Tune in soon for Europe’s view of Britain’s post-Brexit apocalyptic future

A wretched characteristic of UK light entertainment has been its obsession with sending our own grands hommes and dames of the television establishment overseas to make programmes. This serves two purposes: it provides some respite from veteran cravat-wearers whingeing about ageism on television and helps executives use up all the expensive spare time on those eye-watering contracts. This gives us the opportunity to see vaguely familiar thespian types mincing about in foreign kitchens or being condescending about the curious customs of the locals.

A joyous byproduct of this is watching the amusement in the faces of a benevolent foreign host as Jasper or Jemima tries to remain insouciant when confronted with les ballons de cochon in a wee sauce soubise. Other shows are frayed versions of the ones Alan Whicker used to do. Occasionally, you get a show such as the one Michael Palin is doing on Channel 5 about life inside North Korea. Half a battalion of Pyongyang’s finest are looking over his shoulder and his passport resides in the desk of a local state excellency. So we can be sure we’ll discover about as much about life beyond the 38th parallel as an open-top bus tour around Possilpark.

Perhaps after the four horsemen of the post-Brexit apocalypse have started to run amok so too will foreign programme-makers. Ageing French, German and Italian stars of stage and screen will give their faltering careers a late-autumnal boost by being asked to front edgy, shaky-cam documentaries about life inside the UK. The voiceover introduction, with Tears for Fears’ Mad World playing in the background, will be something like this: “La Grande Bretagne has toujours été un pays cut off from ze world mais maintenant it is vraiment dans un helluva state de isolation splendide.” I’ve obviously translated this into franglais in a spirit of Anglo-French solidarity.

“Can there be a country more shrouded in mystery and fear?” asked Palin as he sought to inject an element of jeopardy into the proceedings. Meanwhile, a young North Korean functionary cooed: “We learn from our hearts that our leaders have done great things for our country – we call it single-hearted unity.” They could have been talking about East Kilbride.

If I were advising European television executives about commissioning a documentary on post-Brexit Britain, I’d encourage them to familiarise themselves with the oeuvre of Danny Dyer. The cockney star of EastEnders fronted a groundbreaking series of documentaries a few years ago chronicling the cultural and social currents underpinning the great, big city football rivalries of western and eastern Europe. In all of them, the wide-boy presenter gets to meet scary hooligan chieftains with names such as Vlad who are eager to tell him why they want to eviscerate the other chaps and impale their bodies on a telegraph pole near the county line. They would tell him about occasions when they displayed the head of a rival hooligan leader in their local, removed its brain and invited new inductees to drink peach schnapps from it while shouting their support for the two Lechs: Poznan and Walesa. Most of them, as it turned out, couldn’t fight sleep.

We’d first see the French version of Danny, perhaps Jean-Claude Potdevin, being stopped at Heathrow security before he was led off to a side room for further questioning. We’d see him being asked to state the real reason for his visit before being ordered to bow to a picture of the Queen hanging on the wall. Later, a shaken Jean-Claude would look at the camera and whisper uneasily that “la Grande Bretagne est no longer un pays sur especially pour un français like moi.”

Next, we would see grainy footage of prime minister Boris Johnson and his adviser Nigel Farage with Arlene Foster emerging triumphantly from coalition talks at Downing Street. This would be spliced with footage of Muslim youths being stopped and searched on the streets of London and the burnt remains of Polish-owned businesses and French and Italian restaurants that had insisted on having the flags of their mother countries hanging on the walls.

Jean-Claude would tell us that, following the inevitable post-Brexit economic crash, the new prime minister had sought to pin the blame on the European Union for stopping essential goods entering the UK. He would also show footage of a state propaganda broadcast showing people in the north-west of England queueing for medicines with sick infants in their arms. “We defeated the forces of Nazism and liberated France and Holland and now they are killing our children.”

Jean-Claude would then be blindfolded and driven to a secret location in Camden to meet the leader of an underground English national group called the True Albion Defenders. He would tell how True Albion are preparing for an inevitable war with Europe and that he had received secret messages from Steve Bannon recognising him as a real patriot and promising him a consignment of Patriot missiles from Donald Trump when the balloon goes up.

Next, Jean-Claude and his TV crew would be taken to interview the home secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg. “Although some people are losing their jobs and though rations have been introduced in some parts of the country, this has forced people to come together in a spirit of community strength and to live a more disciplined and austere life. Traditional family life will be strengthened as a result and the nation’s morale will reach heights not seen since Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.”

“I ’ave just disembarked at Waterloo et c’est une grande station,” Jean-Claude tells the home secretary. He then looks at his watch; his 24-hour emergency visa has almost expired.

• Kevin McKenna is an Observer columnist