James Delingpole

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.

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.

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 this effect on me. It was about the aftermath of a killer virus which wipes out virtually the entire human species leaving just a handful of survivors to roam the earth, scrape by without TV or electric lights or hot showers, and generally rediscover the old agrarian ways before we became so dependent on technology. The ultimate fantasy of the modern green movement, in other words.

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 your house are theirs. Everything in the house belongs to them too, including all your mother’s lovely clothes which you’ll soon see being flaunted by the Soviet officers’ vulgar wives. Or maybe you live in a fine old country house and your father is one of the war heroes who saw off the Russians in 1920. Big mistake that, because one of the Russians your father beat was Stalin and he’s had a chip on his shoulder ever since.

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 then I realised, ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to do a Syd Barrett. Only by keeping your routines as close as possible to pre-bad-trip normality can you ever hope to arrest your slide down the slippery slope to madness.’ And see! It worked totally! But that wasn’t the point of the anecdote.

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 a prism of economic misery. At one point he trundled in his black cab to the vast, ugly hotel where the Bretton Woods trade and monetary system was agreed in 1944. ‘Eek!’ I went. ‘That was designed to stop the second Great Depression like the one we’re about to have now!’ But even the bits which must have seemed so innocuous when he filmed them earlier this year were suddenly filled with foreboding.

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.