enemies and its own propaganda says it is, America is a highly conformist society.

“Together, together, together everyone/ Together, together, come on let's have some fun” runs the seminal opening verse to We're All in This Together. Profound, eh? Yes, and revealing too. Of the first six words, five of them are “together” and the sixth is “everyone”. What does this tell us about America? It's tells us Americans are encouraged to do things together, that's what. From going to church to attending high-school basketball games to singing the anthem every morning, this is the society of the group, the institution, the collective, the rule.

Whenever I go to the US, I'm struck not only by the number of rules and regulations there are, but by the way they are obeyed. In New York for instance, for all its we're-all-crazy self-image, people seldom jaywalk. In London, everyone does.

This obedience holds not just for laws, but etiquette, quite old-fashioned etiquette, of the sort that mercifully laid down and died here in Britain a long time ago and refuses to be revived. Some Scottish friends recently settled in Long Island. A short while after immigrating, the wife was picking up from the school gate and was surprised to find herself being told off by another mother. The offence? Wearing white before Memorial Day (the last Monday in May). It took a while to realise a) the other mother was being serious, b) no one else was indeed wearing white, not so much as a T-shirt, and in fact, c) the other parents were dressed identically. My friend felt suddenly homesick for Glasgow.

Scarcity 0 Abundance 1

Brown wants us to leave our plates clear, Cameron says fat people eat too much. It's healthy to see a genuine difference of opinion between the two

leaders, and they can't both be right. Either it's scoff the lot and if you don't, use the leftovers to make a tasty pie for later in the week, like Gordon “Fanny Cradock” Brown does of a Sunday afternoon, or it's Oi fatty, put down the fork and step away from the pie. Which way will the British people jump? Or rather, waddle?

Well, the grimly inevitable answer is that Gordon has got it wrong again. The moral imperative to eat every last scrap was admirable when everyone earned tuppence ha'penny and you didn't know where the next bowl of potato and gravel pie was coming from. But now that the problems of the Western world tend to be problems of abundance rather than scarcity, that imperative needs to be precisely reversed. If the Government is to involve itself in this issue at all, it should be to encourage people to leave rather than finish food. The slops bucket is a better place for spare chips than the nation's hips and thighs.

Regrettable

Back to music. I suspect we each have a breaking point regarding the offensive use of a favourite song in an advert. Top Gun fans will have bridled at Berlin's Take My Breath Away, the Peugeot 405 and the cornfield going up in flames. Others might have objected to Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now and that woman making coffee in a VW Beetle on a rainy beach.

Riders on the Storm flogging Pirelli tyres will have irritated some people beyond measure. Having recently paid my respects at the grave of Edith Piaf, my own line in the sand is Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien being used to promote cheap spectacles. When I saw the footage, the mismatch between the depth of Piaf's performance and the shallowness of the subtitles left me strangely upset, and I'm not even French.

Switch off

Nor am I black, but I don't much care for that uSwitch ad either, the one that employs a hammy gospel choir in shiny blue gowns. No doubt many see it as a harmless send-up, but to us gospel fans, mocking this wonderful, inspirational genre to flog a price comparison website feels plain wrong. Obviously it's not as cringeworthy as the future Queen carting a golliwog around in the boot of her car, as she was this week, but it's not far off. Tricky business, political correctness. A lot, not all but a lot, of what gets written off as PC is actually a refusal to be horribly rude about people with less power.

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