James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I hate weddings; funerals are almost invariably better in every way

If I’d written the film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion — as I was reminded the other week when I went to Tisbury, Wiltshire, to bid farewell to my old friend John Clanwilliam. John, you may remember, was the earl I killed last summer during a game of human Cluedo. At Christmas, he died for real and though I shall miss him dearly I don’t think anyone could be too unhappy at the manner of his leaving: a few months after two glorious 90th birthday parties (one in London, one in the country), cheery, well-loved and with all his faculties intact.

James Delingpole

Broken Britain

I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. It’s called MPs Walled Up in Scorpion-Filled, Ebola-Ridden, Plague-Rat-Infested, Acid-Drenched, Radioactive Tower Block of Slow Hellish Screaming Death. All right, so the title does give away the premise, slightly, but I’d still watch it, wouldn’t you? 24/7. Done right — with special feature-length episodes devoted to Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, and the Milibands — I reckon it would be more satisfying than Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, Das Boot, South Park, The Simpsons and University Challenge rolled into one. And from me, that’s quite an accolade.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Glorious send-up

Bellamy’s People (BBC2, Thursday) began life in 2006 as a spoof Radio Four phone-in show called Down the Line presented by ‘award-winning’ Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) with the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse playing the various callers. Bellamy’s People (BBC2, Thursday) began life in 2006 as a spoof Radio Four phone-in show called Down the Line presented by ‘award-winning’ Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) with the Fast Show’s Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse playing the various callers. Now it has moved to TV and its satirical target — not before time — are all those programmes where celebrities drive round the country meeting people and saying, ‘Isn’t Britain brilliant?

Saturday

James Delingpole

If we’re going to rage against cultural atrocities, let’s make sure we target the right ones

The highlight of my Christmas holidays was taking the family to see Avatar. It’s not often a film comes along which wife, Boy (11), Girl (9) and I are able to adore in equal measure. But James Cameron’s $200 million epic ego-fest hit the spot perfectly and for those families out there still wavering, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Whenever I’ve mentioned this to my right-leaning friends, though, the general reaction has been one of appalled horror. ‘But how could you?’ they want to know.

James Delingpole

Childhood hero

I think I might be about the second-last person on earth finally to have replaced his squat, bulbous, stone-age TV set with one of those new angled, wide-screen, narrow, HD-ready jobs. My worry is it’s not big enough. ‘No, you can’t have a 50-inch. No way are you having a 50-inch. Not in MY house,’ said the wife, as the kids and I all begged and begged to no avail. Of course, I understand where the wife is coming from. There was indeed an era when to have a large TV screen dominating your sitting room would have been considered vulgar or nouveau-riche or what we now call chavvy. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed. Plus, I’m a TV critic — sort of — so I jolly well should.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Territorial imperative

Ever since I gave up watching TV over Christmas and New Year I have become much, much happier. The reason Yuletide TV is so depressing is that — as with those tantalising presents under the tree — it’s fraught with a level of expectation it can never possibly fulfil. You think, ‘At last: I’m free. Free to slob; free to watch without having to worry about going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep so I can be fresh for work tomorrow. So, go on, TV: entertain me!’ I’m not even sure that it’s TV’s fault. I think it’s the problem with Christmas generally. The whole season reminds me of a slightly dodgy Ecstasy pill. ‘Am I up yet?’ you keep asking yourself. ‘When’s it going to happen? When do I peak?

Saturday

James Delingpole

Watching the Climategate scandal explode makes me feel like a proud parent

It has been a weird, weird thing having a ringside seat at the messy unravelling of the greatest scientific scandal in the history of the world. The only experience in my life even vaguely similar was queuing outside the Wag club in the spring of 1988 watching all the straight people staring at us freaks, and thinking to myself: ‘God, just imagine how totally awesome it would be if this Acid House craze ever caught on.’ From a tiny germ of a story on a few specialist blogs, Climategate has gone über-viral in a way few of us sceptics could ever have dared hope.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Time wasting

I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. As usual, I wasn’t permitted just to make my transaction and get on with my life. First, the helpful person at the other end impressed on me, I would really need to sort out my bank accounts. Currently, he had noticed, I held my money in a Greyman Ordinaire Current account and a Crapmeister Lo-Interest Saver account and this was losing me money. ‘Have you thought about transferring your funds into one of our new Spanglo Plutocrat Wealth-Enhancer Imperator accounts?

Saturday

James Delingpole

What idiocy it is to regard whiteness as a problem in need of a remedy

‘Oh please let no one call Trevor McDonald a nignog. Oh, please. Oh please!’ It was sometime towards the end of the 1980s (before Britain’s first black newsreader got his knighthood) and my brother, my sister and I were standing on the pavement watching the village carnival go by, each of us offering up the same silent prayer to the heavens. The place was Topsham, a village on the river Exe, a few miles outside Exeter, where our mother had just moved in with a lovely chap named Frank. Trevor was the local celebrity, the carnival guest of honour and also the Only Black Man In The Village. None of us had really thought of Trevor as being black before. (Well he isn’t really, is he?

