James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Wasted talent

‘We’ve got our main presenters,’ they explained. ‘What we need are interviewees to fill the guest slots. People with strong opinions on ...well, what are your views on the EU, for example?’ So I told them my views on the EUSSR, while swearing quite a lot. This seemed to make them happy. ‘It’s called 10 O’Clock Live,’ they said. ‘You probably saw our pilot. The one-off special with Lauren Laverne, Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell and Jimmy Carr? It got pretty good ratings.’ No, I replied. That isn’t the sort of programme I’d watch in a million years. Lefty comedians making lefty jokes to a lefty audience about politics from a relentlessly lefty perspective? No, thanks.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Sometimes, freedom requires doing your homework

‘Have you heard about the vast Libertarian conspiracy? We’re going to take over the government — and then leave you alone!’ This is the kind of joke that makes me proud to be libertarian, as a lot of the wisest, funniest and best people are these days, from Kelsey Grammer to Clint Eastwood to Trey Parker from South Park. ‘Have you heard about the vast Libertarian conspiracy? We’re going to take over the government — and then leave you alone!’ This is the kind of joke that makes me proud to be libertarian, as a lot of the wisest, funniest and best people are these days, from Kelsey Grammer to Clint Eastwood to Trey Parker from South Park.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Waste not, want not

‘I want everyone to be as angry as I am,’ says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and I hope he succeeds for the thing that makes him so angry is one of the things that makes me most angry, too: the senseless eradication of the world’s fish stocks. ‘I want everyone to be as angry as I am,’ says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and I hope he succeeds for the thing that makes him so angry is one of the things that makes me most angry, too: the senseless eradication of the world’s fish stocks. All this week on Channel 4, HF-W has been campaigning in a series of programmes called Hugh’s Fish Fight. In the first episode he set the scene nicely by going out with a trawler into the fishing grounds 80 miles off the north Scottish coast.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Am I offending the wrong Americans?

Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices? A. So that even the blind could hate them. Q. Why did God give liberals annoying, whiny voices? A. So that even the blind could hate them. This is probably my favourite joke from a new book I just published in the US, (hence the use of ‘liberal’ in its American sense), called 365 Ways To Drive A Liberal Crazy. Though I don’t think it’s quite as funny as the Obama ‘Men Who Stare At Goats’ joke or the one about Nancy Pelosi and the sheep on the desert island, I like it a) because I invented it (or, rather, adapted it from an old Eighties racist joke) and b) because it offends so many liberal pieties.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Weekly shockers

Did you hear the one about Jordan’s disabled son? Unlikely, since you probably don’t watch Tramadol Nights (Channel 4), nor read the Mirror (‘Katie Price furious after Frankie Boyle joke about her disabled son’), nor the Guardian (‘Frankie Boyle’s Katie Price joke sparks Ofcom investigation’). Did you hear the one about Jordan’s disabled son? Unlikely, since you probably don’t watch Tramadol Nights (Channel 4), nor read the Mirror (‘Katie Price furious after Frankie Boyle joke about her disabled son’), nor the Guardian (‘Frankie Boyle’s Katie Price joke sparks Ofcom investigation’). Don’t worry, I’m not going to repeat it here. What kind of sicko do you think I am: Rod Liddle?

Saturday

James Delingpole

Would I be a better novelist if I found my inner Trollope?

Some of you are going to be appalled that it has taken me till now to read Trollope’s Autobiography. And quite right too. If I’d read it in my mid-twenties instead of my mid-forties, I would have had two dozen novels under my belt by now instead of a measly five-and-a-half. And you would never have had to read a single column of mine complaining about how poor and underrated I am, because I wouldn’t be. By the time he was my age, Trollope was a household name and bringing in £4,500 a year. This is the rough equivalent of £675,000 today. How did he do it? By treating the business of writing not as an ‘art’ to get precious about but just another journeyman craft to be laboured at nine-to-five. Or, in Trollope’s case, 5.30 a.m.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Freedom starts with plain speaking

The Jeremy Vine show (BBC Radio 2) rang the other day to ask whether I’d come on and talk about the newly ennobled Tory peer Howard Flight’s remarks about ‘breeding’ and the underclass. The Jeremy Vine show (BBC Radio 2) rang the other day to ask whether I’d come on and talk about the newly ennobled Tory peer Howard Flight’s remarks about ‘breeding’ and the underclass. As usual, my immediate answer was, ‘No. You just want me to come on and be your token hate figure.’ ‘Oh pleeeeze,’ they said. ‘We’ll send a car. A really nice one.’ ‘Oh, all right then. But not because of the car. You’d have sent the car anyway. I’m doing it because I’m a whore, that’s all.

