James Delingpole

As budgets fall and standards slip, it’s inevitable that TV is going to get worse and worse and that the job of the TV critic in trying to shame the bosses into arresting this decline will become more important than ever. But this doesn’t make me feel happy. It just — like so many things in the modern world, from biofuels to ‘best practice’ — makes me want to kill myself. I mean, I’d much rather have wall-to-wall brilliant TV and a near-meaningless job function than rubbish TV and a vital corrective role. After that portentous start, you’re probably expecting me to have found something truly abysmal to review. But I haven’t.

I’m always on the lookout for writers who’ve had well-paid, fun, fulfilled lives but I hardly ever find them. Jane Austen, for example. You’d think that the very least God would have given her in return for Emma and Pride and Prejudice would have been a single man in possession of a good fortune, a long, happy marriage and lots of lovely kiddies. But no, God really hates writers, preferring to smile on Dan Brown. If you’re Jane Austen, the deal is you get a pretty rubbish life as an impoverished spinster, but the moment you’re dead everyone thinks you’re great, and goes on remaking films of your novels and slushy drama-docs with pretty girls in bonnets well into the 21st century.

According to a recently divorced friend of mine, the sex opportunities when you’re a single man in your forties are fantastic. Apparently, you don’t even need to bother with chat-up lines. You’ll be hanging about at the bus stop, or wherever, and, bang!, a flash of meaningful eye contact then back to her place for brilliant, uncomplicated sex miles better than you ever had in your teens or twenties because at this age you know what you’re doing. I’d like to be able to try out my friend’s theory but I’m afeared there might be opposition from the Fawn. Plus, this friend is a very rich banker, whereas I’m not.

Rather deftly, I managed to avoid all but ten minutes of the 3,742 hours of programming dedicated this week to the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. I’ve no doubt that some of it was very well done — Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (C4), say; Ronan Bennett’s 10 Days to War (BBC1), which I caught ten gripping minutes of before the preview DVD I’d been sent went mysteriously blank — but my heart wasn’t in it. Yes, I’m sure there were many bad, misguided things about the Iraq invasion and many even worse things — as I ranted the other week — about the post-war ‘strategy’.

You have neat, slicked-back hair which never gets dandruff. You keep a pile of beautifully laundered white shirts stacked in your office drawer. You look great in your sharp suit and so does everyone else in theirs. The girls in the office are there to service your every need, and actually discuss with one another tactics for making themselves look sexier and how to please you more. You smoke ALL THE TIME — so incredibly often that people in the future are going to look at you and wonder how it can possibly be that you and your friends smoked so much — and you do it suavely, without guilt or fear, for cancer has barely been invented.

Imagine (BBC1); Ten O'Clock News (BBC1); That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC2)  The Day of the Kamikaze (Channel 4, Monday) was really good, I’ll bet, but the Fawn wasn’t having it so I suppose I’ll have to watch it some other time on my own. She’d rather be watching some old rubbish like Ladette to Lady (ITV1), which I sympathise with up to a point. It’s so nice in these ghastly times to find a programme whose fundamental underlying assumption is that toffs are better than oiks. As a compromise, we settled for Imagine (BBC1, Tuesday), the first in a new series of Alan Yentob documentaries. This one was about self-help books, which I personally became strangely convinced by after interviewing Paul McKenna for this magazine.

You were probably expecting me to review Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Sky One, Monday) this week but I’m a bit off Afghanistan programmes at the moment. Not to the point where I won’t watch them all the time to the exclusion of almost all else. Just to the point where, at the end, I feel ever so slightly, ‘Was that it?’ Don’t get me wrong. I have the most enormous respect for the brave folk who make these programmes — still more for the men doing the fighting. But I’ve yet to see the documentary which properly conveys to people who’ve never done it — e.g., me — what it’s like to be involved in a serious firefight. On his tour of Helmand with the Royal Anglian Regiment, Kemp experienced a gun battle of pant-wetting intensity.

My resolution this year is to make huge sums of money, buy a vast country estate, surround it with a moat and spend the rest of my life hunting, driving fast cars round my private race track and generally trying to maximise my carbon footprint. At Christmas, I shall invite the poor people on to my land to admire my spectacular Christmas light display which will be much brighter and less carbon neutral than the one at Sandringham or even the famous ‘loights’ in Wollaston, nr Stourbridge. And if my vicar objects on environmental grounds, I shall have him sacked because of course his living will be in my gift, and my family will have a special pew in the medieval church and everything.

On the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert. Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production company RDF who personally edited that dodgy reel preview which seemed to show the Queen walking out in a huff from a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, when in real life she hadn’t. As a result, he had to step down at RDF, while Peter Fincham lost his job as controller of the BBC, and dark things were muttered about the documentary being doomed never to see the light of day. Well, that would have been stupid, wouldn’t it?

For much of the summer my brother Dick spends his weekends either as a skirmisher with the Voltigeurs in Napoleon’s Grande Armée or depending on which side needs the extras as a redcoat of the 9th Regiment of Foot. He has frozen his balls off at the battle of Jena. He is fluent in complex early-19th-century musket drill. He even alters his facial hair configurations according to whether or not the soldier he’s playing would or wouldn’t be allowed a beard. Some people think re-enactors are silly. My friends Robert Hardman and Andrew Roberts like to put on a sort of E.L. Wisty voice and tease them thus: ‘By day I am a British Telecom engineer. But at the weekends I am Prince Rupert of the Rhine!!!’ I, however, think re-enactors are ruddy marvellous.

So the big question this week is: is the Today programme a viper’s nest of evil pinkoes, all of whom should be put in sacks and dropped into a deep well? And the answer is: yes. Shame, though, really, because wrong and bad though it is I do have a soft spot for Today. I like the poshness of the cars they send to pick you up when you’re on it and the producers’ apparently genuine gratitude that you’ve agreed to appear at such a hideously early time. I like the teeny-weeny half-nod of acknowledgement which is all you get from the presenters when you creep to your mic in the studio because they’re busy concentrating and guests are two-a-penny.