An American friend has chided me for being too pessimistic in our private client reports - these are the ones you don't see.  In fact, he takes our rather chilling observations of particular events, where there seems to be a sustained ability of those in charge to make bad decisions, as a set of predictions for the long term - as if some self-correcting mechanism won't appear and that we are all going to hell in a hand-basket.  We are indeed pessimistic about pride, egoism and ignorance as eternally recurring phenomena within the human condition but not about the ability of the human race to advance two steps for every one that it steps back.  This is that odd tramp into the future that Hegel and Marx privileged as evolution through contradictions and negations.

But maybe he has a point about our cultural prejudices.  We are British.  It is our nature (according to the sterotype) to be gloomy (though not so dark and gloomy as the barbarian woodland German from whence half our ur-culture apparently sprang) yet stoically to carry on regardless, building our empires and yet knowing that they must fall.  We were brought up on Gibbon.  How different from Americans (according to the sterotype) whose frontier spirit and eternal optimism means that a set-back, any set-back - from Pearl Harbour through to 9/11 - is merely cause for renewed effort against whoever has the temerity to tweak their noses.

This contrast, exaggerated for effect, always seemed to be clearest in post war science fiction, the genre that has driven so much of our global popular culture's memes.  There was a pre-war British school of magnificent if occasionally turgid dream work from H.G Wells and Olaf Stapledon that was almost fascistic in its diminishing of us mere humans in sight of the cosmic - an optimism or at least grandeur about the future to be contrasted with the malign Elder Ones created by the extremely dark and gloomy H.P Lovecraft in his New England fastness.

This seemed to change with the wider culture in the run-up to the 1950s.  Popular radio introduced young Americans to space cadet heroes, the comic book introduced us to Superman (and a cultural thread that fuels many of the highest-earning Hollywood global blockbusters today), science fiction moved to space opera and rockets that took the frontier spirit first to the nearer planets and then, when scientists demonstrated what these planets actually were on the ground, to the stars.  James Blish, who had his dark side of demon-horror tales, nevertheless invented Cities in Flight which postulated whole Earth cities rising up and exploring the cosmos.  Even today, popular American audiences still demand a happy ending and a clear crisp plot line and dislike the European tendency to ambiguity and assuming the worst.

Amongst the British, post-war science fiction tended to threat and dystopia, partly for the practical reason that science fiction writers were often unable to get their work printed or noticed.  This could make any writer into a miserabilist.  The optimistic Arthur C. Clarke is the great British contribution, of course - but his stories still tended to diminish the individual in the face of the cosmic.  His most startling short story has a priest questioning God's beneficence when he sees the destruction of another planet of sentient beings in the flash of a 'normal' cosmic event. 

The signal post war character was Quatermass, Nigel Kneale's creation, whose ouevre - only four key stories but stories that were television and then film based and reached a much wider audience than any book could. Kneale would make alien invasion and destruction of British property and myths central to the plot.  The final series had Stonehenge as harvesting point for extraterrestrial mass genocide of global youth.  The hero is eliminated in a despairing nuclear self-immolation to sting the predator into oblivion.  The literary high point is Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island and a tradition of cynical amused misery and stoicism whose current epitome is Ken Macleod's The Execution Channel.

Yes, I have over simplified - and a great deal.  I have ignored the paranoid horrors of the Cold War movie industry in the 1950s and the invention of serious zombie horror by George A. Romero - which has inspired the recent World War Z, horror fiction tailor made for international relations analysts.  In the same vein, the rich fantasy tradition of the Inklings has continued well beyond Tolkien and is generally benign and hopeful, while British TV has rarely stopped producing imaginative material that has left its audience thinking without necessarily depressing it.  And this brings us naturally to Dr. Who.

Dr. Who and its spin-off Torchwood is like a crash course in British culture - not English because the latest series is actually made in Wales with a very strong Welsh flavour not-so-hidden in the text.  Above all, the latest series is a modernisation of a once tired franchise which is still (like The Archers soap opera on Radio 4 and BBC News) one of the few cultural artefacts that creates a common language for generations from their fifties to their teens.  The latest series is true to its origins and yet it has pulled in cultural references that are very modern - Torchwood itself owes something to the X-Files concept of hidden government units dealing with things of which the public must know nothing.

But is it optimistic or pessimistic?  Market conditions dictate that it be entertaining in the American sense and that, though famously scary for young kids, Dr Who should still, paradoxically, be suitable for those same young kids.  But, like Stapledon and Quatermass, Dr Who has more than once dwelt on the end of the world and of humanity, on terms in which the ultimate humans do not come out as angels at all.  Moral ambiguity is built into both series.  The 'family' (in the sense of the central crew) is set against the system and its misjudgements.  There is a dark theme in Torchwood that has yet to be worked through but suggests that beyond life there is - nothing.  And that this nothing is moving inexorably towards us.  Dark stuff indeed.

So something in the British soul still remains stubbornly sceptical about utopian claims.  In several recent horror movies, British and Americans have been set alongside each other and the alliance shown to be necessary but tense, like family members with completely different and conflicting personalities and with two very different ways of thinking (just as in Iraq and Afghanistan).  The British are stoic and improvisatory and the Americans are well equipped and aggressive.  Who says art cannot reflect reality?

[Expression of Interest: TPPR's subsidiary Pendry White has the honour of acting as media relations adviser and Press Office to Europe's most successful Dr Who Convention, Regenerations, which is returning to Swansea in Wales (heartland of the 'new' Dr. Who) on September 29th/30th.]