James Delingpole

Juggling statistics

I love statistics. Possibly my favourite is the one from Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: the total number of birds killed in the Exxon Valdez disaster was the same as are killed each day in the US flying into plate-glass windows or the same as are killed in Britain every two days by cats. It’s good because you can use it in so many different ways: to annoy cat lovers; to amaze friends at dinner parties; and above all to bait those tortured souls for whom Exxon Valdez has become the ne plus ultra of the kind of Man Made Eco Armageddon that must never, at all costs, be allowed to happen again. Obviously, we’d all rather those little tweetie birdies didn’t die, but that’s not the point.

Saturday

James Delingpole

It’s getting lonely over here on the right

In New York last week I was gobsmacked to discover I’d won the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism. So gobsmacked that I hadn’t thought to prepare a magnanimous, funny victor’s speech, only a halting, rueful runner’s-up one. In New York last week I was gobsmacked to discover I’d won the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism. So gobsmacked that I hadn’t thought to prepare a magnanimous, funny victor’s speech, only a halting, rueful runner’s-up one. No one ever gives me prizes. And it’s not purely because I’m utterly rubbish and can’t write for toffee.

James Delingpole

Tendentious drivel

It told the story of two best mates, Frankie and Peter, serving in an unidentified northern regiment in Afghanistan where Peter quickly discovers he can’t cope under fire — and as a punishment is made the unit’s ‘camp bitch’ by the sadistic Lance Corporal Buckley (Mackenzie Crook). ‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.’ So I suppose you could argue that  Jimmy McGovern was merely following the fine tradition of Robert Browning when he wrote his drama about cowardice, bullying and murder among British soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan. But I wouldn’t.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I’d take Lord Curzon over Gandhi – and so would many Indians

In India last week I found myself thinking about Mohandas Gandhi and his famous quote when asked what he thought about western civilisation. ‘I think it would be a good idea,’ he replied. When I first heard that story — probably about the time of the Richard Attenborough biopic majoring on British colonial oppressiveness like the Amritsar massacre — I don’t doubt I reacted in the way I had been culturally programmed to do. ‘Well, that certainly put us arrogant, colonial Westerners in our place,’ my carefully indoctrinated brain almost certainly went. And it’s not as though I went through a phase in my life where I imagined the British empire to have been a bad thing.

James Delingpole

Rallying cry

Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story (Channel 4, Thursday) was unquestionably the most important programme that will appear on British television this year. Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story (Channel 4, Thursday) was unquestionably the most important programme that will appear on British television this year. Yes, even more important than Downton Abbey. The thing that really drove home just how important was the point, quite early on, where the Fawn turned to me and said, ‘Ohmygod! Where do we emigrate to?’ And it’s not as though the Fawn has ever been one of those irksome left-liberal wives who keeps undermining her husband’s thought-through right-wing wisdom with prissy right-on inanities based on nothing more solid than hormones. No, sirree.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Life’s too short to be nice to lefties

Now I know why so many people hate me. It came to me in a flash during dinner with a group of bright, articulate, well-balanced sixth-formers from Roedean girls’ school. I was banging on in my rabid right-wing way about the importance of free markets and the shortcomings of feminism and suchlike when I happened accidentally to vouchsafe that the proudest achievement of my life had been teaching my children to read. And it was as if, all of a sudden, I’d waved a magic wand and sprinkled myself in fairy dust. The mood softened. You could almost see the thought bubbles above the girls’ heads, saying: ‘Aaah!’ and ‘Gosh maybe he isn’t, like, so totally evil after all.’ ‘Blimey!’ I thought to myself.

