Now there’s a boom, mainly thanks to UK formats.” She is also remaking Channel 4’s edgy Los Dos Bros, a series about a pair of dysfunctional half-brothers, aired here to little effect two years ago.Eckhard stresses that UK formats need reworking before they become acceptable to German audiences. For a start, sitcoms without laughter tracks do not work in her country: “We can’t afford to be subtle, otherwise the audience won’t know when to laugh.”The original UK shows, laced with all that confusing irony, are banished to late-night slots where “more sophisticated” Germans can appreciate them, she says.Other countries, too, are turning to UK comedy. And, despite the failure of The Kumars in America, that show is now being adapted for a German channel, with an immigrant Turkish family.”Two years ago there were no sitcoms in Germany,” says Sabine Eckhard, head of series at the Potsdam-based UFA Produktion, which is adapting My Hero “It just wasn’t something we did. The country’s biggest broadcaster, RTL, is developing two BBC sitcoms for its own audience: My Hero, which in Britain starred Ardal O’Hanlon as a clueless superhero, and My Family, the Zo?anamaker and Richard Lindsay comedy.Other German broadcasters have also successfully adapted British shows such as BBC2’s Big Train, ITV1’s The Sketch Show and even the ropey series Hale & Pace from the 1980s.

“After years of selling game-show and reality formats such as The Weakest Link into Europe and the rest of the world,” Jarvis says, “these places are now opening up for scripted comedy formats from Britain.”In fact, outside America, UK sitcoms are prospering all over the place. Germany, for example, is suddenly hungry for British formats. Holly Pye of the William Morris Agency, which arranged the NBC deal for Coupling, admits: “Coupling USA coming off the air has affected certain people’s views on bringing over English programmes.”Though some British producers are still reworking their sitcoms for the American audience – The Office and The Royle Family are also lined up – many others have decided to abandon the United States and take their comedy formats to other territories instead.Colin Jarvis is BBC Worldwide’s director of programmes: it is his job to exploit BBC programmes overseas. Then, both NBC and Fox decided that The Ortegas – the US take on The Kumars at No 42 – wasn’t good enough for their autumn schedules. Interest rates are being held at zero, and the currency is being kept low through massive intervention. All this therapy is finally producing results in terms of a return to modest rates of growth.None of these policies could be easily repeated in Europe, where the constraints of the single currency would prevent foreign exchange intervention on a similar scale or fiscal laxity of the magnitude practised in Japan.

The growing stand-off between the ECB and its member governments is reminiscent of the paralysis in economic policy making that occurred in Japan in the 1990s as the Ministry of Finance pulled one way and the Bank of Japan the other.The euro area has become the biggest loser in the game of competitive currency devaluation being played out between the US and the Far East, and the real curiosity is that the ECB doesn’t even seem to realise it. Britain is caught in the crossfire.Gas prices inflateThere must be a cold snap on the way British Gas is raising its prices. True, its 2.5 million prepayment customers will not have to bear the increase until winter is over But that is where the season of goodwill ends. Everyone else will find their bills going up by 6 per cent from January And not just for gas. Electricity, which these days is generated substantially from gas, is going up by the same amount.British Gas customers could always protest by switching to another supplier but that would not do much good since most of the competition has already raised prices.