Culture

The BBC has been heavily criticised for its coverage of the Jubilee flotilla, and the tone was incredibly annoying. All those smiley celebrities pretending to enjoy themselves! The tabloids, those for whom the Beeb can never do anything right, would have been just as mean if the treatment had been sombre and serious. ‘And we see a boat, followed by a barge, and next to that, another boat. And Her Majesty is waving, now to the crowds on the embankment, now to the next boat…’ The queue of vessels was a feeble idea, the rain made it worse and there was nothing anyone could have done. Bagehot himself would have been reduced to burbling about souvenir sick bags.

For my holiday reading in Australia I chose Max Hastings’s brilliant but exceedingly depressing Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Once you’ve read it, it’s impossible to take any pleasure from second world war history ever again. Basically, runs Hastings’s persuasively argued thesis, we were rubbish at pretty much everything. Our generals were useless, our citizen soldiers lacked dash and folded at the first opportunity, our tanks were ill-protected and undergunned. Apart, maybe, from Bletchley, we contributed nothing major whatsoever to the Allied war effort: the Soviets doing all the killing and dying for us and the Yanks providing all the materiel.

Now and again a sitcom gag lodges in the public mind. In 1974, Ronnie Barker, in Porridge, was reminiscing about Top of the Pops and its all-girl dance troupe, Pan’s People. ‘There’s one special one — Beautiful Babs,’ he says. Beat. ‘Dunno what her name is.’ Her name was Babs Lord. She attracted the attention of a young actor called Robert Powell, then in a long-forgotten thriller called Doomwatch, so he met up with her in the celebrated and notorious BBC Club at Television Centre; after 36 years they are still married. She also became an explorer, described as the only housewife to have visited both the North and South Poles, which is an impressive feat, though a patronising title, since it sounds as if someone felt they needed tidying.

Rest easy on your deckchair, Delingpole, for I come in peace. Your column is safe — from me, at least — because this week I have made an unpleasant discovery: your job is really hard, and I don’t know how to do it. It’s not the watching that’s so hellish, it’s deciding what to watch. It took me two days just to plough through the listings, for Pete’s sake, with a sense of panic rising in my bosom. What sort of locum would I be if I missed the week’s televisual pearl? What if the hours, days and nights I spent in front of the box were wasted on the wrong programmes? The responsibility that comes with this position is fearsome and, what’s worse, unending.

I spent the last week in America, and my hosts had 900-plus channels listed on cable, though some required payment, others were in Spanish, and many featured what can only be called niche programming, such as lacrosse from the high school. My hostess liked Chopped!, which is their version of MasterChef — less hectic though with more repulsive food. But I liked the commercials, which I watched carefully since — even though our advertising industry regards itself as the world’s most influential — American styles will soon cross the Atlantic. One problem advertisers face is how to plug something that nobody hopes they’ll need to buy. Man is driving along an empty road in the far west. Steam starts to come out of the engine.

By the time you read this it’s quite likely I shall be in mid-air on my long journey to Australia. I’m off on a month-long speaking tour to promote Killing the Earth to Save It (the Oz version of Watermelons) and I figured my flight might work out cheaper if I arranged to be travelling on Friday the 13th. Should my plane blow up or the door come off at 30,000 feet causing me to be sucked out of the aircraft or I succumb to deep-vein thrombosis you’ll know I made the wrong call. This will be the longest stretch without a Delingpole Spectator TV column since I took over Nigella Lawson’s slot at the end of August 1995.

Two documentaries this week made us ponder what our country, with its 1 per cent of the world’s population, exists for. How God Made the English (BBC2, Saturday) had the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch musing about the way we have believed for a thousand years that we were God’s chosen people, having taken that baton from the Israelites — thanks to the Venerable Bede. I am not sure that he made the case. Most nations have believed at one time or another that God was their principal cheerleader. When the Israelites were in the smiting business, anyone they successfully smote, such as the poor wretches who lived in Jericho, were simply in God’s bad books. When they themselves were taken into slavery, it was because they had disobeyed orders.

If Titanic hadn’t actually sunk on its maiden voyage not even Jeffrey Archer would have dared invent such a hammily extravagant plot. The passenger list — Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV (Macy’s owner), Isidor Straus, the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson, inventor of the New Journalism W.T. Stead, and sundry English toffs — was just too implausibly rich and diverse. The sudden social levelling induced by disaster too neat and melodramatic. The background details — the band playing on, the lifeboat shortage, the men’s Birkenhead drill stoicism as their female loved ones and children clambered into the lifeboats (or not) — were too upsetting, maddening and moving. And the deus ex machina — an iceberg, for God’s sake?