James Delingpole

Education in horror

When my brother and I were teenagers growing up in the arse end of nowheresville — Bromsgrove to its friend — we were mainly looked after by Nanny VHS. When my brother and I were teenagers growing up in the arse end of nowheresville — Bromsgrove to its friend — we were mainly looked after by Nanny VHS. Every day, Mummy would take us to the rental store to hire a new video so as to keep us off her back. Sometimes it would be war porn, like The Deerhunter, which I think we must have watched about eight times — and the key Russian Roulette scene about 500 times. Sometimes it would be horror porn like Shivers or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’d quite forgotten I’d seen Shivers until I watched A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (BBC4, Monday).

Saturday

James Delingpole

Back to basics

One of the few professional stand-up comics I’ve met who wasn’t bitter, twisted, malign, graceless, grumpy, chippy, egomaniacal and slightly to the left of Stalin is Mark Billingham. One of the few professional stand-up comics I’ve met who wasn’t bitter, twisted, malign, graceless, grumpy, chippy, egomaniacal and slightly to the left of Stalin is Mark Billingham. We bonded at the Dubai literary festival earlier this year, and I liked him so much that I very nearly bought one of his bestselling crime thrillers.

James Delingpole

I’m sure Richard Curtis doesn’t really want to kill my children. Well, I say that …

For some time now I’ve had this idea for a running gag in a comedy sketch series. For some time now I’ve had this idea for a running gag in a comedy sketch series. It would star a character called Unfunny Observational Comic. Each week we’d see him dying a death with his ‘Have you ever noticed...?’ comedy of recognition before an appalled audience. He’d say things like: ‘You know how it is, when you’ve broken into your neighbour’s house to rummage through her knicker drawer...?’ and ‘Gerbils. Just what is it about gerbils that makes us all want to shag ’em?

Saturday

James Delingpole

House rules | 2 October 2010

The other weekend the Fawn and I were invited to stay at Chilham Castle. Obviously, if you’re Charles Moore, this is no big deal because it’s the kind of thing you do 24/7, 365 days of the year. For us, though — me especially, the Fawn being slightly posher than me — it was a revelation. ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought. ‘This is totally fantastic. Why isn’t my life like this all the time?’ And I found myself wishing dear Hugh Massingberd were still alive. He would have understood perfectly when I rang him up to boast. Private Eye called him ‘Massivesnob’ but as Hugh knew snobbery has little to do with it. You don’t need to be grand to land an invitation to one of the great English (or Scottish) houses. Just interesting.

James Delingpole

How I provoked the wrath of Mumsnet

James Delingpole says You Know It Makes Sense Apparently I’m in the doghouse. It’s because of a piece I wrote in Tatler which asked the question: ‘If you had a boy and a girl and could only afford to educate one of them privately, which would you choose?’ All other things being equal, I foolhardily argued, it should be the boy. This is the kind of article guaranteed to grab the attention of the termagants’ website Mumsnet. And so it came to pass. Friends kept forwarding me links to the discussion going on about me, in much the same kindly, helpful way they email links to unpleasant reviews of my books I might otherwise have missed. But I’m afraid I was too squeamish to investigate.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Eat local organic food if you like, but don’t kid yourself that it’s ‘green’

Don’t get me wrong, I love farmers’ markets. I love going to the fashionable one in Borough, London, and that wonderful rich feeling you get whenever you don’t buy anything. And I love going to the one near me in south London and bantering and haggling with the fish man till he succumbs to giving me some amazing bargain like five decent-size Dover sole for a tenner. I also really like the idea of putting money direct into the farmer’s pocket rather than helping finance yet another bloody edge-of-town Tesco. And I like the espresso man with his espresso machine. And the jolly sausage ladies. And the free-range eggs. And the Eastern European man who gives me a discount on the veg.

James Delingpole

In search of lost time

My friend Mickie O’Brien, late of 47 and 44 RM Cdo, died the other day. My friend Mickie O’Brien, late of 47 and 44 RM Cdo, died the other day. I’m not sure how old he was — late 80s, I would imagine — but, whatever, it was good going for a man who should have been killed at least twice in the 1940s, once at the Battle of Kangaw when the Japs shot away half his stomach and once when he walked deliberately into a minefield to rescue a French farmer. For one exploit or another Mickie won an MC. The question I used to ask Mickie most often was how he managed to cope with so much fear and horror. He always replied that he had the perfect temperament for wartime soldiering: ‘a strong sense of fatalism and no imagination’.