"Say," said the American, looking at the sky, "there's a lot of light up there. Which one is it?"

I leaned against the rail of the ship, the black Baltic sea rushing below me. "That one," I said, pointing a finger upwards.

The American looked up again. "Which one?" he said.

"That one," I said.

"Which one?" he said.

"That one there, next to the other ones," I said helpfully.

This could conceivably have gone on for some length of time, but it is cruel to bait Americans for too long. Americans out of America, when separated from other Americans, are like big, clawless bears shambling through a cocktail party with a sign saying "Kick me" sticky-taped to their backs.

To stand on a darkened deck, late at night upon the swell of a northern sea, and try to single out a point of light from the scattering of stars, on the basis of the upturned index finger of a sarcastic stranger 20m away... I suddenly felt very sorry for Americans. It occurred to me that when it comes to the wide world and all those foreigners in it, they really don't know what they're getting themselves into.

The American finally fixed on a point of light. "So that's Mars, huh?"

"If it's not, it sure looks like it," I said generously.

The American squinted at his star, nodding with slow satisfaction, then he shuffled off toward the cocktail lounge, swaying a little with the movement of the ship.

"Francine!" I heard his voice over the tinkle of the piano as the door closed behind him. "You should really go out there and see Mars."

I tried to feel superior, but it didnot last, because of course I wasn't at all sure that the speck of light I was eyeing was indeed Mars. One speck of light is much like another to me, and on a clear night off the coast of Finland I could stand on deck and see as many Marses as there are, well, stars in the sky. I don't, I fear, know my Mars from my elbow.

I have been, you might gather, away this past week. I have been moving my way around Scandinavia and Russia, and I have been doing it, dear reader, for you. For some time now I have been troubled to realise that I have not conducted a sufficiently thorough investigation of the television of the far northern reaches. "What do they watch in Helsinki?" I have wondered, frequently aloud. "What strikes them as funny in Estonia? Do they have continuity announcers in Russia?"

So I took myself off to the millpond waters of the Baltic, aboard a mighty ship named the Radisson Seven Seas Voyager. It moved across the Scandinavian waters like a serene white cloud, an iceberg made from icing sugar, and I was aboard, ordering caviar from room service and scanning the horizon for foreign television.

I am pleased to say that I found it. In Helsinki I sat with a couple of Finns in a bar and watched the flickering of a big-screen television. What do Finns in bars watch on their big-screen television? Not Finnish sport, I am relieved to report.

I don't think I could have stood washing down my aquavit with a dose of men's open herring-tossing or women's freestyle reindeer wrestling, or whatever Finns do to celebrate the blue skies of summer. No, we watched the news.

The news featured heavily on the channel favoured at the Treaty of Tartu Bar and Grill. There are three channels in Finland, and you would have to be Finnish to discern one degree of awfulness from another. We watched features on the art of whittling, a documentary on the Swedish furniture industry, and one peculiar local music show in which a trio of apple-shaped women hopped from one foot to the other while yodelling their ode to chunky-legged joy. The Finnish men looked at me and I looked at them and we all shuddered in unison.

The news was blessed relief, especially since much of it concerned itself with the European heatwave. The same footage of wilting French people kept recycling across the screen. The Finnish men looked at me. "Hot," they said.

I shrugged. "French people," I said.

They laughed, and in that happy moment we discovered yet another point of cultural merging: the locals in the Treaty of Tartu Bar and Grill don't much like French people either.

There wasn't a great deal else we could communicate, since the Finns have little English and my Finn can scarcely break water, but that evening I waved goodbye to the lights of Helsinki from the balcony of my stateroom, feeling all global and connected. Complaining about local television and smiling at French misfortune - this is the real stuff of our shared humanity.

I had been given to believe that Russian television was of a higher order. The next day I was in St Petersburg, gasping at the wonders of the Winter Palace, patting the great bronze fetlocks of Peter the Great's rearing horse.

In a display room on Nevsky Prospekt I watched 30 minutes of a scarcely describable Russian game show. A woman with a face like a Tartar (the steak, rather than the Central Asian tribe united under Genghis Khan) kept removing a knee-length leather coat to reveal a suspender belt and a red lacy something, then slipping the coat back on to alternate between asking questions and flogging the contestants with a crop when they answered. It didn't seem to make any difference whether the answers were right or wrong.

An elderly Russian lady in a headscarf paused to look at what I was watching.

She tugged at my sleeve. "Nyet," she said. "Nyet."

Ah, it was a fine trip north. Sometimes it just takes local television or a starry night at sea to remind us that we are all, underneath it all, just human. Except the French.