James Delingpole

‘Warmer, sharper and funnier than ever,’ claims one reviewer of ‘the BBC’s disgraced cookery show’ MasterChef. But this is nonsense. First, MasterChef was never ‘disgraced’. It was just the victim of some desperate sub-#MeToo media insinuations about the mildly laddish shenanigans of its two ex-presenters John Torode and Gregg Wallace. These insinuations were likely not

There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate

HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those £10 a month subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per

Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I listened to an entertainment-industry podcast recently which tried to explain. Apparently, chat shows are ratings death; hardly anyone watches them, so TV execs are very reluctant to launch new ones. But because of Traitors, Winkleman

‘Oh dear, you look like an old person,’ said Girl, greeting me in the interval of the Bach choir’s St Matthew Passion at the Royal Festival Hall. I took her point. Moments earlier I had been lamenting to the Fawn: ‘It seems like only yesterday when I had lovely long hair and you rode pillion

I lasted all of five minutes with Netflix’s tasting menu-length Being Gordon Ramsay. This surprised me, because I’ve long had a bit of a soft spot for the irascible, crevice-faced, sweary old ham. I know that all reality TV is fake but I’ve always quite enjoyed watching carrot-top pretending to lose his rag yet again

I don’t much like Lord of the Flies. It’s nasty, weird in an oblique, psychotic way and wrong. William Golding – a war-damaged, depressive alcoholic – wrote it as an antidote to the uplifting escapism of The Coral Island, a Victorian yarn by R.M. Ballantyne about plucky young British castaways surviving and thriving in the

I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank. It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see

The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is

The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is

Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway – and am dearly hoping that I might bump into someone at a party who will blurt out all the plot details and spare me the misery of having to sit it out to the bitter

The Beast in Me is one of those ‘taut psychological thrillers’ that everyone talks about in the office. This might sound disparaging – as it is, obviously – but I have to admit that, having succumbed in desperation (because, as usual, there is so little else on), I did find the show pretty addictive and

Pluribus is another drama set in the dystopian future. But on this occasion the integrity of the entire human race depends not on someone ordinary and likeable who could almost be you, but on a bolshie, misanthropic middle-aged lesbian called Carol. Carol (Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul) is so grumpy that when in flashback

I once came up with a brilliant idea for a children’s Sunday-evening TV series. It would follow the adventures of young Jesus in Britain, circa AD 16, and his rich, tin-trading great uncle Joseph of Arimathea. There’d be dragons and giants and lots demonic figures, all trying to kill the boy Messiah before He achieved

I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and

First the surprising news: not a single one of the four Guinness siblings in 1868 Dublin is black; and only 25 per cent of them – surely a record for Netflix – is gay. Now the bad: despite these oversights, House of Guinness remains very recognisably the work of Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders screenwriter

Apart from hunting, one of the very few consolations of the end of summer is that telly stops being quite so dire. But that moment hasn’t quite arrived yet – as you can tell from the fact that I’m reviewing Hostage. There’s so much that is annoying about Hostage that I don’t know quite where