‘Oh my God. Did you see?!’ ‘Oh. My. God. Did you SEEEE…?!’

So begins the conversation, at about three minutes past 10 every Tuesday night, between me and my sister.

‘The pink!’, ‘The net!’, ‘The battery packs under the pink net!’, ‘The mechanical butterflies. The MECHANICAL BUTTERFLIES!’

And so it goes on, until we have squawkingly dissected the whole of the previous hour. We are, of course, just two of the almost eight million viewers who have tuned in to Channel 4’s latest series of Cutting Edge documentaries, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. It’s given the channel its highest ratings since Big Brother 2008. It’s a serious success. And why? Because we’re all such massive snobs.

Ah, snobbery – Britain’s finest homegrown product. The class system is one of our most successful and enduring creations. What’s great about it is that almost no-one – especially these days – can be sure precisely of their position within it. Except maybe the Queen, and even she is looked down on by certain elements of the aristocracy who can trace their own bloodline back to the Normans and see Liz as a German arriviste with ermine-trimmed ideas above her station. It’s not all to do with money – however many millions David Cameron makes when he moves onto the dinner party circuit after this amusing little sojourn he’s having in No 10, he will never be as posh as his wife, who is a baronet’s daughter, a fact I like to imagine gnaws day and night.

You couldn’t possibly begin to parse its intricacies for a foreigner: ‘Eating in the street is common.’ ‘You mean – not rare?’ ‘No – common. Vulgar. Although it’s not rare either. That’s part of what makes it common.’ Or ‘James Blunt’s mum rang up a radio show to complain that her son was criticised for his ‘posh’ background and private education. But she rang Radio 4, which just proved how posh they were. Except that he was actually originally James Blount and changed it to seem less posh. Which is quite common. I mean, vulgar.’ Using the word ‘common’ is quite common – meaning vulgar – too, of course. Sometimes I wonder how we manage to fit so much complicated madness into one tiny island.

"Being massive snobs unites us all"