For the benefit of non-British readers, and indeed British ones under 30, let's explain this strange and faintly offensive title.

In the 60s and 70s, no British TV sitcom was complete without a sex-starved, middle aged harridan (usually played by Mollie Sugden) and a mincing closet homosexual man. Together they withstood the barrage of double-entendres which passed, shamefully, for English humour at that time.

Mrs Slocombe, from the ghastly example "Are You Being Served", which took place in an archaic department store, was constantly referring to her pussy, which is English slang for a woman's genitals. Go figure.

Anyway, now that's out of the way, this is a generally perceptive and amusing memoir, and more besides. Using the device of thematic chapters with names such as "Sebastian Flyte's Teddy Bear" (TV Drama) or "Jack Duckworth's Glasses" (Reality and soaps), Jeffries writes his story - a story shared by the first generation of working class children to benefit from the 1944 Education Act and progress unhindered by financial barriers to secondary education, university and the professions. The social barriers were rather more persistent, particularly at Oxford University, where Jeffries spent a lonely three years before becoming a journalist.

Beginning with a very funny Proustian parody, in which he recalls the weekly ritual of a custard tart eaten at his Nan's house in the obsessive way of small boys everywhere, and accompanied by the children's TV show "Bill and Ben", he traces the history of TV in Britain from the 60s, when the medium had a social cohesiveness born partly from the BBC's aura of gravitas and partly from the availability of less than four channels, to the socially fragmented present, characterised by multiple channels and satellite dishes. It has an elegaic quality which will endear it to a certain generation of English baby boomers, myself included. But there's an iron fist within the nostalgic oven mitt. Jeffries is scathing on the subject of the crual stereotypes which fed British bigotry, and still linger in the national psyche in unexpected places.

Occasionally, particularly in the later chapters, the narrative falters, torn between memoir and exposition, and the format holds up best when he's dealing with the gulf between real life and TV life - for example, the costume drama idyll of "Brideshead Revisited" is linked to his undergraduate isolation, and the 1970 World Cup, which he watched as an 8 year old, becomes a metaphor of Britain's postwar decline

"Three lions on the shirt,
Jules Rimet still gleaming
Thirty years of hurt
Never stopped me dreaming."

He's been called the Nick Hornby of TV and there's a lot of truth in that - he has Hornby's knack of sidestepping the British male's unease when expressing emotion by analysing the cultural icons which, inexplicably to outsiders, become loaded with a social significance beyond their true importance. From the nation that brought you a week of hysteria after Diana's death, this very funny book charts the rise and fall of politically incorrect humour in all its awfulness, and will be greeted, in England at least, with a cringe of nostalgic recognition.

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