James Delingpole

I’ve got this idea for a book, when I get the time, called Everything You Know Is Wrong. Its job will be to attack all the idiot received ideas of our age — what my father-in-law calls ‘notions’. High on the list of candidates, most definitely, is the commonly held belief (especially among stand-up comics) that Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian who ever lived. I’ve got this idea for a book, when I get the time, called Everything You Know Is Wrong. Its job will be to attack all the idiot received ideas of our age — what my father-in-law calls ‘notions’. High on the list of candidates, most definitely, is the commonly held belief (especially among stand-up comics) that Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian who ever lived.

Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything. OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to an EU constitution. When Rupert Murdoch discovered this, he personally intervened by running a Sun front-page story headlined ‘TRAITOR’. The effect was almost instant. Within days, Tony Blair had offered the people of Britain a referendum on the EU. Yep, sorry about that. What you were doing was waiting for the exciting revelation. And what I was doing was taking the piss out of presenter Peter Oborne.

A few years ago, my at-the-time-quite-impoverished screenwriter friend Jake Michie told me about this brilliant new children’s TV series he’d dreamed up about the Knights of the Round Table. A few years ago, my at-the-time-quite-impoverished screenwriter friend Jake Michie told me about this brilliant new children’s TV series he’d dreamed up about the Knights of the Round Table. All the male leads would be young and pretty with boy band haircuts; Arthur would be a bit of a rugger-bugger lunk, while the real hero would be a younger Merlin who would use his magic to get his pal out of all sorts of scrapes; and obviously there’d be monsters and demons and suchlike to stop the kids getting bored. I was appalled.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for coming back so soon to the subject of Adam Curtis, the first part of whose All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was so ably dissected by Simon Hoggart last week. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for coming back so soon to the subject of Adam Curtis, the first part of whose All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was so ably dissected by Simon Hoggart last week. Only, no less a personage than Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times has estimated Curtis as ‘TV’s greatest documentary maker’ and the BBC obviously agrees. So, really, two Speccie TV reviews in a fortnight is surely the barest minimum this genius deserves. Is he, though? Is Curtis really a genius?

For the past few weeks, unnoticed by all but the most sharp-eyed critics, BBC1 has been running a Celebrate Communitarianism season. The first programmes were: Envy of the World!!!, in which children at Great Ormond Street hospital spent a week being forcibly denied vital drug treatment. Then, in a touching scene right at the end, just as they were all on the brink of death, a big pink bunny with NHS printed all over his fur came hopping in with all the medicines and dialysis machines they needed, accompanied by Sir Jimmy Savile saying, ‘Now then, now then. As it ’appens, I have fixed it for YOU to understand why it is we have the best healthcare system in the world.’ So You Think You’re Hard Enough?

When I was a teenager I used to upset my father by telling him I thought it would be really glamorous to die young in a car crash. The stupid thing was, I believed it. The corollary of feeling immortal is that you have no real understanding of the finality of death. That’s why you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of 40-plus suicide bombers. In My Brother, the Islamist (BBC3, Monday), a likeable Dorset tree surgeon called Robb Leech set out on a quest to discover why the blond, perfectly normal-seeming stepbrother Rich with whom he’d grown up in Weymouth had ended up as a member of the group Islam4UK.