James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
30 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: William Atkinson sends his dispatch from the Shetland Islands; James Delingpole remembers Malcolm, his ‘gloriously unfiltered’ father; Daisy Dunn reviews Mary Beard’s Talking Classics; and Margaret Mitchell explores corporate dread and the institutional gothic. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
Nothing can prepare you for the death of your father because, by definition, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. You have these ideas in your head about how it’s going to be: the children gathered at the bedside saying all the moving, important things that hitherto they’d held back; the fond paternal benison. But the reality, in my experience, is unlike the scenes in literature. My dad couldn’t wait to get rid of us. He was far too preoccupied with the intimate, difficult and very personal business of dying to indulge our let’s-pretend-everything’s-normal chit-chat. His last words to me – perhaps to anyone – were: ‘I’m feeling really buggered. Call me a nurse.
Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s ‘based on a true story’, there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. ‘Thought they were just those men in white shirts embarrassing you at the airport by exposing the stash of cheap baccy hidden in your holiday underwear? Think again!’, you can imagine the tagline running. The model here, of course, would be Top Gun – the 1986 movie, heavily supported by the US military, which supposedly caused the number of men applying to become US Navy fighter pilots to increase by 500 per cent (a figure that’s since been debunked).
‘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 unconnected with a) the show’s need for some publicity; and b) an excuse for a revamp after 20 years with those presenters now starting to look about as fresh and inviting as the trays of congealing fried eggs and uncrispy bacon you get in a hotel breakfast buffet. MasterChef was never ‘disgraced’.
From our US edition
It was just after seeing my first resplendent quetzal that I hatched my crazy plan to visit Colombia. I was in the Costa Rican cloud forest at the time and my guide – you need a guide because the birds are impossible to spot without someone who a) can identify the different calls and b) carries a $2,000 Swarovski Optik monocular – said, “Of course, if you really like this sort of thing the place to go is Colombia.” Costa Rica, delightful though it is, only has around 900 species of bird. Colombia, on the other hand, has nearly 2,000 (including 83 endemics: i.e., ones you can find nowhere else), more than any other country in the world. When I tried impressing on my wife what an incredible incentive this was, she wasn’t convinced. “But what if we die?” she said.
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 youth, thinks I’m an idiot, that AI is the future and quite mind-blowing in its potential to change everything. Probably we’re both right. Personally, I don’t feel quite as threatened by AI as perhaps I should. More by accident than design, I seem to have ended up in one of the very few jobs that AI isn’t going to steal.
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 episode and has been called ‘the best medical drama on television in years’. This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as ‘most amusing form of cancer’ or ‘most ineradicable variety of testicular lice’. But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.
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 is now huge, bigger even than Ant and Dec, so against their better judgment they decided to give her a shot. If Winkleman’s chat show flops and doesn’t get recommissioned she shouldn’t blame herself, just the genre They’re probably regretting it, though. Everyone wants Claudia to do well because she seems nice.
‘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 to rock gigs on my Guzzi.’ And now here we were surrounded by music lovers of a noticeably certain age and not feeling at all out of place. Still, it could be worse. At least I’m not Jonathan Ross. In my youth Wossie was a sort of role model. I coveted his fame, his cheeky chappy banter, his Jean Paul Gaultier suits. What could possibly be more delightful a career than being on TV, talking to movie stars and being paid lots of money for it?
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 in some rat-infested culinary cesspit before transforming it, in the space of a month, into a Michelin three-star. Ramsay no longer even pretends that his programmes are anything more than extended plugs for his brand But the dishonesty and contrivance and brazen commercialism of this autohagiography are just too much to stomach.
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 tropics. Golding turned it on its head and revealed, supposedly, the heart of darkness that lurks within us all. Au contraire, Golding’s misanthropic message was bollocks Says who? The lesson of the Christmas truce in the trenches is that ordinary men have to be coerced into killing one another. The lesson of Jena is that free-thinking individuals are averse to being slaughtered which is why, as a corrective, Bismarck invented the modern education system.
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 coming a mile off. But don’t be put off by its structural and narrative shortcomings. This is still a very watchable, gripping and sometimes moving portrait of men at war, and likely the most realistic ever depiction of a second world war tank crew. It’s far superior to the ludicrous Fury, where Brad Pitt plays an implausibly elderly tank commander, and where a single Sherman successfully takes on virtually an entire SS Panzer Grenadier regiment.
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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 identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse.
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 identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse.
If dramas like Adolescence are the rough televisual equivalent of whoever won the latest Turner Prize, then Midsomer Murders (ITV1) is David Hockney. The first category embodies the kind of worthy, tormented, agenda-pushing stuff we’re supposed to like; the second represents the sort of thing we actually like: undemanding, unpretentious, easy on the eye and brain. The deaths serve as a plot device and as a source of macabre comedy but are most definitely not there to cause you any emotional distress Even though Midsomer Murders has been going since 1997, I only saw my first full episode this week.
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 end. The Fawn thinks I’m being a wuss, grumbling that I never used to be this squeamish about gory, psychologically harrowing torture-porn TV. Maybe so, but the older I get, the more I wonder: what am I actually gaining by spending six hours on a sofa writhing my way through a horrid story about a made-up psychopath doing terrible things to a made-up family and their made-up pets? Wouldn’t I be better just re-reading Anna Karenina?
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 unusually satisfying. What makes it stand out is that it doesn’t go for the obvious. Yes, its heroine – played by Claire Danes – is feisty, talented and capable. But she’s also whiny, uptight and really quite unsympathetic, as perhaps screenwriter Gabe Rotter intended when he gave her the weirdly repellant name Aggie Wiggs.
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 we see her wife Helen treating her to an expensive jaunt to a romantic ice hotel in Scandinavia, she refuses to snuggle beneath the fur bedspread, sip designer vodka and gaze at the Northern Lights above. Instead, all she wants to notice is that sitting on a bed made of blocks of ice makes her want to pee. But now Helen is gone and Carol is one of only 12 people in the entire world who remain normal.
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 his true purpose. And young Jesus would continually be constrained from using any of His real powers because it was all a secret and His time had not yet come. If you’re clever, you can probably guess the title. But it’s never going to get made because a) I haven’t written it and b) the film and TV worlds are run by satanists. Not literal satanists, perhaps. Well, not all of them.
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 portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend.
