New dawn for a national treasure - Kate Bush

Of all the 1970s, 1978 comes off as having the least cultural significance. It was no 1971, with its ground breaking albums, or 1976 with the arrival of punk, 1977 with the death of Elvis and the Queen's silver jubilee or 1979 and the coronation of Margaret Thatcher and the subsequent decade of that combined ostentation with social division.

By the start of 1978, punk's vanguard of The Damned, the Sex Pistols and Television had already collapsed, leaving The Clash to keep that particular revolution going, sort of. Out of it emerged the New Wave and the punkish, somewhat less threatening likes of The Jam, The Police, XTC, Siouxie & The Banshees, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and even Dire Straits and their bluesy pub rock. Elsewhere, rock's establishment was consolidating its lot: Bowie spent much of '78 on an epic world tour, the Low and Heroes albums behind him, while the Rolling Stones delivered the patchy Some Girls ahead of Keith running into drug trouble in Toronto. The Who released Who Are You? (yes kids, long before CSI...) and then Keith Moon shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 32 from a prescription drug overdose.

Three years previously, a member of one of the other behemoths of the age had set in train the career of a British national treasure. While mixing Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album, guitarist David Gilmour was handed a demo tape by a schoolgirl from south-east London: Kate Bush. "I was intrigued by this strange voice," Gilmour recently told the BBC. "So I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me - gosh - it must have been 40 or 50 songs. And I thought, I should try and do something." Gilmour arranged for the prodigy to have a more professional tape made before arranging executives from EMI Records to come down to Abbey Road studios to hear it. On the back of what they heard, EMI signed the-then 16-year-old, who had already amassed a catalogue of 200 songs in various forms.

On January 6, 1978, the first single from Bush's forthcoming debut album The Kick Inside was released: Wuthering Heights. It was, by any stretch of the imagination, an extraordinary entrance. Released in a week when the UK singles chart was topped by Paul McCartney's unthreatening Mull Of Kintyre and included such rock monsters as Figaro by Brotherhood of Man, Bonnie Tyler's It's A Heartache and Terry Wogan's The Floral Dance, it was hard to place a song based on an Emily Brontë novel (Bush shares a birthday with the writer) with a vocal sung in a pixie-squeak of a high register.

Who was this 19-year-old, with an audacious song that might be prog rock, might be a MoR ballad, or might be simply avante garde? Whatever it was it went to Number One and stayed there for a month, the first time a female singer-songwriter had got to the top with a self-written song. Four months later Bush released the spine-tinglingly beautiful The Man With The Child In His Eyes, which went to No.6 in the charts. It had been one of the songs that had clinched her signing to EMI, when Gilmour had arranged for executives to hear Bush's demos at Abbey Road Studios. "I said to them, 'Do you want to hear something I’ve got?'," Gilmour recalled to the BBC. "They said sure, so I played them The Man With A Child In His Eyes and they said, 'Yep, thank you — we’ll have it.' It’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t it? That’s her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics."

By the end of 1978 Bush was already releasing her second album, Lionheart, capitalising on the success of her debut, though the somewhat uninspiring nature of the record - the idiosyncratic hit single Wow not withstanding - suggested a rush job. Regardless, 1978 was still the year that founded one of the most remarkable, if idiosyncratic, music careers, one that has never, ever wielded to convention or commercial expectations. Much like her occasional collaborator Peter Gabriel and the Bowie and Roxy Music she idolised as a teenager, Bush has successfully - and resolutely - bucked convention. It's hard to think of any other artist - with perhaps the exception of Björk who would release an album called 50 Words for Snow which included a song that indeed contained 50 words for snow, and it not coming across as profoundly pretentious.

That album, though, was only her 10th, and it came more than three decades after her first. Bush has always steadfastly dictated the pace of her career, sometimes haphazardly, it would appear. Her 22-night, 2014 residency at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith were her first gigs for 35 years. She had toured only once, in 1979, and while the death of her lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, is reported to have induced a long-standing aversion to live performance, she suggested to BBC 6 Music's Matt Everitt last Sunday that her absence from the stage was perhaps down to other forces. "After 1979 the intention had always been to do another set of shows after the first two albums," she explained. "There was never any intention to go such a long time without shows - things just went in a different direction."

