Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett: ‘It’s a universal coming-of-age impulse to romanticize what you’re not’

The Men in Blazers co-host and native Liverpudlian traces the origins of his love affair with America in the just-published memoir (Re)born in the USA

More than a third of Britons watched Dallas during the soap opera's heyday. With only three TV channels before 1982, there wasn't much else on. But the massive viewership also implied a nation eager for escapism.

Eastenders, Coronation Street, Brookside, vicarious delight in the travails of working class Londoners or Mancunians, those were your choices," Roger Bennett recalls. The message of these was always: you think your life's terrible? Look, you're better off than these people are, so shut the hell up'."