James Delingpole

‘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.

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?

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.

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’.

With the possible exception of Game of Thrones, The Returned (Channel 4, Sunday) is the best series you will see on TV all year. I caught some early previews about a month ago when I was on The Review Show (BBC4). Normally the reviewers don’t agree on much but on this we were unanimous: we all felt like newly made addicts who’d been introduced to the finest, purest heroin — only to be suddenly denied our next fix. When was the rest of the series going to be broadcast? When? WHEN? Well, now, finally it has made it on to Channel 4 and I hope you’ll all be as hooked as I am. It has been variously billed as a zombie thriller and a successor to Twin Peaks, but neither does justice to its intelligence, subtlety and eerie beauty.

The kids are back for half-term so we’re having to watch absolute crap again on TV. Monday night, I wanted to watch The Fall (BBC1). But I couldn’t, obviously, because Britain’s Got Talent (ITV1) was on. ‘Dad! Dad! You’ve got to see this!’ So I come in to see what I’ve got to see and it’s a man called Aaron Crow whose unique and remarkable skills are that he never speaks, he has an interesting haircut, and he does mildly scary magic tricks which aren’t quite as good as Dynamo’s. Also he pronounces his name ‘Aran’ — as in sweater. Is this some other annoying new trend I didn’t know about?

The serial killer on The Fall (BBC1, Monday) is no ordinary serial killer. He has a unique and terrifying modus operandi — or ‘signature’, as we serial-killer experts call it. What this serial killer does is to predate ruthlessly and single-mindedly on those young, attractive women unfortunate enough to be in the precise target-audience demographic of glossy-grimy five-part, prime-time BBC thrillers about serial killers. His thoroughness is chilling. First he checks out what they do for a living: architects and lawyers are ideal because then people at opinion-forming, BBC executive-frequented Islington dinner parties will definitely be talking about it, whereas they might not if it were just smelly prostitutes.

The controversial counterintuitive piece I was going to write concerned Ben Elton’s new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1, Tuesday). You may have noticed it has been panned by all the critics, but the main focus has been on Elton’s shift from darling of the Eighties alternative comedy left to bourgeois sell-out. So what I was going to do was note that, whatever you think of Elton, he doesn’t half know how to capture the zeitgeist, and that this beautifully acted send-up of Elf n Safety gone mad starring the great David Haig is a bourgeois gem to rank with My Family and Outnumbered. But then I made the mistake of watching it. I lasted all of five minutes.