James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

Thursday

James Delingpole

I love that people assume I’m gay

At a birthday dinner over the weekend I was introduced to this delightful party girl of a certain age whose diet for the evening consisted of chips and Grey Goose vodka on the rocks with lime. She launched straight into the praises of this marvellous gay couple she knew in the area who were mad keen on hunting, kept getting injured but didn’t care, and who she was sure I’d get on with like a house on fire. They did indeed sound like my kind of people. But it was only later, after my new friend had had a few more and she had expressed surprise at the existence of my wife across the table, that she fessed up. ‘I had no idea you weren’t gay. Those clothes. Your manner. That gaunt look...’ I didn’t mind, obviously.

Thursday

James Delingpole

My amazing dad has found the secret of a happy life

This week I wanted to tell you about my amazing dad. He hasn’t died or anything. I just thought I’d get in there with my panegyric quick while he’s still got most of his marbles and before he’s lying in a coffin quite deaf to all the nice stuff I’m about to say about him. So: my dad. What prompted this was a chance remark he made the other day about having left school at 15. Fifteen? ‘Well I wasn’t enjoying it,’ he explained. ‘And Dad said he couldn’t afford the fees. So it made much more sense for me to come and work for the family firm as a lathe operator. I loved it. It gave me independence and I was earning money.’ Now if you were to meet my Dad, you wouldn’t guess his education was so basic.

Thursday

James Delingpole

We need more opinionated English eccentrics making documentaries like, ahem, me…

Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started this job I’d review one almost every fortnight. Always there’d be something worth watching: on the horrors of the Pacific or the Eastern Front, say; or castles; or Churchill; or medieval sword techniques. But now it’s all crap like The Hidden World of Georgian Needlecraft or In The Footsteps of Twelve Forgotten South American Civilisations Which All Look The Same or A Brooding, Long-Haired Scottish Geographer Shouts From Inside A Volcano Why Climate Change Is Worse Than Ever. The presenters have got more annoying too. I mean, I’m not saying some of the old ones weren’t infuriating with their hand-waving and tics and mannerisms and wheezings.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Frankie Boyle is a cowardly bully, and I’m ashamed I ever stood up for him

‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’ Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report? Clue: it’s that first word. In order to qualify as ‘outspoken’, surely, you need to be the kind of person who fearlessly, frequently and vociferously sets himself in opposition to the clamour of the times. Does demanding that a public figure lose his job for some mildly sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist remark fit into that category? Hardly.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Eye-gouging within the first half-hour: the edgy new rules of TV drama

Where is Jessica Hyde? If those words mean nothing to you then I have some excellent news. If not, then you’ll already be aware that I have failed you totally. And not for the first time, either. I was about a series (sorry, ‘season’) late to Game of Thrones; not much quicker into Breaking Bad; and now here I am again belatedly drawing your attention to something we all really should have seen last year if we were to consider ourselves even halfway in the loop... Anyway, for what it’s worth, the show is Utopia (Channel 4, Tuesdays) and I can’t remember when I last saw a British drama series open so strongly.

Thursday

James Delingpole

You’re never too old, they say. But I am

For my 49th birthday treat, I went to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward theatre in London. Expensive but worth it: spry, funny, uplifting and moving but also, for all the surface froth, quite a deep meditation on the creative process and the enduring power of art. What everyone secretly loves best about it, though, I suspect, is the way it so shamelessly flatters their intelligence. We’re all aware that Shakespeare wrote a sonnet that begins ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; that Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub brawl; that Malvolio wears yellow stockings and cross garters. This is basic, middlebrow general knowledge.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Gomorrah is gangsters without glamour – but it’s still not as scary as Dance Moms

Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic, Monday), the new, must-see Mafioso series, started promisingly. We met two hoods — one young, shaven-headed, good-looking; one weary, brow-beaten, middle-aged — filling up at a petrol station in Naples, an unfamiliar (to me anyway) setting that looks promisingly like a cross between Vegas and downtown Gaza. Clearly they were up to no good. Meanwhile, in a decrepit apartment block, an elderly mamma was preparing her beloved, twentysomething son a rather delicious-looking pasta dinner. She chastised him for smoking at the dinner table. The son tried explaining, to no avail, that this was an E-cigarette, not a real one. Mamma wasn’t having it. She said grace and her nicely brought up if wayward boy crossed himself piously.

