James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: I told Radley school pupils how to rebel. But I’m not sure they want to

For two blissful days last week I was at Radley College — what you might call the posh person’s Eton — as the school’s Provocateur-in-Residence. Delightful place: like an especially agreeable gentleman’s club with a first-rate school attached. My only criticism — and it’s not really a criticism, more a rueful observation — is that even in this Helm’s Deep of immense soundness, the Orcish forces of lentil-eating progressivism have begun tunnelling beneath the walls and infecting the defenders of western civilisation with their malign and slithy creed. Or to put it another way: if you cannot rely on the boys of Radley College to stick up for man’s unalienable right to hunt foxes, what the hell can you rely on?

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: Is the fight against environmentalism the new Cold War?

Gosh it isn’t half irksome when someone who went to the same school as you but is considerably younger than you ends up doing dramatically better than you. But hats off to Dominic Sandbrook: his new series Cold War Britain (BBC2, Tuesday) is an absolute delight. Sandbrook has that rare gift of making things you thought you knew pretty well already seem startling and fresh. Take Churchill’s Fulton, Missouri speech. ‘Ah,’ I said expertly to the Fawn, a good five minutes before the programme reproduced the famous recording, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic...’ But what Sandbrook does is both put it in context and give it a human dimension that brings the whole business alive.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: I’m in love with Shakespeare — and with David Tennant’s Richard II

‘Dad, it’s three hours long,’ says Boy, worriedly. ‘Yeah. And whose bloody fault is it we’re going?’ I want to reply but don’t because I know, as a dad, you’re not supposed to say discouraging things when your child has asked you to take him to see his first ever Shakespeare play at the RSC. Still, I can’t pretend I’m happy with the arrangement. Partly it’s the cost of the tickets: £50-plus each, with no student discount for Boy because the show has long since sold out and you don’t get special deals on last-minute returns. Partly it’s just that, well, it’s the theatre and I’m not that keen on going to the theatre.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: All students need a ‘sense of entitlement’ — ask my fundie friend Rupert 

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ said John Lennon. Quite apposite from a man who — presumably — meant to spend a ripe old age staging increasingly embarrassing art happenings with Yoko Ono, rather than be shot dead by a nutcase. It also applies to the two things that most grabbed me on TV this week: A Very English Education (BBC2, Sunday) and the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones (available via Blinkbox). The first, a follow up to Public School — the BBC’s 1979 fly-on-the-wall series about Radley — sought to find out what had become of its various stars. One of them, Rupert Gather, is now a very successful fund manager. Rupert is an old friend from way back.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: Why can’t the BBC be impartial in the climate change debate? 

 ‘Well, you’re arguing facts against opinions. OK, I mean, the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has rocketed up since the Industrial Revolution, and continues to rocket up, is a fact. Now, it’s so much a fact that even the climate change deniers look away from it and don’t deny it.’ — Professor Steve Jones, Feedback, BBC Radio 4, 18 October Have a look at that last sentence. It represents such a cherishably stupid, rude, fatuous, crabby, bigoted, ignorant, petulant, feeble, fallacious, dishonest and misleading argument that if it turned out the speaker in question was a professor of logic or philosophy you really might want to shoot yourself in despair. Can you see what the problem is? Let me explain.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: The Wrong Mans leaves me gasping with exhilaration and glee

Among the criticisms rightly levelled at the BBC are that its commissioning editors are overcautious, unimaginative, unadventurous and over-reliant on star names and proven formulae. So I really didn’t have much hope for The Wrong Mans (BBC2, Tuesday), the latest vehicle for the painfully ubiquitous James Corden. Since Gavin & Stacey — which I know we’re all supposed to have cherished beyond measure — Corden has become as inescapable a part of the BBC furniture as David Jason was in the Eighties, or Robson & Jerome were in the Nineties. If Corden had pitched a script based on the Albanian telephone directory, I’m sure the BBC would have commissioned it like a shot.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: I don’t automatically support Piers Morgan. So why should women automatically support Julia Gillard?

