Homer is where the heart is
It is enough to make Bart invite the opposition to 'eat my shorts'.
He and the other members of that dysfunctional US cartoon clan, the Simpsons, have been voted Britain's favourite TV family.
Homer, Marge and the children edged the homegrown challenge of the Trotters from Only Fools And Horses into second place, with The Royle Family third.
The rest of the chart was made up largely of families few of us would want to live near: the Cranes (Frasier), the Slaters ( EastEnders), the Harpers (My Family), the Sopranos, the Braithwaites (At Home With The Braithwaites) and Larkins (The Darling Buds Of May). Only the Waltons qualified as a model family. Radio Times readers voted in the poll and the magazine asked a top psychologist to analyse the results.
Dr Cynthia McVey, of Glasgow University, said it was interesting viewers liked to watch families with problems. She said of the Simpsons: 'We enjoy the joke because it is in a "safe" cartoon setting, which allows us to accept a pretty harsh criticism of family life.' She added the Royle Family was 'a laboratory of family behaviour', while the Slaters proved popular 'because we love to see women behaving badly'.