Thursday

James Delingpole

You owe it to yourself to visit John Clare country

This has been a terrible year for horseflies. It’s bad enough if you’re human: often by the time you swat them off the damage has already been wrought by their revolting, cutting mandibles and it’s not till 24 hours later, I find, that the bite reaches peak unpleasantness, swelling into a huge itchy dome which somehow never quite generates the massive sympathy you feel you deserve. But obviously it’s worse if you’ve no hands to swat them with, as Girl and I were reminded when we went out for a summer ride. Every few yards our mounts shuddered and twitched and twisted their heads back under sustained and vicious assault from the evil clegs. Sometimes, you could see the blood. ‘Kill them! Keep killing them!

Thursday

James Delingpole

In which James Delingpole gets down with the kids, finds they’re sex-obsessed…

If there’s one thing everyone knows about BBC comedy it’s that it’s going downhill. According to Danny Cohen, now Director of BBC Television, it’s too white and middle class; according to producer John ‘Blackadder’ Lloyd, it’s run by idiots like the bureaucrats in the BBC satire W1A who don’t understand what comedy is; according to the gag-inducingly PC Dara O’Briain, it’s too gag-inducingly PC (he means the quota system they’re trying to introduce whereby every comedy panel show must have a token female); according to John Cleese, it’s never been the same since John Cleese left; etc. Probably they’re all right.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Fear and libertarianism in Las Vegas

Great God, Vegas is an awful place. I realised this the moment I arrived. My cab driver — who’d been perfectly agreeable en route from the airport — mistook my post-flight sluggishness for reluctance to give him a tip, and drove off angrily cursing me as I fumbled in my pockets. The line just for the check-in desk was about a mile long. Everyone was fat and drunk and dressed for the beach. Outside it was too hot: 105°F at 5 p.m. Inside, it was too cold from the relentless air-conditioning. Everywhere had the style and charm and tastefulness of Redditch. By day three I’d had enough. ‘Don’t stay in Vegas more than three days,’ people had warned me. And people were right. It’s more than enough. Four days would definitely drive you mad.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Your starter for ten: why do we Brits so love University Challenge?

‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually has buzzers. The other side has push-button bells, instead. I’ve been watching the programme religiously for God knows how many years without ever consciously noticing this. But, once you’ve been told, it’s obvious — in much the same way it’s obvious that the way you tell Thompson and Thomson apart is that one has an upturned moustache and the other doesn’t. Which, come to think of it, would be quite a good University Challenge question. Apparently, one of its main criteria is that every question must have ‘inherent interest’. That is, it must make you genuinely keen to know the answer.

Thursday

James Delingpole

A Glastonbury adventure with Led Zeppelin, Lana del Rey, drug dealers – and my son

‘Charlie. E. Powder,’ said the friendly, helpful man working his way through the crowd during the mindblowing Friday-night headline set by the American dubstep DJ Skrillex. I looked wistfully at his man-bag of chemical  enhancers. Skrillex was good. Maybe the best electronic act I’ve seen in 24 years of Glastonburies. (‘Slivers of mutant dancehall, booty house, Daft Punk arpeggios and big pop choruses, all mangled into oblivion with his signature sub-bass wobbles,’ as the Guardian’s critic so rightly put it.) But imagine just how much more trippy that Transformers light show would look if...‘Dad?’ said Boy, next to me. ‘I’m really tired. Can we go soon?’ Yes.