There’s a game you have to play at the BBC and Jeremy Paxman plays it very well — which is why he is currently still the most famous Old Malvernian after C.S. Lewis whereas I’m way down the list at maybe fourth, fifth or sixth. The rules are very simple: no matter how great your sympathies secretly might be towards the British Empire, Tory values, climate-change scepticism, Israel, the idea of national sovereignty, Margaret Thatcher or any other manifestation of what the BBC would consider WrongThink, you must suppress, suppress, suppress, using the mental equivalent of that spiked metal ring the late Victorians devised to discourage young men from masturbating. With Paxo, this self-administered therapy has been extremely effective over the years.

An American reporter once said to me that all television in his country was fundamentally about race, and all TV in this country was about class. There was some truth there, I thought, if exaggerated. Then in one week along comes a new Melvyn Bragg series about class and another attempt to revive Upstairs, Downstairs, whose original ended on ITV some 37 years ago. Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture began at BBC2’s prime time on Friday. There are problems with documentaries about class. In this case, one difficulty is Melvyn’s hypnotic hair. When he’s indoors, it is thick and lustrous, as if a King Charles spaniel had settled on his head. Out of doors, in the wind, it looks like a haystack in a hurricane, or a game of pick-up-sticks gone lethally wrong.

Only this morning I got an email from an evidently very bright 17-year-old at a certain nameless public school. ‘I’m so sick of having to study “environmental ethics” for hours on end, being split into “study groups”, and making lovely colourful mind-maps for presentations; the syllabus is infantile, and I feel increasingly infantilised by my relativist, happy-clappy and downright incompetent teachers,’ he wrote. Amen, brother. I’m not sure who I feel sorrier for: the poor kids being force-fed this drivel; or the poor parents who probably imagined that for the price of £30,000 a year they’d bought the right not to have their beloved ones indoctrinated with all this specious eco-propaganda.

Masterchef (BBC1) is a total waste of life — and I should know, because I’m addicted to it. It came to me suddenly and I’m still not sure how it happened. All I know is that one year I was like: ‘Masterchef. Ah, yes, it’s that foodie programme Loyd Grossman presents, which critics always call things like “Moaasterchoif” and “Mxxrgrghstrchrrxff” to show how amusing they can be about the presenter’s pronunciation.’ And the next I was: ‘Noo! Noo! No way was cloudberry coulis on calf’s brain carpaccio an ejection offence! That boy’s got talent. You should have got rid of the woman with her crappy tarte au citron...

One of my resolutions this year is to make a lot more money. But how? In fact, I’ve noticed recently, it’s very simple: all you have to do is take a popular character with enormous worldwide brand recognition (e.g., King Arthur, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) and shamelessly reinvent him for the youth demographic. So, for example, you dress up Dracula in Abercrombie & Fitch, emphasise the sublimated but not consummated sex angle, throw in a werewolf to complete the platonic love triangle, and suddenly you’re Stephenie Meyer selling trillions to pubescents.

The most watched programme on television this past year was the royal wedding, which is hardly surprising, since we had the day off to watch it. Bagehot said that royalty was the institution that ‘riveted’ the nation, by which he meant bound together rather than fascinated. However, strange as it may seem, most people in the UK weren’t sufficiently fascinated, or bound together, to see the ceremony — they were republicans, too young, having a day out, were on the street in London, or just didn’t care. Some 26 million were in front of their sets, only 3 million more than watched in the US, where the coverage started at 6 a.m. East Coast on a normal weekday.

My prize for the best thing on TV this year goes to the comedy Rev (BBC2, Thursdays). I know Simon Hoggart disagrees with me on this  — he finds it all a bit predictable. But in the spirit of Christmas I should like to point out that Simon is a wine-soaked pinko Guardianista who hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, whereas I am world-famous for being right about everything, so there. Why is Rev so good? Let us count the ways. Its alpha and omega — as with all the best sitcoms — is character. Apart from Perry and Croft’s various masterpieces and The Simpsons, I’m hard pushed to think of any other TV comedy with quite so extensive a cast of well-drawn, plausible, compelling major and minor characters.