Poco globalization - Brit style

Great posting by Doctor Media about Daljit Dhaliwal and other UK-Indian presenters. Britain's been trying to push this postcolonial globalization thing for some years, with varying degrees of success - and not just with BBC/ITV News' rainbow spectrum of presenters. What about Prime Minister Tony Blair's continuing outreach efforts to Africa and Palestine? Then we have London being pushed hard as the primus inter pares of global cities (clearly seen in London's current Olympic bid for 2012); there was British Airways' controversial new paint schemes, that had their tail fins looking like a Putamaya CD cover (though that didn't go down so well). And even British movies are becoming less insular and more cross-cultural - think Gurinder Chadha's latest work, "Bride & Prejudice" (she'd previously directed the international hit, "Bend it Like Beckham"). Of course Britain - and especially London - is still very much a global entity, thanks to the powerful trading and communication links inherited from the days of empire. What the Brits have been trying hard to do is to downplay the imperial connotations of "Britishness" of their institutions of communication (from British Airways to Reuters to the BBC) while still trying to retain the positive attributes these institutions connote globally by being associated with that small island off the Northwest coast of Europe. One question for the U.S. is this: How much of UK media's appeal to Americans is due to admiration of purely British values, and how much is it due to the UK's apparent ability to hook into some global values more effortlessly than is the case with Bush's America?