James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

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’.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Opiate for the masses

One of the few things I respect about mainstream TV is how utterly shallow and addictive it is. In many ways it’s like crack: it doesn’t pretend that it’s good for you but it gets you to where you want to go way more effectively than tofu or wheatgrass juice or organic dolphin-friendly tuna caught with rod and line. Sometimes it achieves high artistic standards too, but this is usually a fluke, which happens despite the medium rather than because of it. TV isn’t like film or opera or theatre or sculpture or any of that poncy stuff. Its main job is to get you out of it as quickly as possible — an opiate for the masses. I got a sense of its true purpose the other day when I ventured up to the Rat’s lair to call him down for supper.

Saturday

James Delingpole

It is not drugs that cause the problems, it’s the wholly unwinnable war on drugs

At a dinner party a couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be sat near one of my heroes, Roger Scruton — like being a couch away from Socrates at a symposium. But then, halfway through, the great man began sounding off on one of the two things he is completely and utterly wrong about (the other one being pop music): drugs. By ‘drugs’, of course, dear, brave, brilliant Roger didn’t mean to include the alcohol he had been quaffing all evening nor yet the highly addictive yet legal nicotine death sticks of which the Fawn and I had partaken before dinner. What he meant was yer proper, actual, tabloid horror drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, heroin, and the deadly, evil ‘gateway’ drug they call ‘spliff’.

James Delingpole

Battered but triumphant

Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen. Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen. It was gripping and brilliant because the story it told with tremendous verve, wit, imagination and style was so extraordinary. Martin Strel, 55, a hideously overweight Slovenian drunkard and gambler, addicted to red wine and horse burgers, also happens to be the world’s greatest endurance swimmer. He’d already done the Danube, the Mississippi and the Yangtse.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I know exactly what I want to read this summer — if only I could find it

What I thought I’d do this summer holidays is catch up with all those classics I’ve been meaning to read for ages: A la recherche du temps perdu, Moby-Dick, David Copperfield, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair, everything by the Brontës, anything German, Metamorphosis, the Odyssey, the Iliad, most Balzac, anything by P.G. Wodehouse, Our Mutual Friend, Anna Karenina... But where to start? Our Mutual Friend is out because the wife is reading it and it’s surely a waste to buy two copies. Also, Dickens generally is very Dickensian and I’m not sure how much of that I can cope with on holiday. The Brontës, I think, are more a girl thing than a boy thing. I’ve seen Vanity Fair on TV.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Is Prince Charles ill-advised, or merely idiotic?

I do wish the Prince of Wales weren’t such a terrible prat because then I wouldn’t have to say it in print and quite ruin my chances of a knighthood. But he is a prat. A dangerous prat at that — as he reminded us yet again just the other day in a speech he gave to ‘business leaders’ at St James’s Palace about what he thinks is happening with ‘climate change’. He said: ‘It has been profoundly depressing to witness the way the so-called climate sceptics are apparently able to intimidate all sorts of people from adopting the precautionary measures necessary to avert environmental collapse.

James Delingpole

Religious conversion

The other week Simon Hoggart had a go at Rev — the new comedy about an inner city vicar played by Tom Hollander (BBC2, Monday) — and I don’t blame him. The other week Simon Hoggart had a go at Rev — the new comedy about an inner city vicar played by Tom Hollander (BBC2, Monday) — and I don’t blame him. We had a similar reaction in our household when we watched about ten minutes of the first episode before deciding it wasn’t for us and switching off. And now it’s our favourite must-watch comedy of the week. What happened? Did James Woods’s scripts suddenly sharpen up? Did the superb cast raise their acting skills a notch? Of course not. The only thing that had changed was us — i.e., me and the Fawn.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Lefties have got away with feeling superior for too long — let the fightback begin

I was at a debate at the Institute of Economic Affairs last week when the speaker next to me — a preening, prickly chap with a moustache and hugely self-important manner — took it upon himself to apprise the assembled throng of the most extraordinary fact: apparently, James Delingpole is nowhere near as good at delivering Ronald Reagan quotes as Ronald Reagan was. ‘As I can testify from experience,’ he added, impressively, ‘having heard Reagan speak on several occasions.’ ‘Gosh!’ I thought to myself. And again ‘Gosh!’ I’m often taken aback when complete strangers decide to have a go at me personally in debates. ‘Hey, you don’t even know me,’ I want to say.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Twisted brilliance

What am I doing reviewing a documentary about the baroque? I hate the baroque — have done for as long as I can remember — and I expect it’s probably the same with you. What am I doing reviewing a documentary about the baroque? I hate the baroque — have done for as long as I can remember — and I expect it’s probably the same with you. Apart from being an essential sign of aesthetic superiority (we much prefer neoclassical in this country, don’t we, those of us who’ve spent time living in places like Peck quad, what, what, what?) hating the baroque is also the most wonderful time-saver.