I’ve been racking my brains to think what I might have in common with Kim Jong Un and Piers Morgan. But apart from owning a spectacularly tiny penis, I simply cannot think. Certainly, when Kim is getting it in the neck for having one of his ex-girlfriends executed by firing squad to please his wife, or whenever Morgan is being criticised for being just the worst thing ever, I never find myself seized with some sudden hormonal urge to rush to their defence on account of the fact that we’re all part of the Brotherhood. Maybe, though, we’re missing a trick. Maybe we chaps of the world could enjoy so much more leeway if only we showed a bit more male solidarity. ‘Of course I had to nuke Seoul.

Thursday

James Delingpole

‘Atlantis’ shows our civilisation is doomed

This week saw the final episode of possibly the greatest television series ever. Breaking Bad wasn’t made by the BBC, of course. Nor, so far as I know, did it make any attempt to buy the broadcast rights. That’s because, obviously, the Beeb has far more important, special things to spend your compulsory licence fee on, in keeping with the Reithian tradition. Stuff like Atlantis (BBC1, Saturday). Atlantis was designed to fill the Saturday evening family entertainment slot that has previously been occupied by Merlin. And I do mean ‘designed’. It’s so crudely manufactured it makes One Direction look like Led Zeppelin.

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: What’s wrong with being right?

I’m trying to imagine what Britain would look like under a Ukip/Conservative coalition with Cameron as PM and Farage as his deputy. The idea fills me with horror. I think, for example, of the runaway economic boom which would result from the sudden dash to exploit our superabundant shale gas resources; I think of the revolution which would occur in education were free schools freed to make a profit; I think of the rolling back of political correctness, the reinvention of the NHS on the Singapore model, the epic reduction in public spending, the cancellation of High Speed 2, the death of the renewable energy scam. It would be a nightmare, I tell you, a complete bloody nightmare. Whatever would there be left for people like me to write about?

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: As a Brummie, I am aggrieved with Peaky Blinders

You wait a whole lifetime for a lavishly shot, starrily cast, mega-budget gangster drama set in Birmingham to come along. Then when it does, it’s absolute rubbish. Well, I’m sorry but it is and as a Brummie — near enough: I grew up in a village called Alvechurch, just outside, and I come from a long line of Midlands industrialists — I feel particularly aggrieved by the entirely unjustified acclaim being heaped on the dismal Peaky Blinders (Thursday, BBC2). Let’s start with the accents. Some sound like a mélange of Liverpool and generic northern; others sound Irish, even when spoken by characters who aren’t supposed to be Irish. The series is set in Small Heath in 1919. Times have changed a bit since then, I’m sure, but Brummagem accents?

Thursday

James Delingpole

The RSPB is fighting for wind turbines. The birds can fend for themselves

The RSPB has come out against fracking and urged the government to ‘rethink its shale gas policies’. And of course the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would know. After all when your skill set ranges from identifying Little Brown Jobs through your binoculars at 10,000 yards all the way to differentiating a Greater Spotted Woodpecker from a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker merely by the sound of its drumming beak, clearly it goes without saying that your insights into the merits of hydraulic fracturing and the minutiae of Britain’s energy economy deserve to be taken very seriously indeed. No, no I jest. About the first bit, anyway.

Thursday

James Delingpole

After watching Bad Education, Big School is as embarrassing as watching your dad trying to DJ

You know you’re getting old when TV starts getting nostalgic about eras during which you were already feeling old and nostalgic. Take Pogs, the subject of one of those ‘Whatever happened to them, eh?’ moments in Badults (BBC3, Tuesday), an amiable sitcom about twentysomething flatmates. Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties. Tragically, though, the reason I know this is not that I played with them myself but that my stepson Jim the Rat did. How depressing is that? What it means is that even the generation below me, Jim’s, is already beginning to feel sufficiently past it to start lamenting its lost youth.

James Delingpole

James Delingpole discovers he’s an old-fashioned disciplinarian

Diving with great white sharks, speeding round the track at Brands Hatch with the world sidecar racing champion, being eaten alive in an interview with Lou Reed… though I’ve done lots of exciting things in the course of my life as a journalist, none has come even close to matching the visceral thrill of the four days I spent earlier this year as a teacher at my old school, Malvern College. I don’t mean that the pupils (or whatever grisly term you’re supposed to call them these days: students? clients? learning co-travellers?) were in any way frightening or unnecessarily difficult. Nor that I found the experience remotely traumatic.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The tao of Ayn Rand

I’m now half way through Atlas Shrugged and I’m loving almost every moment. But Ayn Rand isn’t someone you read for pleasure, I’m beginning to realise. She’s someone you read so you can underline sentences and scrawl in the margins ‘Yes’, ‘God that is so TRUE!’ and ‘YES!!!’ For example, at the heart of the novel are three romances between heroine Dagny Taggart and a trio of driven, dauntless free marketeers. But you don’t pay them any serious attention — not even during the sex scenes, which you skip quickly past in order to get to the much more exciting bits about industrial relations. Partly, it’s because Rand isn’t much of a prose stylist, least of all when she tries to do lyrical.