Whatever that direction was, the surprise decision to appear in a live setting once more was no less artistically bold and imaginative as any of Bush's songwriting. The 22 Before The Dawn shows - captured in a triple live album released today - brought together Bush's longstanding love of theatricality (Lindsay Kemp - who'd worked closely, in more ways than one, with Bowie had been another early influence and mentor). Part rock concert, part performance art theatre, the shows were split into three acts - the first featuring hits like Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill, with the second and third based on the two long songsuites from the Hounds Of Love and Aerial albums, The Ninth Wave and A Sky Of Honey.

Photo: Ken McKay

"I was really nervous every night," Bush told Everitt, explaining how she worried she would lose her place in the middle of her often complex compositions. "I naturally tend to race ahead in my mind, I'm always thinking about situations and running them through. Maybe it's that kind of primeval thing where you're trying to think, 'Can I get to that tree before the tiger gets me?' So my head is always moving ahead, just trying to get to the conclusion of whatever this journey is. And once we started running the show I had to be absolutely in that moment. "But I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off that when I came back I wouldn't remember where I was."

Although such apprehension has been a hallmark of much of Bush's career, she relished the challenge of creating the Before The Dawn concept. "The idea of putting the show together was something that I found really interesting and really exciting. But to actually step into it was something that I had to really work hard on because I was terrified of doing live work as a performer again," she said in the BBC interview, which portrayed Bush not as a reclusive, publicity-shy British eccentric, but as the mum and occasional pop star she has studiously worked at being seen to be.

The comfort and appeal of family life in rural Devon has certainly played a part in restricting musical output. The clear message from her encounter with Everitt is that we shouldn't expect any new material from Bush anytime soon. "The thing about [the Before The Dawn show] is that most of the material was already written. And to start something like that from scratch is another whole world of work, isn't it? It was an extraordinary thing to be involved in, especially to have got the response that we did. It was really magical. But I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do next."

Bush explained that production of the Before The Dawn album (there are no plans at all for an accompanying video release) has taken up a lot of time, an attention to detail as fastidious as her production of new material to begin with. "​I'm desperate to do something new," she told Everitt, "I've been working on this project for a really long time now. I haven't written a song for ages." And asked if this new release represented a "full stop" to her career, Bush simply replied warmly but vaguely: "Oh no, I don't think so. I think it's just a rather big comma."

With an air of familiarity, the holy trinity returns

Facebook/Amazon Prime

Not since Clarkson, Hammond and May unceremoniously left the old Top Gear (henceforth known as "the show we shall not mention"), and Chris Evans was charged with reviving it to much expectation - somewhat unfulfilled, as it turned out - has there been, er, as much expectation about a TV show making its debut.

However, we should identify exactly what the expectations were for The Grand Tour, CH&M's vehicle for Amazon Prime, which was streamed for the first time last night. Because this was, essentially, the show-we-shall-not-mention in a different location, replete with daft blokeish banter between the presenting trio, gloriously photographed filmed sequences made even better by 4K ultra-HD technology, and exotic cars tyre-screeching their way around race tracks, accompanied by yet more daft, blokeish banter.

Despite the BBC retaining certain intellectual elements of the show-we-shall-not-mention, there was little attempt in the first Grand Tour show to compensate with anything different: the Dunsfold Aerodrome hangar studio was replaced by a giant military field hospital-style tent, pitched for the first show in the Mojave Desert; James May appeared to have received a partial makeover - well, a jacket and a new pair of suede shoes, and...um...that's it.

Clarkson remained bumptious and risk-taking with a near-the-knuckle joke early on about gypsies, Hammond remains impish and slightly irritatingly full of himself (and still with that porn star goatee), and May continues to be the fogeyish maiden aunt of the trio. Which meant that it simply worked. What the BBC failed, horrendously, to address with its continuation of the show-we-shall-not-mention is that it made no real attempt to offer anything different, presenters aside. 

