James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Every cloud has a silver lining. Never again are you likely to have a better opportunity to catch up with those classic TV series your friends have been banging on about but which you’ve not had time to see. I’m not saying my own list is definitive, only that if you’re not blown away by
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There’s an ongoing debate in the media as to whether or not president Trump is being ‘racist’ by repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as a ‘Chinese’ virus. ‘It’s not racist at all,’ Trump insisted at one press conference. ‘It comes from China, that’s why.’ This is at least objectively true – unlike the case with Spanish
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The world may be going to hell in a handcart but some things remain reassuringly unchanged: Julian Fellowes period dramas about feisty dowager duchesses, social climbing and snobbery, say. I like and admire Fellowes so I don’t want him to take this the wrong way. But when I say that his new series Belgravia (ITV)
The world before woke
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The BBC could scarcely have chosen a less auspicious time to release as its flagship Spring drama an adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s contentious, race-baiting Noughts + Crosses. For one thing, it is under increasing pressure to demonstrate that it is not purely the propaganda arm of the liberal, metropolitan elite. For another, a dystopian fantasy
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Gomorrah (Sky) Life in the Naples Mafia (the Camorra) is nasty, brutish, short – and nothing like Goodfellas. Even when you’ve made your millions from the drugs trade, there’s nothing to spend it on save your fleet of armoured 4 x 4s and your gilded cage in some bleak, rundown suburb which it’s never safe
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One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to be total rubbish, meaning I’ll for ever have thousands of viewers’ wasted lives and disappointment on my conscience. But my even greater fear is that I’ll peremptorily condemn something after one or two episodes which
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If Jeremy Clarkson had lived through the Wars of the Roses he would have been neither a Yorkist nor a Lancastrian. He would have lurked in his castle, reassuring each side of his unswerving loyalty, till the moment came when Richard III lost his crown. At this point Clarkson would make his position absolutely clear:
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What a brilliant idea the concept of Hunters (Amazon Prime) must have sounded after the third or fourth Martini. “So, like, it’s set in the 1970s and America is swarming with Nazis. Actual Nazis. They’ve infiltrated every level of society and they’re totally evil and powerful, like vampires with swastikas. And all that stands in
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Ever since the end of Gomorrah season four (Sky Atlantic) I have been bereft. I eked it out for as long as I could, going whole weeks without watching an episode — rationing it and savouring it as you do when you’re down to your last Rolo. But eventually I could put off the climax
Proposing a ban is election suicide. The Democrats are doing it anyway.
Too many Netflix true-crime documentaries are tiresome and overlong. This one was a lot worse than that
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SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear to watch any more. And I’m only slightly exaggerating. Where else, anywhere from the BBC to Channel 4, would you see a woman being punched in the face and made to cry by an ex-SAS
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The river of death has brimmed his banks And England’s far and Honour’s a name But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ Even as long ago as the first world war, men bitterly mocked the tritely jingo-istic sentiment of Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitaï
Medieval gore for millennial gamers
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Sky’s latest bingewatch potboiler Cobra can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be an arch, knowing House of Cards-meets-The Thick Of It satire about parliamentary intrigue. Or a full-on post-apocalyptic thriller in the manner of Survivors or The Walking Dead. It ends up succeeding in neither. The premise is that a powerful
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Just before Christmas our cat Runty died and I wasn’t in any rush to find a replacement. I like cats well enough but I wouldn’t consider them one of life’s essentials. You can’t ride them; they won’t come with you on walks or bark at burglars or gaze at you like you’re the most wonderful,
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is now a politically correct pantywaist
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‘People trust us,’ claimed Lord Hall, recently. But like a lot of what you hear from the BBC these days I’m not sure that that is strictly accurate. The BBC’s shamelessly biased news coverage over Brexit was bad enough but what has really started in sticking in viewers’ craws is the way its relentlessly woke
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The key to surviving the next couple of weeks of TV is to avoid like the plague anything that smacks of seasonal viewing. So, no Christmas specials (such as the semi-celebrity, elderly grown-ups version of University Challenge where the questions are even more laboriously PC than on the student edition), no Harry Potter, no adverts