James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Death watch | 10 January 2013

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.

Friday

James Delingpole

I’m proud to come out as an Eton parent

I was just traipsing across the fields towards Common Lane, there to collect Boy en route to his St Andrews’ Day F-Blockers’ exhibition match of the Wall Game, when I was accosted by a splendid, Spectator-reading type who’d parked his car next to mine. ‘Are you James Delingpole?’ he asked. I admitted that I was. We got talking. There was only one possible reason for my being there, as he and I both knew. ‘Do you think I should finally out myself?’ I said. ‘I mean I’ve been living the lie for what seems like an age. And it’s so unlike me to keep secrets from my readers. Let’s face it, fearless and frank autobiography rather is my schtick.’ My new friend agreed that perhaps the time had come. So here goes.

James Delingpole

On the bias

It must be ten years now since I risked life and limb to brave the Cresta Run, go fox hunting and be driven round a racetrack by Lord Brocket in a Ferrari for a Channel 4 documentary on the British Upper Class. In the heady few minutes following its first transmission I thought it would mark the beginning of a glorious TV career. But TV never happened for me and oftentimes since I’ve wondered why. The short and obvious answer is that I’m crap — which may be true, but that never stopped a thousand and one other TV C-listers you could name. What I think it really boils down to is something far more insidious and pernicious: the institutional bias right across the board against almost anyone of a vaguely right-wing persuasion.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

We must act now to save our country from the scourge of wind turbines

The place I love more than anywhere on earth is the Edw Valley in mid-Wales. We’ve been going there every summer for more than a decade now and the kids think of it as their second home. When I die — as I nearly did once, you’ll remember, when I was carried off down the River Edw in full spate only to be rescued by an overhanging branch — you’ll find engraved in my heart the name of the hamlet where we stay. Cregrina. It’s our garden of Eden. In the evenings, long after the valley has descended into shadow, the moors on the humpbacked hills are still bathed in golden light and every time I look at them I think of the Churchillian sunlit uplands whose prospect gave us hope in our darkest hour.

Thursday

James Delingpole

I love Michel Roux Jr

For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’. No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a smear of MasterChef purée, MasterChef shavings, MasterChef pickles and MasterChef tapenade and pommes, style Masterchef. With more MasterChef for pud, obviously. Does this make me a bad person? Well, possibly. But it also makes me a normal person.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Back in the Delingpole fold

Gosh, I can’t tell you how lucky you were not to have been brought up in the Delingpole family. There were nine of us in all — not counting the cats, iguanas, fleas, lice and one-eyed pugs — and the scene every day in the rambling Old Rectory where we lived was like the second half of Lord of the Flies only without the restraint, civility and gentle charm. It was a dog-eat-dog world where no quarter was given and none expected. It was like Florence in the era of the Medici (only without the culture and art part: unless you count the huge mural of Judge Death my brother Dick did in his bedroom) — an era of constantly shifting alliances, betrayal, backstabbing, torture, humiliation and perpetual war. It made me the hardened street-fighter I am today.... ....

Thursday

James Delingpole

Top of their game

God, I’m jealous of Michael Gove. Not for being a cabinet minister in the same coalition as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, obviously, but for being outed as a queer in the new series of Harry & Paul (BBC2, Sunday). Now that’s what I call fame. Harry & Paul has had mixed reviews. Some of the sketches — the ‘I’m a cop’ one; the US car salesmen — simply aren’t funny. But so what? Even at its best The Fast Show, arguably the funniest-ever broken-sketch comedy series, contained some sketches that weren’t funny. It goes with the territory. Unfunny sketches are the equivalent of the ‘darlings’ that William Faulkner advised authors they should kill.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Here’s a BBC scandal that should really make you disgusted

How many of you reading this were abused by Jimmy Savile? Few if any, I would hazard. And while I don’t wish to play down the misery wrought over four or more decades by that loathsome perve, the BBC scandal I’m about to describe has resulted in damage, pain and destruction far more widespread than anything Savile managed.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Zombie hell

Derren Brown is a great big cheating liar. Or so my old mucker Rod Liddle reckoned last week in his Spectator blog. Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was ‘clearly, demonstrably, faked’, declared Rod. Well, I guess that settles it then. Or does it? First some background for those of you who missed it. (Though my advice for those of you who did is: stop reading now and watch both episodes immediately on Channel 4’s 4oD catch-up site.) Derren Brown’s Apocalypse (Channel 4, last Friday) was — or, pace Rod, purported to be — an extraordinarily bold TV experiment.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Why on earth do we think badgers are charismatic?

Did you know that the badger is one of the most charismatic creatures in our countryside? It says so on an advisory leaflet produced by Scottish Natural Heritage called ‘Badgers And The Law’. The document doesn’t make clear which aspect of badgers is particularly charismatic. Perhaps it’s that they are prone to collapsing during evangelical church services and babbling in strange tongues. Or perhaps it’s that with their rakish stripes and their dusk-till-dawn social hours they’re widely known to be the life and soul of every party. But the more likely explanation, I fear, is that the author of those words is doing what psychologists call ‘projecting’.

Thursday

James Delingpole

BBC goes for it

Which is the worse crime, would you say: eavesdropping on celebrities’ answerphones? Or hosting and covering up for a ruthless predatory paedophile ring — led by your biggest, most heavily promoted star — over a period of four decades? Mm, me too. In fact, I’d say the Savile affair is as close as we’ll ever get to proving that God really hates the BBC. I mean, the timing is far too perfect to be coincidental, isn’t it? First we get Leveson — essentially a stitch-up by the BBC and the Guardian to entrench the power of the bien-pensant establishment, increase regulation and destroy the free market (especially Rupert Murdoch). Then, just when the tofu-eating turbine-huggers think they’ve won — zing!