Because it was this particular triumvirate of presenters who made it work. They are the holy trinity of the first show's title (even if it was meant to refer to the Porsche, McClaren and Ferrari which featured in the main film of the episode). Under CH&M, the show-we-shall-not-mention was an excuse to tune in on a Sunday evening to. It was, essentially, three oafs in a pub, like that other Sunday evening tradition, Last Of The Summer Wine - three man-children doing silly things, except with expensive cars rather than bathtubs and Nora Batty's stockinged calves. 

Whatever they say in press interviews about not actually getting on, CH&M's chemistry is rare in TV land, and this proved all the more endearing over the 12 years of the old show. No wonder Amazon wrote such a substantial cheque to secure their services. It did, though, take The Grand Tour a considerable amount of time to get to air. Early on, some cleverly made social media promos suggested that they were taking ages to even come up with a name for he new show, eventually settling on what is obviously a cunning play on both GT cars and the initials of the-show-we-shall-not-mention. 

While the revived show-we-shall-not-mention was soldiering on in the face of clear critical and audience resistance, CH&M including Clarkson's old schoolmate and producer Andy Wilman, were developing the concept for The Grand Tour. For all that time, however, the end result us overwhelmingly more of the same, which makes it all the more entertaining. This is only a mild tinkering with the format, a change to the can design rather than New Coke.

Opening with grey, melancholy footage of Clarkson handing in his security pass at a grim, rainy London institution (yes, we get it...), before taking off for Los Angeles, whereopon colour returned in the form of a vivid blue Ford Mustang Rocket, which Clarkson powered out of LA and into the desert, where, in a moment of faux soppiness, he is reunited with May and Hammond in similar vehicles. In Hollywood terms, the scene was an extended 'establishing shot', presumably for Amazon Prime's new audiences, but also a reminder to devotees of the old show-we-shall-not-mention of what they had missed after CH&M left the BBC.

Facebook/Amazon Prime

It's clear, though, what power they have. All three of them - even May - seem to harbour rock star aspirations, judging by the show's live musical opening, with the Hothouse Flowers doing Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now before CH&M joined them on stage like a reforming supergroup to introduce each other amid bantz about the various institutions each had been fired from (though obviously not Clarkson, who merely had his contract at the BBC not renewed...).

Facebook/Amazon Prime

It was, though, then clear, from the preview compilation introduced by Clarkson that what lay ahead in terms of films, japes and larks would be remarkably similar to the tonality of their lengthy incarnation on the-show-we-shall-not-mention. In what must be a challenge for both the BBC and Amazon's copyright lawyers, there were in fact plenty of familiarities: a test track at an old military faciilty in England, a news segment (jokingly called 'Conversation Street'), and a celebrity participation segment (albeit one that turned out quite badly for the celebrities involved).

These were, however, simple mechanics to make CH&M's fanbase feel at home in a different setting. The filmed sequences were hilarious but also visually stunning (almost worth the purchase of a 4K television alone), and while retaining the innate depth of petrolheadedness of the trio's previous show, were still as much about one of television's most unique presenting chemistries. 

Whatever you might think about Clarkson, his past demeanours, lack of political correctness and his teeth (which look horrendous in ultra-HD...), about Hammond and his exaggerated delivery or May and his near-narcoleptic presence at times, theirs is a formula that Amazon has cleverly exploited. Because it looks like The Grand Tour is going to be worth the subscription price alone.

This is not America

© Simon Poulter 2016

It would be something of an understatement to say that I’ve visited America a lot. Indeed, the pages of my old passport were almost exclusively full of US entry stamps. I guess, then, that I am an Americanophile: I have embraced - pretty warmly, as it goes - its music, its culture, its fashions and its habits. Like many, I’ve been drawn in by aspiration and an odd mix of glamour and normality, by what I’ve seen on television and on the cinema screen.

Because everywhere here is a film set or a line from a song. New York is no exception. Almost 200 movies are shot in the city every year, and every avenue, every cross street, every square and every park has a ring of familiarity about it. The same was the case when I first visited the country 24 years ago, spending a month touring the West Coast. Unlike most new experiences of a different country, I felt perfectly at home on the very freeways I saw in CHiPs as a child, or amongst the hills and mountains which doubled for Korea in M*A*S*H or rural Georgia in The Dukes Of Hazard. Even for a city fame for its smog, the LA sky was as blue as I’d seen on all those myriad Glen A. Larson productions.

