Say what you like about the Scots – as long as you’re Scottish

I was born in Inverness and grew up in Edinburgh. For breakfast I eat porridge. Recently my doctor told me I drink too much. The other week I wrote a column explaining that I’m so miserly that in winter I can’t bear to put the heating on.

I say all this to show that it is actually possible to behave like your national stereotype. Some people, apparently, refuse to accept this. Take listeners to The Archers. Not all of them, obviously (I don’t wish to stereotype), but the ones who have been complaining to the BBC that Jazzer McCreary, the sole Scottish character in the BBC’s rural soap opera, is a case of “racial stereotyping”. Like me, Jazzer eats porridge, drinks too much and is mean. He also (unlike me) has been known to steal cars and nearly kill himself with ketamine.

Here’s the curious thing. Scottish films and TV shows – Trainspotting, Rab C Nesbitt and Still Game, for example – often depict Scots as feckless layabouts, too, and yet they are roaringly popular with Scottish audiences. This is because we Scots are great at taking a joke – as long as we’re the ones making it. When it’s the English, on the other hand, we become itchily defensive.

If the producers of The Archers really want to stereotype the Scots, they should introduce a character who is always making fun of his own failings, and then sulks when anyone else makes fun of them.

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A study says the average British adult spends eight minutes and 45 seconds a day moaning. Nonsense, clearly. That sounds far too low.

Anyway, the figure itself isn’t important. The significant thing about British moaning, and what makes it distinct from everyone else’s moaning, is its purpose. For other people, moaning is a prelude to taking action. For the British, it’s a substitute for taking action.

Do you know how much a year in refunds London commuters are owed for delays to their Tube journeys? About £34 million. And do you know much of that £34 million these commuters actually claim? About five per cent. All of us who use the Tube moan about delays, and yet hardly any of us do anything about it. I – already at the age of 30 a seasoned moaner, perhaps even one of this country’s leading young moaners, a moaner for whom a long and distinguished career in moaning beckons – have never claimed a Tube refund in my life.

For us, the mere act of moaning is enough.

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Tomorrow, on the digital channel GOLD, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry will appear together on television for the first time in 15 years, in a documentary about their erstwhile comedy partnership. Today both are highly successful, in particular Laurie, who is the star of the world’s most-watched drama serial, House. He earns more than any other actor on American TV: $400,000 (£250,000) an episode.

In 2002, a couple of years before House began, I was seeing a girl who happened to live in a flat opposite Laurie’s house in north-west London. One spring evening, glancing out of the second-floor window, I spotted Laurie trudging across his poky front garden. He was taking out the rubbish. He had, I noticed for the first time, a sizeable bald spot.

“Poor old Hugh Laurie,” I thought. “How brilliant and successful he used to be, in Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. But these days he’s reduced to cameo roles in The Bill and appearing in Stuart Little, a series of gooey children’s films about an animated, anthropomorphic mouse. Oh, he has enough money to get by, I suppose, but what a pity to see such a talented man washed up like this. I don’t expect we’ll hear much of him again.”

My services as a clairvoyant have never been in great demand.