James Delingpole

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.

In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick. What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing entitlement at some smoky St James’s club; and, second, the noisome cultural assumptions behind Mac’s ineffably grand remark. According to Mac’s Weltanschauung, it was not only right that people of his class should always keep hold of their silver, their Canalettos and Rembrandts, but that everyone else, a notch or two below, should also applaud them for doing so.

Everyone’s loving BBC1’s new, Sunday-night period mega-drama The Village (32 episodes long if writer Peter Moffat has his way). It’s taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics, which I think are all euphemisms for ‘not like Downton Abbey’. And it definitely isn’t like Downton Abbey. There’s a lot more brooding, the dialogue’s more Pinteresque (which is to say it’s more often there to evoke mood or the banality of existence than to carry the plot, amuse you or illuminate character), its view of the past (a Derbyshire village on the eve of the first world war) is much less rosy. But is this necessarily a good thing? Personally, I’m not so sure.

On 28 January 1986 the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch, killing all seven crew. What made it worse was that one of the victims, Christa McAuliffe, was a teacher, so of course all the children in her class were watching it live on TV. I remember it well. For the first few seconds after the shuttle blew up, you weren’t quite sure whether or not what you’d just seen was meant to happen: perhaps all those swirls of white vapour were jettisoned boosters or something. Then, you heard the gasps and groans from the crowds standing at the launch site and finally you knew. Up until 9/11 I think it was the most shocking event most of us had ever witnessed on TV. What I hadn’t been properly aware of, till The Challenger (BBC2, Monday), was the back story.

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42 (Tuesday).

‘Don’t be evil.’ Google’s unofficial motto. ‘Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do evil.” They say, “I’m going to make the world a better place.”’ Christopher Booker. Meanwhile — while you were distracted by other things like tax bills and school fees and somehow scraping by — Google and Amazon and Apple took over the world. This, of course, is what novels by the likes of William Gibson, films such as Blade Runner and comic strips like Judge Dredd have been telling us for some time: that one day, the world will be ruled not by governments but by giant corporations.

`The older I get, the less tolerant I become of being treated by television like a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. No offence meant to Dr Jago Cooper but, if I’m going to consider spending a valuable hour of my fast-diminishing lifespan watching a documentary about Lost Kingdoms of South America, the very last thing that’s going to persuade me is being importuned in the manner of those men with microphones at street markets trying to persuade me to buy an amazing labour-saving device I never knew I needed, the Radish-o-Chop.

Some people say TV is a bad thing for families but I say don’t knock it. It was thanks to TV this school holidays that I almost got vaguely, slightly, accepted by Boy. Fathers of young teenage males will know exactly what I’m on about here. There comes a point — quite often bang on your son’s 13th birthday — when he suddenly decides that you’re the lamest, dumbest, uncoolest Dad in the entire history of fatherhood. And you spend many anxious months wondering how on earth you’re ever going to win him back. Well, in my case TV has been the answer.