Thursday

James Delingpole

Treating Islam with special reverence is cultural suicide and just plain wrong

My brilliant niece Freya was talking to my brother the other day about the religious education curriculum at her predominately white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city. She happened to mention ‘Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him.’ ‘Eh?’ said my brother. ‘It’s what we’re taught at school. After we mention “Mohammed” we have to say “Peace be upon him”.’ Now I know what you’re thinking: that Freya must surely have got the wrong end of the stick. ‘If this were a madrassa in Bradford, well maybe,’ you’ll be thinking. ‘But at a white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city? No way. Things aren’t that bad. At least not yet, anyway...

Thursday

James Delingpole

All-pervading PC

Do not read this review if you haven’t seen the first series of Homeland. Because I’m a lazy bastard I have recently taken to farming out my TV criticism responsibilities to Twitter. The other day, for example, I Tweeted the vexed question: ‘Should I get Homeland series one box set — or is it meh?’ ‘Meh’, by the way — for those of you unfamiliar with modern yoofspeak — is the current fashionable term for ‘bland’, ‘so-so’, ‘so what?’, ‘neither here nor there’, ‘can’t be bothered’. Well, I say ‘fashionable’, though in fact it has been around since at least 1992 when Lisa first deployed it on an episode of The Simpsons.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Public-interest piety is the real threat to a free press

For me the only useful fact to emerge from the otherwise immensely tedious Leveson inquiry was this: that messages on the phone of Milly Dowler were not erased by News of the World journalists. Of course, it would have been a much, much better story if they had been. Eavesdropping on the phone messages of a murdered schoolgirl may be creepy and unpleasant but it is essentially a victimless crime. Actively interfering with those messages, on the other hand, might have had serious consequences. Perhaps false hope might have been given to Milly’s distraught parents. Perhaps the police inquiry might have been jeopardised.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Artificial life

I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents. Why do I not share in the general adulation of this comedy? First, to misquote Homer Simpson, it isn’t funny because it isn’t true. I say this with confidence having personally bred and raised two of the most brilliant, witty and incisive children ever created. Maybe once or twice in their entire lives have they said anything as clever as the kind of one-liners those smartarse — and supposedly typical — brats on Outnumbered come up with every two seconds.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

How a fountain pen and a chiropractor restored my lost youth

God, it’s a bore getting older: all those things you used to be able to do but can’t any more and will never be able to do again. Grow hair, for example (except in all the wrong places); recover quickly from hangovers; vault fences; climb high up trees without getting vertigo; be looked at with anything more than indifference or disgust by attractive young females; and so on. But it’s not all bad. Sometimes you can buck the trend. A few months ago, my friend David Hearsey — who flew Halifax bombers in the war — emailed to tell me that he’d recently taken up flying again. How amazingly impressive is that in your late eighties/early nineties?

Thursday

James Delingpole

Identity crisis | 13 September 2012

The greatest moment in the history of television — and one which will surely remain unsurpassed for ever — was the final episode of The Sopranos. Part of its genius was to reward all of us who had stuck with it so loyally for the previous 85 episodes by allowing us to make up our own minds how it ended. Did Tony get wasted by those hitmen-like figures we saw entering the restaurant where he was having the rapprochement dinner with Carmela? Well, maybe. Or did the Feds finally get their wiretaps and informants properly organised and put Tony away for ever? Or did he — as I prefer not to stop believing — waste all the people who’d come to kill him and then get off, on a technicality, whatever charges the Feds threw at him.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Enough bluster. It’s time I faced the voters

They’re building a wind farm, six turbines the height of Salisbury cathedral spire, on the hilltop half a mile from your home. Would you say, on balance, that this will increase or decrease the value of your property? Hmm. Tough one. Let’s try and work it out by carefully weighing up the pros and cons. Cons • The lovely view which was one of the reasons you bought the house has been destroyed. • From now on your days will be plagued by ‘shadow flicker’ and your nights by irregular whumping and low-frequency noise which may cause you insomnia, raised cortisol levels, stress, anxiety, disorientation, panic attacks, depression.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I’ve left London. How will I ever work again

They say that moving house is the third most traumatic thing after death and divorce and they’re right about that, I reckon. For the past few weeks and months I’ve been treating our London house not like the beloved home where I’ve spent 12 happy years but more like an anonymous shell where I just happen to eat, sleep and work. I used to enjoy having new friends round and hearing them wax lyrical about the niceness of the wallpaper or the size of the bedrooms or the delightfulness of the view over the park, but not this year. I used to spend hours in the garden, but I’ve scarcely been out at all — not to weed, not to grow tomatoes, not even to smell the scent of my favourite Souvenir du Docteur Jamain.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Double vision | 18 August 2012

If you were to condense everything that was most quintessentially English about quintessential Englishness — from the green man and morris dancing to Vaughan Williams and The Whitsun Weddings — feed it into a liquidiser, have it remixed by an electronica DJ, and then transformed into the soundtrack of some trendy arthouse film premièred at a festival in Brighton, what you might end up with is something like the work of Grasscut. I hope that doesn’t sound offputting. It’s quite possible that I’ve completely misrepresented them. For a more accurate assessment, I did try asking one of their two members Marcus O’Dair — who spends his spare time as a music journalist.