James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

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 Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties.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?

Monday

James Delingpole

It’s a boy! Advice for the royal baby from James Delingpole

Congratulations, Baby Windsor. You have just been born a subject of Her Britannic Majesty (as it used to say on the passports) and have therefore won life’s lottery.  Actually, given the state of the nation and the economy, maybe ‘won life’s dog-eared scratchcard’ is more the phrase juste. Still, you’ve done amazingly well. Thanks to the freakiest odds imaginable you have, merely by the accident of being conceived by the right couple, leapfrogged to the covetable position of third in line to the British throne. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that it comes with a certain amount of baggage. Problem one: you’re a constititutional monarch.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Books are a load of crap – the sporty kids have got it made

What a glorious sporting summer it has been so far. For some the highlight will have been Andy Murray at Wimbledon, for others that nailbiting first Test against the Aussies. But for me, none of this comes even close to matching the joy, the exultation, the triumph of the moment on an Atlantic beach a few days ago when our hot young female Portuguese surf instructor took Girl and me aside to comment on our morning’s performance. ‘You, Poppy, and you, James, are both good,’ she said. That’s ‘good’ as in the exact opposite of ‘bad’.

James Delingpole

Notes on…Normandy

There are some, I know, who for whom Normandy means the three Cs — cider, cream and calvados. But if, like me, you’re more of a three B person — beaches, bocage and the Bayeux tapestry — then the place from which to assault all three is the relatively unknown fishing village of Port-en-Bessin. Everyone visits the spectacular US cemetery of dazzling white marble and the pillboxes at Omaha beach, and rightly so, for together with the similarly well-preserved clifftop battery taken by the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Pointe du Hoc, it’s the perfect Saving Private Ryan experience.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Brainwashed from birth: the cult of the BBC

Last week I was on holiday with my family on the Algarve. The good news was that, thanks to the BBC’s widespread availability in Portugal, we didn’t miss out on Murray at Wimbledon. The bad news was that, for the same reason, we couldn’t escape The Apprentice. But this isn’t an anti-Apprentice column. It’s an anti-BBC column prompted in part by something annoying somebody said to me on Twitter the other day. I’d written, not for the first time, that I considered the BBC ‘a total waste of money’. And the tweeter replied primly, ‘The BBC is a total waste of money or actually you quite like Today, Proms, Glasto, wildlife docs. Can’t have it both ways.’ No, actually, you can.

James Delingpole

James Delingpole’s letter to the royal baby

Congratulations, Baby Windsor. You have just been born a subject of Her Britannic Majesty (as it used to say on the passports) and have therefore won life’s lottery.  Actually, given the state of the nation and the economy, maybe ‘won life’s dog-eared scratchcard’ is more the phrase juste. Still, you’ve done amazingly well. Thanks to the freakiest odds imaginable you have, merely by the accident of being conceived by the right couple, leapfrogged to the covetable position of third in line to the British throne. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that it comes with a certain amount of baggage. Problem one: you’re a constititutional monarch.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The Stones at Glastonbury: the greatest show EVER

Yes, I’m sorry, the Stones at Glastonbury really were that good and if you weren’t there I’m afraid you seriously need to consider killing yourself. You missed a piece of rock’n’roll history, one of the gigs that will likely be ranked henceforward among the greatest EVER. So again, sorry if you weren’t there to enjoy it. Boy and I were. And we did. A lot. Perhaps it helped that so few of us were expecting much. I was hanging around the afternoon beforehand in the EE tent waiting for my phone to recharge, having one of those random Glasto conversations with strangers — an A&E nurse, a geeky kid — and we all agreed that the Stones were a band we planned to see more out of duty than pleasure.

James Delingpole

It’s the secret of a successful marriage: my wife treats me like a dog

‘Here, Wolf,’ says the Fawn to me, showing me a saucer. ‘Look at this! This is the new place where you put your mouth things. See! See the saucer? Look at the saucer! See the saucer! This saucer will now live by your bed. This is the place where from now on you put your mouth things. Not on the floor. In the saucer. See Wolf? See?’ (My ‘mouth things’, I should explain, are the manky strips of surgical tape I use to seal up my mouth every night. This sounds weird, I know, but it does have a purpose. I practise this breathing method called buteyko). And that dialogue I gave you in the first par — that’s my wife (aka the Fawn) in the process of training me.

Thursday

James Delingpole

TV review: Russell Brand socks it to the gods and goddesses of daytime TV

This week I witnessed the bloody, brutal death of mainstream television. It will, I think, go down in media history as one of those ‘Where were you when JFK was shot?’ moments. The victims were the presenters of a US breakfast television show called Morning Joe; the executioner was Russell Brand. Russell Brand? No, it’s OK, I’m quite with you: on a bad day he can be the most annoying person on earth, with his swarthy, beardie, slimy, wheedling faux-grandiloquence and even more faux-intellect and that little-puppy-dog-lost way he has of looking you straight in the eye and impudently demanding your forgiveness for having just shagged both your wife and your daughter ‘because, hey, it could have been worse — at least I didn’t do grandma too’.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Am I politically correct enough to stand for Ukip?

A few weeks ago I drove to Market Harborough for my test as a potential Ukip candidate. The process was very thorough. There was a media interview section, where one of my examiners did a bravura impersonation of a tricksy local radio presenter (he even did the traffic bulletin beforehand). Then came a test on the manifesto. Finally, there was the bit where I nearly came unstuck: the speeches. My problem was that the stern lady interviewing me had seen me speak before. It was at one of Nigel Farage’s boozy fundraisers at the East India Club. Coming out as a Ukip member, I had vouchsafed to the audience, had been as thrilling as finally admitting you’re gay and realising you now have the pick of London’s finest fisting clubs.