We at Masterpiece Theatre take pride in having changed the meaning of "masterpiece" to a bit of wretched sitcom fluff steeped in legendary English history to be sold to our amply paid agents at American Public Broadcasting. And now we bring our act to an even higher level with a collection of Masterpiece Porno Shows, featuring the very masterful actors and actresses in our cunning exports.

Politely designed to be shown only after midnight to avoid the gaze of the kiddies, we feature in our very masterful masterpieces done by such masters of masterful mastering in the style of the late Anthony Trollope, a covey of well-larded British oldsters freckling in the gardens of the very posh town houses in which we set our bathetic dramas.

You will find them at least as casually masterful in their amorousness as they are in their equally masterful depictions of the glories of the English class system. Are these ancient crones mostly beyond mere puerile comeliness? Perhaps they are, what of it? Are they dead? Probably not.


We are engaged here not in life or death, nor rank scholastic aesthetics, but in penetrating the America Public Broadcasting System to persuade the aging armies of formally educated innocents and dupes, rife in your swinish moors, bogs, and Academic baronies, that the American Revolution had never happened.

What better place to do it, after all, than planting our Tory faithful copulating within unctuous machines for pretense, wafting their electronic ecstasies on a supposedly prestigious television channel, one paid for amply, if hardly all that happily, by cozened American taxpayers?

You can't blame us Brits for doing what we do well: among other things, pretense. You can't even castigate us for pretending on American television that the American revolution never happened. If the Americans take up that pretense, why shouldn't we?

Heigh-ho!

We don't ever give you Shakespeare or anyone who is a real English master in our most masterful masterpieces. We don't even give you the reliably dogged Anthony Trollope. We give you cabbage-strewn fare worthy of Moe, Larry and Curly sporting obesely thick English accents.

You don't need to be an Anglophile to enjoy our Masterpiece Porno Theatre - a scooped out empty head and the lack of appreciation for America and its freedoms will do jolly well. If you're indeed a properly educated bloke, by George, you poor Yankee, you are usually damned happy to get it.

For the first fifty viewers with a PhD to watch Masterpiece Porno Theatre we will rush you an authentic gooseberry crumpet and a frothing cup of excellent and strong Indian tea.


* * *
Story by Matthew Paris
Illustrations by Red Square

Is that all? Where are the actors and mattresses?

Sex fueled by tea - it is much superior to lowbrow American television which features only coarse fare such as sex fueled by beer. And no annoying commercials, only pleasurable-to-watch pledge drives!

This weeks episode is going to have EVERYTHING!

An important update:

Keeping PBS British

By Matthew Paris

The Royal Family has finalized a deal with PBS to keep American government public television British in a way that might be more amusing to its viewers. The entire Royal Family will be starring in Anthony Trollope's masterpieces on their excellent Masterpiece Theatre.

Even remote cousins of the English nobility will be playing roles proper to them in Trollope's epics. Queen Elizabeth has been quoted by the press as saying: "I don't know whether I can ever give a fair and adequate account of any of Trollope's midlands riffraff though sadly they are of course my subjects."

Many of these gentry including the Queen will be selling imported lemon and gooseberry tarts on the tube. "I may be selling treacle and lemon tarts; I'm no bawd," Prince Harry has quipped lightly.

The Labour Party of course is very happy with this new and rather cushy financial arrangement with a chump like American Public Television. "Inequality is an expensive luxury; it is to a nation what golf is to toffs," Ed Miliband has asserted in Parliament. "We value Labour. At last, by the high mercy of an ineluctable God we Brits have figured out how to put our resident gaudy Nazis and insufferably rank popinjays to work."

The Tories have insisted they will not permit commoners even if they are talented as Laurence Olivier to play princes of noble blood. "A true aristocracy sets standards; it defines measure. Shakespeare was the biggest mountebank of them all," David Cameron has said privately. "The man should have been locked up by the polizei in Bedlam. He wrote all those stupid plays though he was a provincial to pretend he was an imaginary Romanian duke."

He added acerbically: "What pish-posh! When I was a rank peura matriculating in Harrow I had to read them all. I even played Hamlet- once. I called it Shamlet. I had that bloke die in Act One of a raging catarrh."

I always knew Cameron was a Shamlet thespian. His acting the conservative is not very convincing. Though, apparently, in 'Great' Brittain, it doesn't need to be, which is very fortunate. We can't have foreign 'leaders' giving hope to the Tea baggers.