It’s this familiarity that has kept me coming back again and again. It requires no effort to fit right in. It might take a little getting used to tipping at first, but apart from that, even something as mundane as having breakfast in a diner immerses you in your own scene from a movie. There’s a convenience here, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a ‘can-do’ spirit and an energy not replicated anywhere else.

You could say, then, that America and I have enjoyed a highly addictive relationship. Until now. Last week's gold-blinged, Cheeto-tanned, bizarrely-bouffant presidential election result has called into serious question my loyalty as a tourist.

For a start, the good times are over. By that I mean being a British tourist able to take advantage of exchange rates that, at one point, meant that a single pound bought you more than two dollars. That was the sort of incentive that made buying everything from CDs to the MacBook I’m writing this on worth the splurge. But at risk of sounding mercenary, the pound’s prevailing weakness since the Brexit referendum means that you start to notice your hotel charging $25 for breakfast, or Pret-à-Manger asking almost eight dollars for a tuna baguette.

The price of a sandwich has brought this year’s dramatic political events into sharp focus. The economic impact in the UK of June’s referendum on Europe is only just being understood. Christmas will be a big test, as families come to terms with inflationary prices. Here in the US, inflation has also been on the rise, feeding into the very rhetoric that fuelled the Trump victory, as he appealed to America’s squeezed middle. The parallels with the Brexit result are brutal. Listening to chatter in coffee shops and on the subway, it’s clear how America was polarised last week in a shockingly similar way to the deep chasm June's referendum carved between the liberal values of inclusion and conservative division, but also between the so-called metropolitan elites and the fiscally challenged provinces.

New York is something of a paradox in this regard: average rent here is $3208 (£2545), with a one-bedroom apartment costing around $2829 (£2244) a month; Donald Trump’s grotesque palace and HQ is here on 5th Avenue, and yet he took just 10% of the vote in this city. In Washington DC, his soon-to-be home, he took just 4% of the vote. Head out into the middle American heartlands, however, and the reasons for his victory become blindingly obvious, as small-town sentiment warmed overwhelmingly to his Route 1 philosophy. The racism and xenophobia - both implied and overt - that coloured the British referendum were a central pillar of the Trump stump, with the added air of latent misogyny to create a cartoon-like monster out of the tangerine-tinged billionaire.

As I blogged last week, Trump’s campaign persona was largely that of a Homer Simpson-like figure, loudly bragging in a bar about what he’d do if he was president. The reality, of course, is that he will, now, become president, but time will only tell whether  as to whether Trump follows through on his campaign promises. The “beautiful wall” he said would be built along the Mexican border is more likely to be just a fence, he told the CBS TV network yesterday. Hmm… What else? The ban on Muslims entering the country? Let’s see.

The bigger fear is what threat he poses to world economics and even world peace that his critics claim he will be. As some were pointing out in the aftermath of Tuesday’s result, presidents don’t just get their own way without due political process. But you can’t help feeling that America - particularly from a liberal-minded point of view - has just commenced an era of almost helpless nightmare. The prospect of Trump forming a government - with his ultra-conservative running mate Mike Pence, the excruciating Sarah Palin, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani all being mentioned for cabinet positions - has an air of comic villainy about it. Like The Joker forming a syndicate of all the worst super criminals in Gotham City. He’s already started by appointing Stephen Bannon, head of the far-right Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Except, it’s not a joke. This is the world’s most powerful democracy. The world’s largest economy. The seat of the last global recession. If you have a mortgage, savings, even a job with an institution reliant on global trade, Trumpageddon should worry you. Because it worries me.

