James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
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
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
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
If I had been given a monkey for every time someone had told me knowledgeably that Boris Johnson was a comical buffoon unfit for high office, I’d be able to open a very large ape house. It annoys me not just because it’s not true but also because of what it says about the stupidity
The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after? Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just
I see from the cover of this book that at least three reviewers had kind words to say about Gordon Brown’s previous effort. ‘Very moving,’ the Guardian wrote. ‘Readable and intelligent,’ alleged the Sunday Times. ‘Trust me: this is a fine book,’ claimed The Spectator. Perhaps they were being polite because the author is not
You’re a middle-class Pole living in modest bourgeois comfort in a detached house in the handsome Austro–Hungarian city of Lwow in 1939 when there’s a knock at the door. Two officers from the newly arrived Soviet army of occupation have come to tell you that from now on all bar one of the rooms in
Wellington, by Jane Wellesley There can never be too many biographies of the Duke of Wellington because, like Churchill’s and Nelson’s, his career path is so extraordinary, uplifting, chequered and involving that it reads more like (slightly overwrought) fiction than fact. The first thing you’d give your mildly implausible hero if you were a novelist
War has a fatal attraction for men, says James Delingpole. Those who fall in combat are indeed the best and the bravest — and we shall certainly need their like again Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, and I’m sorry to repeat such a hoary cliché, but the reason
About 25 years ago, during a particularly bad acid trip, I had my soul stolen by Mister Migarette, an evil glowing man with a huge hat, like the mad hatter’s, who lived in the ash on the end of my cigarette. It put me off smoking for a while and I considered giving up. But
The problem with this wretched crisis is that it infects even TV. There I was on Sunday night, trying to enjoy some soothing, mellow quality time with dear Stephen Fry — or ‘Steve’ as he now styles himself in his six-part travelogue Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) — and the whole experience was filtered through
If you ever want to get in touch with the real world, try pretending to be a second world war GI. This is what I did the other weekend and it was quite an eye-opener. I don’t mean the stuff I learned about the correct procedure for debussing and advancing to contact from an armoured
Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday); Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday) ‘People have a problem with me,’ claims Jamie Oliver, but I’m not one of them. I’ve had my doubts in the past — overuse of phrases like ‘luvly jubbly’, the Sainsbury’s ads, the general extreme jealousy of his stupendous wealth,
It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans. A
Earth: The Climate Wars (BBC 2); Amazon (BBC 2); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (BBC 1) A Church of England official has issued an apology to the descendants of Charles Darwin for the Church’s ‘anti-evolutionary’ fervour towards his Origin of the Species. I wonder if in about 150 years’ time the BBC — presuming it still
Before I get on to TV, can I tell you about my horrible health-scare thing, oh, can I, can I? Right, well I’ve been having this horrible health-scare thing and I’ve been out of my mind with worry — to the point where I’ve been saying, ‘Oh, please, God, let it just be cancer…’ Very
One of my ambitions this summer is to try not to see even the tiniest glimpse of Olympics coverage on TV. This isn’t mainly a protest about how boring athletics are generally; or about China’s human rights record. It’s more that my hatred of the modern world has risen to such a pitch that I’m
Have you ever noticed how the Islamist terror threat has been ridiculously overplayed by the government? I have. I’ll be standing with my kids on a crowded Tube, looking at the 20-year-old with the beard, the knitted cap and the classic Bin-Laden-style salwar kameez/combat jacket combo and thinking, ‘Well, he’s a lovely devout bloke from
My favourite part of Banged Up (Channel 4, Monday) — the new reality show in which juvenile delinquents get to spend ten days in fake prison so they’re never tempted to end up in a real one — was the bit where the other inmates discovered Barry was a nonce. ‘Oi, Bazza. Just dropped me
When I was up at Oxford, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, my deepest wish was to find a letter one day in my pigeonhole informing me that a distant relative had died and that henceforward I was entitled to style myself the Marquess of Wessex (or wherever), until eventually I inherited my dukedom. That