Your Mayor has been a longtime champion of BBC America, the cable network that brings some of the best of British television to our shores. I’ve always wondered why, given the general quality of its original programming, it doesn’t have a higher profile in this country.

And now, sadly, I know. BBC America is engaged in a self-abnegating Intifada, a jihad hellbent to exterminate its Stateside fans until the network has fewer viewers than than E! on a good night.

Consider: I was ostensibly beneficently invited to the BAFTA/BBC America pre-Emmy tea Saturday afternoon in Hollywood in lieu of tonight’s Emmy ceremony. Big-time celebrities and British Emmy nominees were promised to attend. (Just a note: Everything from this point on, including my near-death, is pretty much true.)

At the party – populated not by Hugh Laurie or Helen Mirren but by Holland Taylor (its highest-profile attendee I saw), Lennie James of “Jericho” (he’s British – who knew? Well, anyone who watched “The State Within,” which obviously wasn’t anyone who votes on Emmy nominations, since it got snubbed in the Outstanding Miniseries category – OK, OK, let it go), a couple of minor players from the U.S. incarnation of “The Office” and the most annoying judge on “America’s Next Top Model” (no, not Tyra Banks – the other one, the guy who you wonder how he has any credentials when it comes to divining female pulchritude) – there were finger sandwiches, as befitting a tea.

But, as Your Mayor’s companion regretfully noted, no cucumber sandwiches, which negated the notion that this was a proper British tea. (The copious flow of vodka might’ve been a second clue.)

And so, I inquired as to the contents of the appetizers, and was told that a tiny roll, about the size of a large-ish dumpling, contained chicken salad. And so I nibbled upon about three-quarters of this foodstuff. Which, it turned out, was rife with nuts.

One of the reasons Your Mayor is such a humble man is because he is not perfect: He has a devastating nut allergy (enough to understand that peanuts and cashews are, in fact, not nuts but legumes, which confuses so many people) that has landed him in an emergency room on two previous occasions.

Because of this, I am reduced to humiliatingly asking the contents of many menu items. And so I did on this day, and still, my servers betrayed me, because they did not mention the nut content of the chicken-salad appetizer. Mere coincidence? I think not.

When one is cursed with such an allergy, one learns how to detect a bad reaction pretty quickly. And so, I, upon munching upon a mere few bites of the “treat,” realized that forces greater than myself were attempting to lay me low. At that point – and there is no polite way of putting this – one’s only alternative is to purge the offending foodstuff, as violently as possible, from one’s system.

(A brief diversion: Fatal nut allergies aren’t exactly secrets in the 21st century. F@ckloads of people suffer from them. So why does anyone plant these things in food without informing servers that people could actually die if they nibble upon such trivial snacks? Your Mayor’s companion, while he was off endeavoring to induce himself to – there is no polite word for this – vomit, asked the server if the appetizer included nuts; the server said she didn’t know. No matter: I knew.)

Extricating such poisons from one’s system is a tricky game. When a potentially fatal allergy enters your system, mucous fills whatever tube you might be able to breathe through. It’s very clever that way.

And let it be noted that Your Mayor, like about 85% of the country, is in thrall to an abysmally p!ss-poor insurance provider (a Blue Cross PPO that routinely rejects the service providers requested by their clients in favor of some no-name half-@ssed group, if you must know). Hence, under such circumstances, the honorable thing to do is to die outright, because the only alternative is to die whilst sitting in an abjectly managed emergency room and having one’s estate billed $75K for the privilege.

So there was Your Mayor, barely able to breathe and circling the drain (and perspiring at a rate so profuse as to put Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News” to shame), when his plucky companion managed to produce a Claritin from a passer-by who clearly had no connection to BBC America. Fortunately, said plucky companion could drive a stick, so could navigate Your Mayor’s bitchen sports car; unfortunately, “gridlock” is but a euphemism for traffic in L.A. on a Saturday afternoon. While vegging out and preparing to expire in the passenger seat of my car stranded in Hollywood Boulevard traffic (hey, it beats writing about the Emmys), we somehow managed to make it to my home, where I fell into a not altogether unsatisfying coma as the Claritin kicked in and the simple syllogism of breathing manifested itself.

So, in the past 24 hours, I’ve consumed nothing more than that chicken-salad-death-machine (which, of course, I subsequently purged). All the better, one presumes, for maintaining my boyish figure.

Nonetheless, in my weakened state, I will heroically endeavor to provide coverage of tonight’s Emmy ceremony. But please do not hold it against me if, in my beleaguered condition, I inadvertently report that “The Sopranos” won the Best Drama Series trophy even if “Grey’s Anatomy” actually does.