Rational argument would dictate that Trump’s presidency should not cut me off from the America I’ve enjoyed as a tourist. Unless white, middle-aged Englishmen are added to the list of people Trump wishes to keep out, all the things I come to America for should still be there for me. But something quite profound has happened. Something has changed in the last seven days about a country normally so tolerant, so beholden of The New Colossus - “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” - that it somehow doesn’t feel like America anymore. Stupid, I know. But when your president-elect’s first words of congratulations come from a notorious white nationalist and Holocaust denier, from French and Dutch far-right politicians, and from the gurning Nigel Farage, it’s probably time to give the country a miss for a while, at least until it can elect a president who offers more than just populist bar-room jingoism, and can instead make the values of respect, dignity and tolerance central to their philosophy.

The tea really does taste better, and other observations

© Simon Poulter 2016

So, I’ve been back in London just over a month, after 17 and a half years living abroad, which is a statement that, I know, carries a whiff of the exotic. However, I'm not suggesting for one minute that I've been off-grid, khaki-clad with a pith helmet, observing still-primitive Amazonian tribes, or carrying out a long-term study of penguins in their natural habitat, or in my wilder moments of Walter Mittydom, living the rock star lifestyle in a Malibu hacienda, occasionally doing something with gated reverb.

No, for most of those years away I've been sat in an office. Furthermore, I've hardly been cut off from my homeland. Frequent commando raids to visit family, friends, Stamford Bridge and carry out sundry business commitments, more or less in that order, have kept me in regular contact. That said, there is a substantial difference between weekend trips to the home island and living somewhere day-to-day (or, simply, "living", as I had been doing exclusively in Britain before being coaxed elsewhere).

Of course, moving to the Netherlands - and subsequently California, back to the Netherlands again and then France - as I did, wasn't exactly volunteering for the first manned Mars mission. These countries do, I established quite quickly, have flushing toilets, and if you know where to look, shops selling Marmite. But coming back has thrown a spotlight on things I had missed, or more importantly, didn't know I'd missed.

With worldly-wiseness comes additional awareness of your home country and recognition of things you'd never have been conscious of before moving abroad, or that you suddenly become aware has become a thing while you've been away. Here, I offer my first observation: cars pushing into traffic from side roads. I honestly don't recall this ever being a custom (interestingly enough, in Holland cars coming out of a side road have right-of-way, which I didn't know until it was almost too late…the first time). During my driving lessons I was taught to wait until there was a break in the traffic and then pull out. Now the norm seems to be to simply stick the nose of your car out, forcing others to stop. And often the driver in question is actually trying to blag his or her way onto the other side of the road, forcing traffic on both sides to stop. I don't know when or where this came from, or why. It's possible that it is simply a consequence of Britain's roads becoming ever more congested, as property, demographics and population increases - including net immigration - have put more cars on the streets. Another good reason for me to eschew car ownership and make use of public transport, a trait I warmly embraced in Paris, and am happy to continue as I base myself in south-east London.

This brings me to my second observation: the sense of entitlement. I blame Simon Cowell. For many things, actually. At risk of committing the most middle-aged thing I've ever written, Britain has, in the years I've been at large, developed an assumption of on-demand, instantaneous everything, from Cowell's drive-through fame culture to 18-year-old footballers skipping the traditional cleaning-the-stadium-toilets-with-a-toothbrush apprenticeship and going straight to Range Rover ownership. And don't get me going on compensation.

With this entitlement comes an erosion of civility, something the Brexit referendum seems to have accelerated, with social media becoming the prime medium to tell complete strangers exactly what is thought of them. There is some credence to the argument that if Gary Lineker or Lily Allen tweet about refugees they are putting themselves out there, and that their freedom to express themselves is rightfully matched by those who dare to troll them. But, as I’ve blogged before, spend any time on Twitter and, much like the bubbling stream of bile that is the Daily Mail and its unhinged, tin-foil hat-wearing, demonstrably illiterate readership, you will succumb to both madness and despair at how people, shielded by their keyboard and the semi-anonymity of their handle, feel entitled to say whatever the want without consequence, and without any basis of a relationship to so.

This manifests itself, post-Brexit, with Polish community centres being vandalised, hijab-wearing Muslim women being verbally abused in town centres, and knuckle-dragging thugs staging protests about claiming their country back, not that I ever noticed that it had been taken away from them. And, guess what? After Tuesday's presidential earthquake, it's happening in America, too. Let right-wing populism win, and all of a sudden there are those acting like it's 1933 Germany, when brown was the in-vogue shirt colour.

