James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. ‘Shh! Cricket!’ my grandfather Ken Delingpole used to say whenever the cricket came on the wireless. It was a family joke, indicative of just how boring Delingpoles all found the world’s most boring game. But then my father bred with a Price and the Prices are the exact opposite — county squash and tennis players, decent golfers, sporting nuts.
‘Bugger,’ says my delightful eight-year-old daughter, dancing round my desk. ‘Bugger, Daddy. Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ ‘Don’t say that word darling, it’s really unattractive,’ I say. ‘You use it, Daddy. I learned it from Coward on the Beach,’ says daughter, gleefully looking up the offending word, which isn’t difficult, because it’s the second one in the book. All right, so I swear. Probably more than is good for me.
I’ve got this brilliant idea for a Sunday night TV series. I’ve got this brilliant idea for a Sunday night TV series. It’s called Inspector Fluffy and His Agreeable Pipe. Every week, Inspector Fluffy (Stephen Fry) will travel to a picturesque corner of Britain in his battered Morris Traveller, giving tearaway gypsy children clips round the ear, discovering that it was a magpie that really took the silverware, judging marrow competitions in vicarage gardens. While cogitating on the latest mystery, he will suck on his agreeable pipe, with lots of stupendous Apprentice-style aerial shots showing the English countryside in all its gasp-inducing majesty.
I don’t bait greens only for fun. I do it because they’re public enemy number one If only you could have seen the gratitude in my guinea pigs’ eyes just now. At least I think it was gratitude. It’s hard to be totally sure with those blank, dead, black staring eyes which, let’s be honest, aren’t noticeably more intelligent or expressive than a (very small) great white shark’s. Even so, if Pickles Deathclaw and Lily Scampers could speak, I like to think that what they would have said is this: ‘Thank you, human. You are so kind and generous and nurturing.
Easily the best thing that has happened to me recently was being called a warthog on TV by Charlie Brooker. At least that’s what I heard from people who’d seen Newswipe (BBC4 — http://is.gd/vztj). But it turned out I was just one of a number of hacks illustrating a point about opinion pieces written by people ‘grinning like idiots, or looking constipated, or pulling embarrassing warthog scowls’. I worship Brooker. You might not have heard of him because he writes for the Guardian, but he has been doing more TV of late — ScreenWipe, then Newswipe always worth catching, because it’s so pungent with loathing for the medium. It’s a privilege granted very few of us to be able to crap on our professions from within.
There’s a new application you can get for your iPhone called Baby Shaker, where a baby cries and cries until eventually you get so sick of it you shake your mobile so that large red Xs appear over the baby’s eyes and the crying stops for good. Or rather there isn’t, because someone took offence and complained to Apple and now, annoyingly, it has been withdrawn. Would I have acquired a copy myself? Well the graphics looked pretty rubbish but I still think it was probably worth the 99 cents, just on the off chance one might have found someone to offend. Sicko, child-related jokes are very useful in this respect, I find. One of my favourites when I was about 14 was: Q. What’s the difference between a truckload of babies and a truckload of marbles? A.
The phone rang last night, I picked it up and it was our friend Tania. ‘God, I hate my ****ing husband,’ she said. ‘Oh, Tania, don’t be silly, Jamie’s a sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Oh, shut up, I don’t want to be talking to you, you’re a man. Pass me to your wife, she’ll understand,’ said Tania. So I handed the phone to the wife and she made all the right noises. It seemed that Jamie had arrived home late and hungry to discover that Tania had eaten all his sausages. Jamie had called her a ‘****ing bitch’. I felt similarly divided loyalties watching English Heritage (BBC2, Friday).
The coppers round my part of south London are really pretty good. They chase the occasional burglar; they’re courteous when they come to your door; and if you can get hold of their direct lines or mobiles they’re even better. Last year, my friendly local rozzers did an excellent job of removing a large, noisy gang of criminally inclined hoodies who had taken to congregating on some steps by the estate at the bottom of my garden. This made all the homeowners in my neck of the woods feel much happier and more secure. ‘Hurrah! The police doing their ruddy job for once!’ we all thought. But stories like that are the exception rather than the rule, aren’t they?
On the posters in the Tube at the moment are these adverts for Argumental, which is the Dave channel’s first self-generated panel show. On the posters in the Tube at the moment are these adverts for Argumental, which is the Dave channel’s first self-generated panel show. I don’t want to knock Dave too much because it’s generally a good thing: the reliable stand-by you end up with if there’s nothing on the terrestrial channels, BBC4, BBC3, Sky One or the Military History channel. It’s got repeats of Top Gear. It has repeats of QI. What’s not to like? Well, Argumental would be my slight problem. Take those poster ads.
Is it really a six-figure salary? Only, this time last year it wouldn’t have seemed worth it, but now it’s looking almost as attractive as a job in the public sector. I think I might have to go for it. ‘Step up to the plate,’ as I must learn to say, if I’m to stand any chance whatsoever. There’s a place going spare at the moment, too, so it’s not totally unfeasible. I could actually be Sir Alan’s new Apprentice. Then again, no. For a man of such tremendous supposed business acumen and shrewd character judgment, Sir Alan has never been much cop at picking the right candidate. He’s unhealthily drawn to spivvy chancers like Michael Sophocles, and rough diamonds like the CV-tweaking Neanderthal who won the last series.
Did you know that in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire there were death squads of heavily armed policemen whose job it was to assassinate anyone who got too close — be he witness, investigating officer, or informer — to unmasking their mysterious bosses’ sinister web of lies, deceit, corruption, betrayal, wife beating, torture and serial killing? No, I didn’t either. Did you know that in 1970s and 1980s Yorkshire there were death squads of heavily armed policemen whose job it was to assassinate anyone who got too close — be he witness, investigating officer, or informer — to unmasking their mysterious bosses’ sinister web of lies, deceit, corruption, betrayal, wife beating, torture and serial killing? No, I didn’t either.
