Is Birmingham having a moment? Let’s try and forget about the bin strike for a moment and be positive. Aston Villa made it to the quarter-finals of the Champions League. The film Becoming Led Zeppelin and this year’s Black Sabbath farewell tour are reminding the world about the city’s considerable musical heritage. From bossing the Bake Off tent to popping up in a fridge in the hit gameshow Last One Laughing on Amazon, Alison Hammond is everywhere. As anyone who has been to a city centre pub or football match in the past few years will testify, so is the Peaky Blinders look. And now there’s Sky’s Joe Lycett’s United States of Birmingham; an apparently frivolous and yet weirdly edifying and gently revealing series in which the Brummie comic journeys around America (and very briefly Canada) in a campervan. Lycett, perhaps in search of an alternative to being papped in the streets of his hometown with his partner and new baby, is seeking out a formal confirmation of friendship with the 18 other Birminghams in the world. It’s slightly disappointing to hear Lycett refer to this personalised project as “A Birminghomage if you will”. After all, “Brumbassador” was sitting there waiting for him. Otherwise, everything is in its right place here. Simultaneously self-deprecating, dryly amused and genuinely engaged with the people he meets, Lycett makes a fine Brumbassador. Lycett, armed with Cadbury’s chocolate, Barbara Cartland novels, tubs of Brylcreem, bags of pork scratchings and pots of Patak’s Balti paste, meets everyone from gun nuts in Birmingham, New Jersey to Hungarian-Brummies in Birmingham, Ohio, who are enjoying a beer and bacon festival. And unless this is a particularly cunningly edited show, he charms pretty much all of them by being unapologetically himself, bouncing around in a variety of colourful trouser suits, throwing himself gamely into everything from Civil War reenactments to digital art designing and unerringly locating a tone at the exact point between generosity and gentle mickey-taking. This is, of course, a particularly weighted time to be making documentaries about small-town America. In a Maga world, many of the things that once seemed curious but essentially harmless about the place – the cultural conservatism, the proud insularity, the implacable exceptionalism – now don’t land quite so comfortably. However, oddly, this is partly why Joe Lycett’s United States of Birmingham works… and why Joe Lycett works in general. If the person conducting this tour was representing, for example, Liverpool or Manchester, they’d be carrying – and indeed, proudly parading – certain baggage. The people they met would have fixed and firm reference points, and they’d feel the need to respond in kind. Accordingly, the mood would be very different. There would be a certain bullishness, a defensiveness about competing origin stories. The way people feel about where they’re from so often dictates how they treat outsiders. There’s nothing like that here. Instead, the Brum propaganda works by stealth. As Lycett (and his funny, likeable American driver Randy) bowl along the freeways, they listen to Brum bangers by artists from ELO to Apache Indian. Yeah, the playlist seems to say, you’d forgotten about that one, hadn’t you? And so it is with the people he meets. They’re self-effacing, but many of them eventually turn out to have plenty to say – about themselves and the Birmingham that they call home. Most of them initially seem bewildered that Lycett has come. Why would a British television personality be wandering around Birmingham, Pennsylvania, talking to the locals, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a swanee whistle, calling everyone “bab”? Soon, it becomes clear. It’s because he’s genuinely interested in small but interesting stories and places and communities. His mind is open. For all of his prankster reputation, Lycett has always been a gentle subversive; more likely to tease than confront. For its part, Birmingham, UK, has often seemed an under-the-radar place – oddly underimagined for the nation’s second city; not possessed of an insistent iconography with which it can represent itself to the world. But what this series shows is that that’s just fine. If there’s an implicit underlying message here, it might just be that places with insistent iconographies that they can’t stop representing to the world sometimes let their sense of pride get the better of them. Sometimes on a national scale. The climax of the series sees Lycett inviting the people he’s met back to Birmingham, England, for a Brum summit. Will the International Day of Birmingham become a regular event? Probably not. But it’s a tribute to this show – and to Lycett – that it doesn’t seem like the worst idea. Sometimes modesty is the best policy. Birmingham may be having a moment, but if its cultural identity isn’t set in stone, maybe that’s because, despite its tendency to self-effacement, it contains multitudes. Joe Lycett’s United States of Birmingham is on Sky Max on Tuesday at 9pm