When I left Britain in 1999 there was no such thing as social media. If you wanted to complain you either wrote to Jimmy Young, Points Of View or The Times. If you wanted to rant at complete strangers there was always Speaker’s Corner. Now, you can meltdown, Basil Fawlty-style, on Twitter. Which I did, without remorse, recently when trying to get broadband installed. Broadband providers go to great lengths to draw you in with slick marketing: TV ads with Hollywood celebrities and websites that connect you to directly via chat to experts helping you pick the right package. And then the horror begins: after handing over a large sum of money, you then wait for the service to begin. Except it doesn’t, so you connect by online chat again…where it takes half an hour for someone to take up your case, only to inform you that another department handles your type of package and you should call their helpdesk. Which you do, and you then spend an hour on hold due to “a high volume of calls”. In my case, I clocked up a full three hours on hold trying to find out why BT had arbitrarily cancelled the visiting installation engineer, and then cancelled my order altogether. Here Twitter comes into its own. It’s amazing how responsive companies become when their reputation is challenged publicly. It shouldn’t be like this, of course. You should just be able to call a number and someone answers, more or less straight away. Britain’s population may have grown in recent years, but not so much that some of a telecommunications provider’s substantial profits can’t be invested in extra customer support personnel.

There are many more line items I could complain about the Britain I’ve returned to, from London’s choked, gridlocked traffic, to those Estuary accents where each sentence ends with a rising pitch like a question?, to jogging bottoms as workwear, young women wearing make-up applied by an industrial sandblaster (and eyebrows which may have been drawn with an extra thick Sharpie), to Nando's. But that could sound ungallant about my return, which would be wrong.

Throughout my time abroad I’ve eulogised about my adopted surroundings. Amsterdam remains an adorable village masquerading as a national capital. California will always be where I go for sunny people and sunny weather in a geography that offers cities as majestic as San Francisco and as relaxed as San Diego, and the eye candy of its beaches, mountains and deserts, of Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. And Paris. What can I say that I haven’t already? An architectural history museum that you can actually live in, with subsidised public transport and the amusement of people watching without being judged for it.

But it's not for nothing that for some time I’ve wanted to come back to London. For a vibrancy matched only by New York; for its culture, its art, music, exhibitions and theatre; for its diversity; for its ability to blend modernity with traditionalism; for the sense of newness I keep finding around every corner, nestled amongst the old; for the joy of taking a Thames Clipper to the football; for tea that really does taste better; for breaking my umbilical cord with the south-western suburbs I grew up in and welcoming me to the south-east of the capital.

As much as there is a degree of architectural vandalism going in London, with the rapid forestation of huge, new towers of glass and steel dominating the skyline, there is also an unshakeable excitement about the place that I notice and experience every day I step outside. Even post-Brexit, with the banks and other corporate institutions supposedly buggering off to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, London feels as resilient today as ever before. It’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a force for good, putting himself about on the world stage in an enthusiastically statesmanlike manner, declaring the British capital open. If he could do something about the traffic, Heathrow and the epidemic of knife crime, he would be somewhere close to the country’s best politician (and certainly more effective than either the leadership of the party he represents or the self-serving scoundrels they are supposed to be in opposition to).

All this aside, I'm not going to make melodrama out of my repatriation. Really, there hasn’t been a lot to it. Essentially, I arrived, and then went straight down the pub. It has all been relatively easy - as really I should have expected, though that’s not to say there have been things to get used to again, not to mention things to do for the very first time. But I’ll be honest, the star of all this has been London.

I'm writing this in New York, the self-styled ‘greatest city in the world’, a description much like The Rolling Stones being the world’s greatest rock and band. If so, then London runs it close on many points, and even beats it on others. Kind of like The Who, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin. It really is good to be back.

