A hero for the Snowflake age
From our US edition
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is now a politically correct pantywaist
James Delingpole
James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
Friday
Thursday
BBC's A Christmas Carol was the victim of tub-thumping lefty politics
‘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
Wednesday
The only way to survive Christmas TV is to avoid anything seasonal and watch Giri/Haji
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
My 2019: mice, Marrakesh and a fond farewell to my dear friend Christopher Booker
Another year over and it wasn’t all bad, you know. Here are some of my personal highlights. Best birthday parties: my dear old friend Liz Hogg’s 90th and my dear older friend’s Jim Lovelock’s 100th. The latter, in the Orangerie at Blenheim Palace, was possibly the most unboring semi-formal social occasion I’ve ever attended. My
Thursday
What have the Anglo-Saxons ever done for us?
It has been a while since I’ve considered the vexed question of Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’. More than 30 years, in fact. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my Anglo-Saxon tutorials with dear, lovely, gentle Richard Hamer. And now he is the author of the standard translation being used by my children on their own university
Saturday
If you like Joe Biden, you’ll love The Irishman
From our US edition
The Irishman reviewed
Thursday
The only bearable TV series these days are the ones with subtitles, like Der Pass
True to the Andrew Roberts rule that the only bearable series on TV these days are ones with subtitles, I’ve started watching Der Pass (Sky Atlantic). Not unlike The Bridge and The Tunnel, it starts with a dead body exactly straddling a border, thus requiring the intervention of detectives from two national jurisdictions. This time,
Thursday
What I learned on my speed awareness course
Speed is in my blood. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all used to race cars in their youth. We even have a hill-climb specialist car part-named after us, the Dellow. Just after I’d passed my test, my dad let me share the driving in his V12 Jag en route to our holiday home in Devon.
Sunday
Payton’s place
From our US edition
Netflix’s The Politician is satire without purpose
Thursday
War of the Worlds is as bad as Doctor Who
Edwardian England deserved everything it got from those killer Martian invaders. Or so I learned from the BBC’s latest adaptation of The War of the Worlds (Sundays). Everything about that era, apparently, was hateful, backward and ripe for destruction: regressive attitudes to women and homosexuality; exultant white supremacy (cue, a speech from a government minister
Thursday
The joy of a day spent bagging almost no birds
The highlight of my country calendar is when I’m lucky enough to be invited to what even the host describes as ‘the world’s best worst shoot’. It’s the worst shoot because the bag is often truly atrocious. This year, for example, in the course of six or possibly seven drives — the details are hazy
Thursday
God awful: BBC1’s His Dark Materials reviewed
‘Here’s your new Sunday night obsession…’ the BBC announcer purred, overintoned and mini-orgasmed, like she was doing an audition for a Cadbury’s Flake commercial, ‘… a dazzling drama with a stellar cast.’ My hackles rose. Did no one ever mention to her the rule about ‘show not tell’? And my hackles were right. His Dark
Thursday
I’m taking inspiration from an ancient Athenian
How sorry I felt for the poor man who died this week stuck up a 290ft chimney in Carlisle despite desperate attempts — helicopter; cherry-picker — by the emergency services to rescue him. We’re so used to the idea that no matter how precarious or remote our plight — be it stranded kids deep inside a
Tuesday
Top Boy wins the turf war
From our US edition
Top Boy reviewed
Thursday
If we do get a good Anglo-American trade deal, we should thank Trump’s mother
In an uncharacteristic fit of almost-robustness, Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan has said she is ‘open-minded’ about scrapping the BBC licence fee and replacing it with a Netflix-style subscription service. Good idea. What would we actually miss if we didn’t subscribe? Not an awful lot in my view. Some people cite David Attenborough’s nature documentaries but
Tuesday
Is this the only Catherine the Great review to mention the age gap?
From our US edition
Helen Mirren is 74 years old while the character she plays — at least at the start of the mini-series — is 33 years old
Thursday
How I plan to win a Bafta
I’ve nearly finished my latest screenplay, Drift. It’s a reimagining of a British imperial atrocity which took place in Natal in 1879 and was subsequently made into a disgracefully jingoistic 1964 movie, and despite its problematic subject matter — the bad guys won — I reckon it will be a shoo-in for an award at
Thursday
Pure, undiluted genius: Succession reviewed
I have never ever watched a TV series I have enjoyed more than Succession (Now TV). There’s stuff I’d put in the same league, maybe — Fauda, Babylon Berlin, Band of Brothers, Utopia, Gomorrah, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and so on — but absolutely nothing beats it. It is, quite simply, a work of pure,
Thursday
At last, the TV-hogging space invaders have returned to university
‘Hands up which other university parents are bloody glad to have got rid of their lumpen, food-gobbling, space-invading kids…’ When I tweeted this the other day having just dumped my offspring at Durham I got accused of being a bad father. But I don’t think I am. A bad father wouldn’t have been labouring in
Thursday
Gloriously un-PC: Ronan Bennett’s Top Boy reviewed
Sir Lenny Henry, the former comedian, is wont to complain to anyone who’ll listen that there isn’t enough ‘diversity’ on TV. Really, he should watch Top Boy (Netflix). Apart from the odd token walk-on whitey — skanky crack addicts, nasty immigration officers — it’s wall-to-wall BAME casting opportunities. The protagonist, Dushane (Ashley Walters), is black.