James Delingpole

Time out

Will my friend, the writer and historian Tom Holland, get his head chopped off for the things he is saying on Islam: The Untold Story (Channel 4)? My guess is not. If I’d said them, I’m sure I would have done because I have the kind of manner which makes people want to punch my lights out even if all I’ve said is that their mum makes a really lovely apple crumble and by the way is it OK if I help with the dishes? Holland, on the other hand, has such a fey, wispy, slightly geeky, quintessential English niceness about him that I’ll bet if he stood outside the Kaaba and declaimed to the crowds through a megaphone, ‘I say, you chaps. You do realise that your religion is a frightful farrago of nonsense?

Thursday

James Delingpole

Breaking Bad is so harrowing that for a while James Delingpole couldn’t watch it

One of Boy’s more annoying teenage rules of thumb is that, if Dad likes it, it must be crap. This applies of course not just to all those classic albums I consider an essential part of his education from Led Zep III to After the Goldrush, but to books, films and TV shows as well. In our precious final years together before he leaves home to work his way up the Greenpeace hierarchy, I’d been quite looking forward to snatching a few father/son bonding moments as we settled down in front of, say, Ghosts of Mars, High Plains Drifter, Das Boot, The Sopranos or, as a special treat, the entire series of Band of Brothers back to back. But I’m beginning to fear that it ain’t going to happen. ‘Dad,’ he said to me the other day.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Ukip are playing it safe – so they’ve rejected me

So farewell then £80,000 salary, £150,000 expense account, secretary, team of assistants, constituency office, first-class travel, immunity from prosecution, Brussels blowouts, ludicrous pension and all the other perks I’d been so looking forward to enjoying from May next year onwards. Ukip has decided that it doesn’t, after all, want to have me as one of its MEPs. The rejection came as a bit of a surprise, I must say. When the party chairman, Steve Crowther, rang to break the news, I felt rather as Brad Pitt might on being turned down for a mercy shag he’d proffered Ann Widdecombe. No offence intended to Ukip — I think they’re great people and a very necessary prick to the Westminster bubble.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Is David Starkey God?

‘Somerset. Winter 877,’ said the subtitles below an arty, BBC-nature-doc style close-up of a coot paddling amid the reeds on the eerie black waters of the Somerset levels. ‘Yes!’ I went, mentally punching the air. ‘I’m in safe hands here, I can tell. Bet they’re going to get all the costume details totally right. There might even be battle scenes. Not crap three-men-with-shields-filmed-over-and-over-again-from-different-angles-with-a-shaky-camera like in the bad old days. But totally convincing CGI-enhanced ones. The Battle of Ashdown, done even more realistically than it was in 871. Yay!’ Then it got even better.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Do women really watch as much porn as men?

You may be aware that David Cameron — as part of a secret, Lynton Crosby-inspired operation codenamed Suck Up Shamelessly To The Embittered Authoritarian Killjoy Harpies At Mumsnet — has decreed that as from next year the default option when you sign a contract with your new internet provider will be ‘No porn in this household, thank you. I think it’s a disgrace.’ Superficially (and does this coalition ever think any other way?) I can see this makes a lot of sense.

Thursday

James Delingpole

What was the point of Burton and Taylor?

Watching Burton and Taylor (BBC4, Monday) I felt a bit like I do when I go to the theatre — or, more often, when friends have kindly taken me to the theatre. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ someone will ask. ‘Oh, yes. Very much,’ I’ll lie. For the truth is, no matter how well done it all is, I’d still so much rather be doing other things. Catching up with the latest episode of the infinitely more gripping The Returned (Channel 4, Sunday), for example. At the end I found myself wondering ‘Why?’ Not just ‘Why didn’t I switch off earlier?’ and ‘Why couldn’t I maybe have chosen to review that David Starkey series on royalty and music instead?