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a conservative’s wet dream. No, it’s better than that. The moment you read it — presuming you’re right-wing, that is — you will experience not only a rush of ecstasy, but also a surge of revolutionary fervour and evangelical zeal. You’ll want to email all your friends and tell them the wonderful news: ‘I’m not an evil bastard, after all!’ What Goldberg very effectively does is to remove from the charge sheet the one possible reason any thinking person could have for not wanting to be right-wing: viz, that being on the right automatically makes you a closet fascist/Nazi scumbag.
Jeremy Paxman has a dark secret: in real life he’s an absolute kitten. Jeremy Paxman has a dark secret: in real life he’s an absolute kitten. He does continental, gay-enough double-cheek kisses, he doesn’t shout exasperatedly, ‘Come on!’ or pull appalled faces to indicate just how ignorant he finds you, and he has about him a general air of gentleness and kindness you just wouldn’t expect from the horrid interrogational techniques he uses on MPs. Even so, for the first few seconds of his new documentary series The Victorians (BBC1, Sunday), I did worry that he might be pushing his Mister Nice act just a bit too far. He’d put on this piping, sensitive, frankly a bit girlie narrator’s voice, as if to say, ‘Look.
Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday); Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s (BBC2, Wednesday) Just in case you needed another reason to loathe and despise the French (I mean, as if Olivier Besancenot wasn’t enough), there was a corker in Norma Percy’s characteristically brilliant new documentary series Iran And The West (BBC2, Saturday). It concerned the Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s when the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia (‘practitioners’ as Jon Snow would no doubt call them) kidnapped dozens of Westerners, among them American journalist Terry Anderson, Archbishop’s envoy Terry Waite, and various Frenchmen and seemed determined to hold them indefinitely.
I’m sorry, really I am, but I don’t love The Wire as much as I know I should. I’m sorry, really I am, but I don’t love The Wire as much as I know I should. It’s not that I can’t see that it has huge amounts going for it. I love McNulty’s cheeky chimp face and that the actor playing him went to Eton; I like the lesbian; I like the way one quickly becomes so well informed on the nuances of drug-dealing in the Baltimore projects that one could easily set up shop there oneself; I sort of like the fact that only about 50 per cent of the dialogue is comprehensible, which must mean it’s edgy and echt and cool. But here’s my problem: it makes me fall asleep.
Is it just me or is Fiona Bruce incredibly, incredibly annoying? I only ask because I didn’t have a view on the subject till I was watching her present The Real Sir Alan Sugar (BBC2, Sunday) and on at least two occasions found myself so cross it was all I could do not to smash my TV to tiny pieces with a claw hammer. The first occasion was when — while breakfasting flirtatiously with Sir Alan on his private jet — Fiona decided to show what a hard-headed reporter cum serious feminist she was by taking umbrage at Sir Alan’s supposed neanderthal sexism. Apparently he has a habit of asking prospective female employees what their childcare plans are. Fiona huffily declared that if he tried that sort of nonsense on her she’d soon tell him where to get off.
On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, James Delingpole says that the President-elect is horribly reminiscent of Tony Blair in 1997. He may be a fantastic guy, and look great, but he will bring a ragbag of scuzzballs, communists and eco-loons to power with him No matter how excited you may be about Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday, I bet you’re not as pleased as I am. Never have I wished more devoutly for a presidential victory than the one won by this mighty intellect-cum-healer-cum-fashion-model-cum-general-all-round-Messiah — a man so conscious of his own merit that, unlike any president before him, he plans to swear his inaugural oath on the Lincoln bible.
A bit like Andrew Sullivan's blog in the last Gulf war, Melanie Phillips's magnificent blog has become THE place to go for everyone who wants to know what's REALLY happening in Gaza. Mel, we salute you! But here's the annoying thing. Until very recently, Mel was looking to be the runaway winner in the Best British Blog category of the 2008weblog awards, which she thoroughly deserves. Thanks, though, to a spot of smearing from a dreary, leftie website, Mel's blog has now been overtaken by an even more dreary site called Created In Birmingham. Look, I'm a Brummie myself. I love the accent, I love the people, I love the sense of humour (which urinates on that of your average Liverpudlian from several miles high), I love a good Balti and many more Midlands things.
If you don’t mind — yeah, like you’ve any choice in the matter — what I thought I’d do for this New Year column is to do just enough TV for the editor not to want to sack me, then move swiftly on to the stuff my hardcore fans prefer, namely the rambling and shameless solipsism. If you don’t mind — yeah, like you’ve any choice in the matter — what I thought I’d do for this New Year column is to do just enough TV for the editor not to want to sack me, then move swiftly on to the stuff my hardcore fans prefer, namely the rambling and shameless solipsism. First, The Devil’s Whore (Channel 4). I know it finished a few weeks ago but it was definitely one of the year’s TV highlights.
RSPCA Press Office Dear James, I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that the RSPCA has received a complaint following your column dated 21 November. We were surprised, however, that it was felt appropriate to trivialise and broadcast a criminal act which may well have led to animal suffering. Can I remind you that whatever your personal ‘sliding scale of values’ may be it remains an offence to fail to meet an animals needs and/or cause it unnecessary suffering? Those found guilty face a maximum six-month prison sentence and/or a £20,000 fine. Obviously we urge everyone who buys a pet to be sure they have the resources and commitment to care for it for the rest of its life.