100% English?

Although possibly related, the cricket test and the DNA test are not in fact identical twins, a state of affairs that was apparently lost on the makers of 100% English, which aired on Four last night.

The premise was to read out the results of 'expert' DNA tests to a bunch of people with fairly rigid idea of what it means to be English. Jane Phillips, a woman that petitions to have the English declared a proper ethnic group − endowed with the kind of highly woundable sensibilities that such a designation usually entails − was looking mortally wounded herself when told she might have Romany gypsies in her immediate ancestry. (She has since threatened to sue). Norman Tebbit meanwhile was informed that his ancestors were "boring". Thatcher's hatchet man duly confirmed that his mother never made it as far as Scotland.

Tebbit had clearly been targeted because he has always been openly critical of multiculturalism, though one's ancestry hardly seems 100% relevant to this debate. The current Archbishop of York John Sentamu would surely fail one Essex comic's definition of a true Englishman, yet this week expressed the rather wishful opinion that Mohammedans arriving on this island should behave like Christians entering a Mosque, "respectfully".

Cultural assimilation does at times proceed against the grain of expanding genetic diversity. My father's mother came from Russia, yet I know what he is driving at when he compares the state of Oxford Street between the wars with its current one, voicing the concern that it has become overrun with "foreigners". (He also has an old, thickly-accented Polish gardener who thinks the whole country has suffered a similar fate!)

There may be many native Spains, but in terms of contemporary dilutions, Iberia is one of the last remaining monocultures in Western Europe. It has experienced more immigration than most over the last half decade, yet much of this has come from their former colonies, and the effect of these Spanish-speakers on the host culture is more akin to that of the Aussies and South Africans in London than that of the harder-to-chew (and digest) foreigners from alternative civilisations that now parade around W1.

What has happened to Oxford Street happened in reverse to the area where I live, once London's port and most melting of pots, with place names like Cuba Street and Manilla Street. Clearly overrun by foreigners in Joseph Conrad's Chance, the Docklands later became the last redoubt of London's poor white working class, who still drape the flag of St George out of their pub windows in the same way that their equivalents in Alabama show off their "heritage" with the Confederate flag. In the 90s this monocultural sanctuary was finally penetrated when successive governments decided that it might make a useful social experiment to install two new communities on the Isle of Dogs along with the dockers' descendants: affluent young yuppies and assimilation-resistant, Koran-bashing Bangladeshis.

That bigoted Essex comedian on last night's programme who proclaimed that Ian Wright was at least twelve generations shy of gaining admittance to the gated community of "true" Englishness looked more than a bit sheepish to learn, like many, that he should look somewhere over the Urals for his own roots. Still, the programme might have interestingly offset this finding with an investigation into the DNA profile of Wright (or any other willing English sportsman with the more obvious lack of Anglo credentials). How many black people in the UK have European code on their chromosomes that they too might be less than 100% comfortable with?