Dr. Who is a British comedy sci-fi that has been on air in various incarnations since 1963. I enjoy it but there is definitely a aesthetic operating here that is different from the US of American aesthetic. This comedic/dramatic aesthetic seems very foreign to me and I'm guessing this same aesthetic seems not at all foreign to the Brits. Douglas Adams has a similar effect on me. It is another example of British comedy sci-fi.

There are of course other examples of nation specific aesthetics in contemporary culture.

Japanese anime, the Scandanavian crime novel, the Mexican soap opera etc.

I remember reading Kant's "Observations of the Beautiful and the Sublime" a long time ago. Kant classified the various national aesthetic characteristics with the four humors as follows:
Now, each nation had each of the humors in some mixture but there was a predominance of one of the humors as follows.
Germans - phlegmatic
English - melancholic
French - sanguine
Spanish - choleric
I remember thinking that suggesting that each nation had such a recognizable national character was a very strange and perhaps even an unenlightened thing to do. Perhaps this was born of a naive and over-active sense of political correctness. What did Kant think of the Africans? What did he think of the Orientals? Was Kant flirting with racism when he defined the national characters of the Europeans in such absolute terms?

However, with my observations of Doctor Who and some other examples it doesn't seem as strange anymore though associating the national characters with the four humors still seems a little weird and a little too cut and dry.

As Doctor Who shows, there are still national aesthetic characters in the arts and entertainment.

There is also the question of the homogenization that comes with the globalization of culture. Perhaps I find Doctor Who so recognizably British because it traces back to 1963 whereas newer British shows like "Peep Show" and "The IT Crowd" seem only British in accent rather than British in their aesthetic. "Doctor Who" and perhaps "Red Dwarf" would still be recognizably British to me even if everyone spoke in American accents.

I don't really have a question or an agenda here but rather I wish to bear witness to this aesthetic phenomena of the still recognizable (though perhaps fading) national character as it manifests in the arts and popular culture. The British sci-fi comedy genre is just one example.