James Delingpole

'You Can Definitely Skip Dave Chappelle's New Netflix Special,' says VICE. And if that's not recommendation enough, here's one from me: Sticks & Stones is the most, offensive, foul-mouthed, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic comedy set you're likely to see on TV this year. Chappelle, I must confess, was new to me. Yes, I know, I know, all you American readers: he's a comedy institution, ranked no. 9 in Rolling Stone's '50 Best Stand Up Comics of All Time' with numerous awards and a career going right back to his 1993 movie debut in Mel Brooks's Robin Hood: Men In Tights. But when you're English and you get to a certain age, you find yourself taking a certain perverse pride in not knowing anything whatsoever about icons who are really huge in the US.

The Boys (Amazon Prime) is a superhero series for people who hate superheroes. That's me all over, which is probably why I've loved every moment of four episodes I've seen so far. It's based on a comic book by Garth Ennis (Preacher; Punisher) who also hates superheroes. 'Personally, not having grown up with superheroes, I find them completely moronic,' he said in a recent interview I could only access by having to use a VPN hider to pretend I wasn't in the EU (seriously we can't leave that overregulated dump soon enough). And: 'The notion that the medium I work in is dominated (and, sadly, defined) by such a stupid genre is not one that feeds my sense of idealism.' Ennis claims to object to superheroes on moral grounds: they are glibly escapist and ignore the world's real problems.

Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (BBC4) began with some footage of kids queuing up outside a warehouse rave in Stoke-on-Trent in 1991. It was at once banal and extraordinary: everyone was white; nobody was overweight; none of the clothes were designer, expensive or branded; nobody wore facial hair. This was the England of my late youth and I remember it vividly. But it feels so remote from the present that it might just as well have been a lithograph of extravagantly side-burned men in stiff woollens captioned: ‘The Camp before Balaklava’. Deller is probably a bit more left-wing than me — how could he not be?

My favourite epithet about my favourite TV series was the headline in a review by the Irish Times: ‘Gomorrah. Where characters die before they become characters.’ The review appeared to suggest that this was a bad thing. But I disagree. What made Game of Thrones so original and compelling, especially in the early seasons, was its refreshing willingness to break convention by murdering key players at the drop of a hat. Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic) merely pushes that troubling edginess a step further: whether you’re the head of the Neapolitan mob, an adorable, cute child, or just some random, decent civilian briefly introduced in vignette, there is never a guarantee that you’ll survive the episode.

Truly I think there is no hope for youth. Watching a couple of episodes of the new Stranger Things with my son confirmed this. Though I raved about the first season — an inspired mash-up of classic early-1980s TV and movie tropes with a great soundtrack, charming characters and lots of spine-tingling creepiness and horror — this latest one (we’re now on season three) appears to have settled for self-indulgence and tweeness. Where season one had the creeping menace of Alien, the mood here is closer to Scooby-Doo, only instead of solving mysteries the pesky kids spend half their time padding out the drama by having cute, winsome relationships with girls (one of whom is Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown but now with added hair).

My plan to cut the BBC out of my life entirely is working well. Apart from the occasional forgivable lapse — that excellent Margaret Thatcher documentary; Pointless and Only Connect because they’re the only programmes we can all watch together as a family — I find that not watching or listening to anything the BBC does is making me calmer, happier and better informed. I’m also learning stuff about myself that I never imagined possible. Like the fact that I have a massive man crush on the rap star Kanye West.

Six hundred and thirty years ago, Chaucer revealed in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ that what women really want is to be totally in charge of everything. With Girl now back home permanently having done her A levels, I can confirm that this is true: no longer am I in control of what we watch on TV, not even when I plead that it’s my job and how else am I going to be able to afford the extensive tour of Magaluf and Bali etc. that she’s got planned this summer? But I don’t mind really because it means I’m forced to watch stuff there’s no way I would have seen otherwise. And in doing so I become a better and wiser person because of all the fascinating things it teaches me about the female psychopathology.