James Delingpole

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.

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 likely it will prove in the end to be all purely psychosomatic — I am the most dreadful hypochondriac: not that that stops it feeling any less real — and what I’ve vowed to do if I come out the other side is to stop whingeing about my life so much.

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 soap. Pick it up for me, would you, mate?’ someone said in the showers. And you should have seen Barry’s face as, glancing between his legs, he suddenly noticed the queue of eager lads building up behind him, led by the official prison Daddy, John ‘Baseball Bat’ Holmes. Priceless! No, not really. The scene didn’t happen because it would never have been allowed to happen.

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 ambition has gone now. As you get older, you grow more accepting of your lot, don’t you? Also, what I’ve noticed is that almost all the people I know who are seriously upper-class are also very seriously f***ed-up. Even more so than I am, which is saying quite a lot. Partly, I suppose, it’s all the inbreeding that has gone on over the centuries.