As I spend longer in this country I get the impression more and more that here, Britain is regarded as a sort of purveyor of strangeness - in Europe I feel that this role is mostly served by France (and more generally, the rest of continental Europe), and Japan has the monopoly on it over the entire world. But I often just haven't seen the strangeness in things from our country's television such as programmes about a colony of swanee-whistle-voiced knitted mice who live on the moon, or the idea of replacing an MP who cancelled his appearance on your satirical news commentary programme with a tub of lard and treating it as a panellist throughout until they're specifically pointed out to me, or I've had to explain it to someone here. It's just been the way that the world has been to me for a large amount of time, so I don't see anything unusual in any of them. However, even I can tell that this video, which I unearthed from Youtube yesterday, stands out as something that really could only be done on the BBC.

I'm not sure how imported into America he is, but this is a collection of moments from one of our treasured political news presenters/interviewers, who had apparently been asked to drop the financial update section of Newsnight and replace it with a weather forecast - his editor had decided that the viewers could find the stock market information on the Internet instead. He doesn't even try to disguise the way he thinks that doing the weather is completely beneath him, and covers it in true classic Jeremy Paxman style.

After the entry a couple of days ago it does a lot to remind me why I like Britain so much.