The dramatic FA Cup final shoot-out, the tense (and ultimately rigged, in my opinion, all’italiana) race for fourth place in the Premiership, the return of Barcelona as Champions of Europe – it all passed without so much as a murmur over here. Same with the Eurovision Song Contest. Nobody cared, except maybe the one guy I met wearing a Barcelona shirt, who innocently wondered if I supported Arsenal, and received a look so foul it would have turned an M&M sour. And yet there can be no doubt about it – this week is the End of the Season: the TV Season. All the long distance shows have been running since September (‘Lost’, ‘Gray’s Anatomy’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, to name but a few), and are all culminating in their own two-hour season finale Cup Finals. I fully intend to sing ‘Abide With Me’ before tomorrow’s ‘Lost’. I have a feeling that one will end in some sort of shoot-out as well.

The American TV Season is one of the big cultural differences between Britain and the US. In the UK, a series will often last for six, maybe even eight episodes; an American show will last for over twenty. But how do you stretch twenty episodes into almost forty weeks? What they do here is they show a few new episodes, then they repeat some, then some new ones, then some repeats (pronounced re-peats, not re-peats). In this way, the suspense is, well, suspended. And it can be really irritating, not least because there appears to be little pattern of when they will show repeats and when they will show new episodes, making the series incredibly frustrating to follow. The repeats they show are equally arbitrary – they have no order, they serve no purpose, other than to rest star players. It is as if Claudio Ranieri is in charge of the TV networks (actually, I really wish he were).

I have no idea what will take place during the summer. I would like to see all the different shows get together and have their own World Cup – we could see Eastenders vs Sex and the City, or at the very least a fist-fight between Jeremy Paxman and those imbeciles on ABC News10. I would pay good money for that, really good money. Who knows, this might even be one World Cup where the English actually beat the Germans. I’ll settle for the real thing; though I know they will show some matches, I will be watching it for the most part on the Mexican channels (that is, when I come back form my holiday to BBC land). Speaking of which, you know the way films sometimes have different names here? Well that film ‘Goal’ is currently listed in theatres here with the catchy title ‘Goal: The Dream Begins’, while in Mexico it is listed as ‘Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!’. Strange but true.