America has just put Homer Simpson in the White House

In Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, one of the greatest of many great episodes of The Simpsons, Homer discovers that he has a half-brother, Herb, an auto tycoon. Seeing Homer as the epitome of Average America, Herb invites him to design the perfect car, believing that his suburban savvy will deliver the vehicle for middle America. The result - 'The Homer' - turns out to be a disaster: a Frankenstein's monster of bubble domes, three horns each playing La Cucaracha, supersized cupholders, shag carpets and tailfins, with a $82,000 price tag. Unsurprisingly, it bankrupts Herb's company, leaves him destitute and bitterly resentful of the half-brother he'd only recently discovered he had. The moral of this tale is clearly be careful what you wish for.

In essence, then, America has just voted for Homer Simpson to be its 45th president. Crass, uncouth, inexperienced, boorish - the list goes on. Trump is the braggart sat all night at the bar getting steadily louder and steadily more pissed, pontificating on everything and anything he thinks he has an opinion on. At some point in the evening he will make a crude pass at the pretty blonde sat a few stools away, not realising that her 6ft 6in cage fighting boyfriend is just coming back from the toilet. It won't end well.

But this is where, precisely, the United States of America finds itself. 2016, eh? The year of unprecedented disruption, of our musical icons leaving us and our political expectations going completely awry in the midst of simply awful campaigning. Brexit was hard to accept, given the toxicity that had gone into the campaign - the outright lies and personal ambition of the Leavers, and the anaemia of certain sections of the Remainers.

The Trump victory, however, is harder to take, but there are blindingly obvious parallels with Brexit, particularly the apparent reaction it represents from a disaffected and squeezed middle. However, the fears of post-Brexit Britain pale by comparison to the potentially dystopian nightmare that might come from Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest economy and third largest nation by population.

Forget, for a moment, his own personality flaws - the implied misogyny and casual sexism, the racism, the complete disregard for anyone who could consider themselves part of any minority. What kind of administration will he offer? What will be the effect on the global economy if he goes through with his pledges on trade reforms? What will be the effect on world peace with his relationships with both China and Russia? What if he does pull the US out of Europe, militarily, effectively removing NATO's backbone, with Putin sabre-rattling and circling his wolves around the Baltic states and maybe others in Eastern Europe? All this from a man who has never held public office before, whose history of business collapses is not good, and whose reputation was largely built on the personality cult of being the host of America's version of The Apprentice.

Of course, anyone can become president - that's the dream every American child is brought up to believe. And, today, 'anyone' has. Trump is hardly Everyman, even if he talks up America's working class as well as his own family backstory. He has talked throughout is campaign about inclusiveness, and yet he couldn't have done more to alienate large sections of the population. Even in official photographs of Trump watching the results last night at his campaign HQ failed to depict anyone who wasn't corn-fed white.

There is no denying that he has connected with a large segment of the country that isn't the college-educated, liberal, metropolitan elite who populate its coastal cities, but is a sizeable slice of the country's heartland. But the truly troubling thing is that he has also opened a portal to right-wing hell with his folsky rhetoric. One female Trump supporter interviewed yesterday on Sky News actually talked up the idea of armed revolution if Hillary Clinton got elected. No wonder Trump's shock victory has been so warmly embraced by a cavalcade of the far right, from the notorious David Duke to France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders. It's like that scene in Blazing Saddles where a queue of reprobates - including, Nazi stormtroopers - are queing up to join Taggart's band of troublemakers to wreak chaos on the town of Rockridge.

Picture: 20th Century Fox

This is where bar-room philosophising gets you if you're not careful. And the irony of all this is that not only has America voted Homer Simpson into the White House, The Simpsons actually predicted the possibility of a Trump presidency as long ago as 2000. The episode Bart To The Future imagines a future in which the ever-ambitious Lisa has become the US president - taking over from Trump.

"We predicted that he would be president back in 2000," Simpsons creator Matt Groening told The Guardian, "but [Trump] was, of course, the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at the time, and that’s still true."

Dan Greaney, who wrote the episode, recently said in The Hollywood Reporter that the episode was meant to show a vision of America "going insane". "It was a warning to America," he said. "That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. What we needed was for Lisa to have problems that were beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and that's why we had Trump be president before her."

Scarily precident - let's hope they don't prove to be too acurate. Only the next four years will tell us...