James Delingpole

Imperialism is back – and this time it’s politically correct

‘Why did you leave us?’ said the old Sudanese man in Omdurman market. ‘Things were so much better when you were here.’ He was talking about the British empire, of course, and apologies if I’ve told the story before, as I know I have. It’s just that it’s such a fantastically satisfying way of winding up all those guilt-ridden post-colonial types who find it a source of shame and embarrassment that the world’s atlas was once half-covered pink. I don’t though. Not at all. What shames me far more are the mistakes we’re now making as a response to that guilt. We’re still treating the Africans like children; and we’re still ripping them off.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The big fat lie about cholesterol | 26 June 2014

In his latest Spectator column, James Delingpole looks at a gigantic scare that lasts for decades because the experts are too embarrassed to back down... Though I’m not generally big on banning stuff, there’s one substance I would prohibit without a moment’s hesitation — probably on pain of death if that’s what it took because clearly, where vanquishing monstrous evil is concerned, no sanction is too extreme. I’m talking, of course, about the devil’s semen: semi-skimmed milk. And about its unholier cousin — aka the devil’s urine — skimmed milk.

James Delingpole

Looking for a Game of Thrones substitute? Vikings is the closest you’ll get – but it ain’t close

Did you know that the 8th-century Kingdom of Northumbria was the epicentre of an international exotic reptile trade? I only discovered this myself from watching episode six of Vikings (History Channel, Tuesday) and being introduced to the snake-pit maintained by King Aelle. What particularly impressed me were not just the variety of pythons and boas at the bottom of the pit but also their excellent state of health.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The big fat lie about cholesterol

Though I’m not generally big on banning stuff, there’s one substance I would prohibit without a moment’s hesitation — probably on pain of death if that’s what it took because clearly, where vanquishing monstrous evil is concerned, no sanction is too extreme. I’m talking, of course, about the devil’s semen: semi-skimmed milk. And about its unholier cousin — aka the devil’s urine — skimmed milk. Seriously, almost nothing can conspire to ruin my day more effectively than when I order up a flat white and the barista doesn’t know that only weird faddists with no taste take their coffee made with anything but full fat. Apart from maybe when someone tries to add some skimmed or semi-skimmed to my tea.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Spectator Debate: Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Welcome to Generation Y’s world

The Spectator's latest debate - Stop Whining Young People: You've Never Had It So Good - was most disgracefully skewed in favour of the proposition. Not only did the epically relaxed moderator Toby Young flagrantly and self-confessedly side with the proposers but so too did the event sponsor, Alan Warner of Duncan Lawrie private banking. Warner recalled, in his introductory speech, how very difficult it had been as a young man coming to terms with the fact that he would never be able to afford to live, like his parents' generation, in Chelsea. Instead, he had to venture to the exotic reaches of the Angel, Islington and had to endure years of taunts on the lines of 'Well I know where it is on the Monopoly board. It's the last pale blue cheap one before you get to the jail'.

Thursday

James Delingpole

We need something less evil than Britain’s Got Talent. How about public executions?

You know what the world needs most right now? What it needs is five good-looking-ish, talented-ish blokes dressed in a mélange of artfully deconstructed dove-grey suits singing one of the songs out of Les Misérables, like a boy band but one that does numbers from musicals rather than original compositions, oh, and preferably with the kind of crap name that you can imagine being brainstormed by one of the teams on The Apprentice... Well, if that’s what you’ve been thinking these past few weeks, lucky you!

Thursday

James Delingpole

Does Ukip believe in anything any more?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Delingpole and Michael Heaver debate whether Ukip stands for anything" startat=1222] Listen [/audioplayer]I’m worried about Ukip. It’s possible that my concerns are entirely misplaced but let me give you some examples of what I mean. First, a tweet from Ukip’s Newark candidate Roger Helmer (whose heroic stance on energy and climate change I greatly admire): ‘Meet Robert Jenrick, the Tory candidate for Newark: Gilded youth. Posh Tory boy. London property millionaire.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos is just too funny for its own good

On Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos (BBC 2, Sunday), there was a particularly cruel sketch in which Paul Whitehouse gave Harry Enfield a Paxman-style grilling as to whether he felt bitter that his comedy series had never won a Bafta award whereas its big rival The Fast Show (featuring, inter alia, one Paul Whitehouse) had won lots and lots and lots. The more Enfield tried to deny that it had bothered him, the more Whitehouse pressed him to admit that it had. But the real victim of the joke, as it would turn out this week, was not Enfield but The Fast Show. Its first episode in years — revived as part of BBC2’s 50th anniversary celebrations — was so embarrassingly bad that it made you wonder why any awards committee might ever have considered it worthy of notice.