People of America, may I just say on behalf of Britain how grateful we all are for The Simpsons, the Marshall Plan, Sergeant Bilko, iPods and Corn Flakes. But if you don’t stop sending your amusing writers over here to tease and torment us, then I’m afraid we are going to fall out.

Look, we know already that some of us have crooked teeth. Nor do we need reminding that we drink too much, that British service is a contradiction in terms and that some of our pavements are gaudily decorated with stale vomit. Yet you Americans delight in pointing this out. Only last month one of your journalists, Tad Safran, said our women were fat and unkempt. As we say over here, this is just not cricket.

In the past we have disarmed hostile authors with our famous laid-back charm. When PJ O’Rourke came here we offered him a lucrative advertising contract with British Airways. When Bill Bryson was rude about our bed-and-breakfast accommodation and poked fun at our place names, we put him in charge of saving rural England. Now, despite a couple of tricky moments over the use of the word quaint, we seem to have defused Greg Gutfeld. In fact, he was even easier to tame than the others. We just got him drunk every so often. In other words, he went native.

Gutfeld came to London from New York four years ago to be editor of Maxim, a lads’ magazine. Perhaps if he’d been offered a job on The Lady, he would have written a different book. As it is, he was immediately plunged into a world of pubs, girls, pubs, football and pubs. He even found himself befriending a man who had the word “Mill-wall” tattooed on the inside of his lip. Gutfeld, perhaps to his surprise, was immediately enthralled.

If you are a clean-living American who visits the gym every 15 minutes and eats like a stick insect, you will appalled by this picture of happy-go-lucky British life. If you are one of us, the account will be depressingly familiar. Gutfeld makes life here sound so squalid and embarrassing. But such fun. Imagine joining Hogarth, Jeremy Clarkson and George Best on a tour of 18th-century London and you’ll have a rough idea of the tone. Unleashed from the gym and career treadmill of New York, Gutfeld threw himself into our pub culture with heroic disregard for his safety. He has his first pint of Guin-ness on page 24 and enjoys it so much that he has soiled his underwear by page 25. He embraces the British lifestyle so comprehensively that he has to apologise to his wife in the acknowledgments for growing fat “and the body odour it has caused”.

He says giving up his gym routine made him put on weight. But there are clues that something else might also be to blame. On an afternoon trip to St James’s park he admits he is “slightly drunk”. Taking a break from football on the television, he real-ises “I am smashed and my head is spinning”. He celebrates a bank holiday by getting drunk for three days, and passes out at Royal Ascot. Believe me, these are just the edited highlights. It’s a wonder he can remember anything about England, never mind write about us.

The book is divided into short chapters.

Really short. There’s one on mushy peas that is barely half a page, and his views on wasps are not much more comprehensive. Generally, though, he is commendably thorough. He covers tea, thatched roofs, Irn-Bru, serial killers, pub quizzes, hen parties, The Office, mobile discos, Jeremy Paxman, Big Brother, pickled eggs, people who shout “tosser” at you in the street, car-boot sales, and the way people call each other “mate” when they’re barely on speaking terms.

But it’s the chapter on Royal Ascot that probably gives most insight into the modern British character. It is supposed to be one of the highlights of our social season. In fact, it’s like a huge, drunken wedding reception. Gutfeld sees men in top hats and waistcoats snoozing drunkenly in the mud. He spots a couple having sex in front of the lavatories, and the previous day, he learns, police had to break up a fight in which racegoers attacked each other with champagne flutes.

All in all, this book is like a good night out. It’s great fun while it lasts, but afterwards you wonder whether it was wise to have spent quite so much time in the pub.

Lessons from the land of pork scratchings by Greg Gutfeld
Simon & Schuster £9.99 pp239

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