Last year, let me remind you, she not only watched Pop Idol, she voted for Gareth. Now, after a lifetime’s fixation on classic dramas such as I, Claudius and The Barchester Chronicles, she shows every sign of being gripped by EastEnders My aunt has not been a help. She refused to come over on Boxing Day unless her daily dose of Albert Square was part of the deal. And these are the same two women who once thought my granny was going ga-ga when she started reading a tabloid newspaper.The insulting thing about my mother’s new egalitarian television regime is that my childhood was blighted by her refusal to let us watch ITV on the grounds it was “common”. This baffling judgement meant that you could watch as much of The Two Ronnies as you wished but very little Tommy Cooper and while Blue Peter was fine, Magpie (ITV’s then flagship kids’ programme) was utterly unspeakable.Looking back, Middle England’s snobbery in the Seventies was far more impenetrable than Nancy Mitford’s Fifties’ “U and non-U” strictures, which mainly meant truly posh people never used words derived from the French, such as serviette or toilet.

In my childhood, things were just deemed common without explanation and you feared contamination by association. So if you were offered Angel Delight (Instant Whip puddings were “very common indeed”) at a friend’s house, you had to stifle your instinctive dread that eating it would make you as common as the person who had served it up. Other prohibited items included hair-bobbles, bubble-gum, Barbie and Tiny Tears. Nice children had hair-ribbons, Fingers of Fudge, Sindy and Sacha dolls (these latter had lightly tanned skin, doubtless from yachting holidays off Sardinia, wore gingham dresses and won design awards). And children were always “children”, never “kids”, which was dreadfully common.This makes my parents sound like terrific snobs, but it was far more pragmatic than that.

They just shared a widespread belief that if you were ambitious for your children, a good education included steering them towards the social mores of the ruling ?te All of which had proved true for their generation. They weren’t to know how swiftly within their offspring’s lifetime the standard English tones, once beloved of the BBC, would become the most reviled accent in the UK; that “trailer trash” and “ghetto fabulous” would evolve into top catwalk looks; that everything my mother once deemed “cheap tat” would be redeemed with the new taste for “ironic” shopping and that we would have a Prime Minister who clearly believes he wins a new vote every time he says “kids” (dropped with all the street savvy of Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday).As we sail through the first week of 2003, I think we can confidently say that “common” is dead. The concept went into terminal decline in the Nineties when a pop star who looked and sounded like a girl from a Boots’ Number 7 counter earned the sobriquet “Posh” (well, you can’t expect a lifetime’s indoctrination at my mother’s skirt-hems without a few scars). If Victoria Beckham was posh, just how common was common? If you grafted Jordan on to Jade you might get halfway there; but could you possibly bandy such an insult around and not get knifed? Obviously not. The safest thing to say, as John Prescott did, is that we’re all middle-class now.Safe, but not the least bit true.