Saturday

James Delingpole

Warts and all

With hindsight it was probably a mistake to sit down with my daughter to watch Enid (BBC4, Monday). Before it started, Girl was a massive fan, especially of the Naughtiest Girl series and The Magic Faraway Tree. By the end, she pronounced herself so disgusted with the evil hag that she swore never to read another word. I’m not sure how glad I should be. On the one hand, I suppose it’s good that Girl will no longer have her expensive boarding-school fixation stoked by the Naughtiest Girl’s frolicsome japes. On the other, though Blyton can indeed be pretty repetitive and dull, she’s one of those writers that children seem to be able to read happily to themselves again and again.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I’m famous at last — thanks to the internet (and this column)

I don’t know quite how to put this without sounding nauseatingly smug or dangerously hubristic, but I think I might finally have become almost-famous. The revelation occurred while I was doing Vanessa Feltz’s show on BBC Radio London. I was burbling away in my usual self-hating way about how needy I am and unappreciated, and Vanessa said: ‘You know a lot of listeners are going to be quite puzzled by that, because you’re a successful columnist with a huge audience and you’re broadcasting to thousands of people right now.’ And I thought, ‘Bloody hell, Vanessa. You’re right.’ Sure I’m not famous enough to be mobbed in the street, or get tables in restaurants, or have gorgeous random females forever hurling their bodies at me.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Near flawless

A few months ago my wife said something to me so awful and shocking I contemplated divorce. ‘I don’t want to watch any more war programmes with you,’ she said. ‘It’s like watching paint dry.’ Imagine, then, my secret joy when, right near the end of Into the Storm (BBC2, Monday), I detected beside me on the sofa the hint of a promising snuffle. It was VE Day. The King was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, beckoning Winston Churchill to come and join him. As soon as he did, the crowd erupted with joy and gratitude. I glanced sideways just in time to catch the wife sneakily wiping a tear from her eye. ‘Yes!’ I inwardly exclaimed. ‘Victory.

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 31 October 2009

The global warming lobby, and the terrier who won’t let go two lines If the devil is in the detail then Satan’s foremost emissary on earth must be Christopher Booker. The Booker does the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour. In my eyes — admittedly biased because he has become a bit of a mate — Booker is way more significant and heroic a journalist than that fellow Old Salopian hack (and tedious leftie) Paul Foot. Indeed I’d rate him among the greatest of the age.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Crime watch

Oh. My. God. Can it really be, like, 16 years since it was 1993? I very much fear it can and the reason the thought is so bothersome is that I remember thinking, even back then, ‘Blimey, I really am getting on a bit. Can’t do pills nearly as often as I used to. The yawning grave beckons. Etc.’ This all came back to me while watching Murderland (ITV1, Monday) in which Robbie Coltrane plays someone a bit like Fitz from Cracker — only with most of the vices (drinking, chain-smoking, gambling) removed. Coltrane has denied there’s any connection, pointing out that this new character is a detective, not a criminal psychologist, and that the new series is more multiple-viewpoint psycho-drama than police procedural.

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 17 October 2009

The Kindly Ones — Les Bienveillantes if you read it in French, which I didn’t — is probably the most brilliant piece of trash fiction ever written. I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell’s much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it. But it’s definitely not as great as Le Figaro thinks: ‘A monument of contemporary literature.’ Nor Le Monde: ‘A staggering triumph.’ Nor yet Anita Brookner who claimed, in The Spectator no less, that it is not only ‘diabolically (and I use the word advisedly) clever’ but also a ‘tour de force’ which ‘outclasses all other fictions [this year] and will continue to do so for some time to come.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

There will be blood

All right, I surrender. There’s just no way on earth I can deal in 600 words with all the great, or potentially great, TV that has been on lately. Emma; Alex: A Passion for Life (the sequel to that moving documentary about the brilliant Etonian musician with cystic fibrosis); Generation Kill. Truly, it has been what we classical scholars call a Weekus Mirabilis. I’m going to deal with just three offerings. First, Criminal Justice (BBC1, all week for a whole hour each night, which is a serious commitment, n’est-ce pas?). I’ve only seen episode one and I’m torn.

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 3 October 2009

I watched, helpless, as a vicious Staffie ripped up my children’s guinea pigs I’m sorry to have to break the news so brutally but there’s no other way: Pickles Deathclaw and Lily Scampers are no more. They are ex-guinea pigs. They have ceased to exist. And all because of one of those bastard, evil dogs you see everywhere these days attached to the arms — or, more worryingly, not attached to the arms — of the nation’s hooded underclass yoof. We were sitting in the kitchen having lunch when it happened. ‘What’s that noise?’ I said. Already I was on my feet and heading for the garden, fearing the very worst because I had been here two months before.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Techno deprivation

Every summer my wife and I conduct an extraordinary social experiment with our kids which, if the authorities got to hear about it, could land us in jail. We take them for a fortnight to a remote house in the Welsh borders, take the fuse out of the plug so they can’t watch TV, and force them to entertain themselves using nothing but books, board games and the outdoors. ‘The Noughties Kids are going back in time. How will they cope?’ you can imagine the voiceover to the accompanying fly-on-the-wall documentary asking in the manner of such previous retro-porn, home-makeover, history-light classics as The Viking House, The Victorian Farm, The Medieval Dungeon, The Eighties Crack Den, and The ’Nam Bunker Where Everyone’s On Acid But The Soundtrack’s Fab.

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 19 September 2009

Was Daphne du Maurier responsible for the attempt to cross the ‘bridge too far’? A few months ago I gave a talk at Boy’s prep school on one of the most glorious debacles in British military history — Operation Market Garden — which marks its 65th anniversary this week.

Wednesday

James Delingpole

No more heroes

You wouldn’t necessarily have guessed this from the quality of commemorative programming on TV this week. You wouldn’t necessarily have guessed this from the quality of commemorative programming on TV this week. But just recently, we’ve marked the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of an event that used to be considered quite important and interesting. It was called the second world war. Now that it has been superseded by issues of such seismic significance as climate change, the childhood obesity ‘epidemic’ and Jordan’s on-off marriage to Peter Andre, one can of course fully understand why TV feels unable to give WWII the thorough and respectful coverage it did in the past.