James Delingpole

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.

At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand. At the launch of Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para at the Cavalry and Guards Club last week, I met some of the boys who’ve been doing their bit in Helmand. God, they looked tough, with a keen, frankly rather unnerving, glint in their eye which set them dramatically apart from all us milksop civvies. One senior NCO told me what a thrill it had been when for the first time in 26 years’ service he’d finally been able to give the command ‘Fix bayonets’ — then lead an actual charge. ‘They don’t like it up ’em,’ he said, as of course he would.

Sorry, I’m in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn’t find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don’t mind I thought I’d just have a general grumble about the state of TV. First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one or two members of Second Battle Group — a British second world war re-enactment outfit which specialises in portraying German Waffen SS soldiers — may have neo-Nazi sympathies. Well, knock me down with a feather. Perhaps next week this same crack team will manage to infiltrate the Vatican and emerge with the shock horror revelation that the Pope (and quite possibly several of his aides) are Catholic. I mean, really.

‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘I’m sure I’ve read this before,’ said the Fawn, skimming through my review of Heroes in the week-before-last’s Speccie. ‘You can’t have done, we were away when it came out,’ I said. ‘Well, it seems very familiar,’ she said. ‘That’ll be because all my pieces start to resemble one another after a time. Same style. Same jokes. Maybe I should just give up now, before anyone else notices.’ But I can’t, obviously.

Which super power would you choose? When I was young, the one I quite wanted was invisibility. I imagined myself sneaking into the bedrooms of all the girls I fancied and persuading them that I was an incubus come to satisfy their every desire. An ability to arrest time with a stopwatch would be a handy power too, as would being able to fly or teleport. But the impression I get with super powers is that you’re not allowed to be too greedy. I was trying to think which low-level super power I’d accept today and I realised how unambitious I’ve become. Being able to go to the loo without ever again needing to wipe your bottom — I’d be quite happy with that. Always going to sleep within 30 seconds of one’s head hitting the pillow, that would be even better.

Great news, guys. Thanks to Live Earth (BBC1 and BBC2, most of last Saturday), recycling is up by almost 6,000 per cent, the icecaps are regenerating, Kilimanjaro has got its snow back and polar bear experts are reporting that the latest batch of cubs are whiter, cuter and fluffier than at any time since records began. Furthermore, no fewer than 98.8 per cent of 15- to 24-year-olds now agree with the statement: ‘Man-made global warming is the greatest threat to humanity ever and if my parents disagree I promise to chop them to pieces with sharp knives like the fascist, Gaia-raping pigs they are.’ Actually, I can think of two encouraging things that came out of all that nonsense over the weekend.

Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday) has been particularly brilliant of late and I think Spectator readers should know. There were moments in the first two new series where one might reasonably have gone, ‘Yeah, but it’s still not a patch on the original.’ But as series three draws to an end, I don’t think there can be any more doubt: the new Doctor Who is the greatest British TV sci-fi series since Quatermass. Where did it go so incredibly right? My personal theory on this — based on wishful thinking, mainly — is that it has to do with the episode in the first series called ‘The Empty Child’. If you saw it, you’ll never forget it. It’s the one with the spooky child wearing the gasmask who goes round saying, ‘Are you my mummy?

The other day I had to address a group of media students from Michigan State University on the purposes of TV criticism. I came up with about five, the last of which was: always impress on your audience what a massive waste of life almost all TV-watching is because it’s mostly rubbish, it sucks out your brain and you’re far better off with a book or the wireless. Possibly they thought I was joking but you all know I wasn’t. It’s a variation on an argument I have every week with the Fawn over The Apprentice (BBC1, Wednesday). She thinks it’s antisocial the way I read the newspaper through the longueurs and then head for an early bath rather than wait to find out who got fired.

Very sadly I couldn’t get hold of Sea of Fire (BBC2, Friday), the (reportedly superb) drama documentary about the destruction of HMS Coventry in the Falklands War, because tapes weren’t available till just before broadcast. But not to worry. I think I can still tell you with some confidence how it went. The first thing I know is that it was artfully shot, beautifully acted, had an authoritative voiceover and looked very realistic, for these BBC drama docs always are. The second thing I know is that, also like all BBC exercises in this vein, it made you feel dreadfully ashamed to be British.

There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people, surfing the net, idly contemplating, searching Amazon to see whether there are any more relevant research books you haven’t yet bought. I’ve made it sound almost fun but the reason it’s not is that while all this is going on you feel terrible.

Victoria’s Empire (BBC1, Sunday) is the BBC’s new Palinesque travelogue series in which comedienne Victoria Wood goes from exotic location to exotic location chatting to the locals, making wry observations and being mildly funny. But there’s at least one thing that’s very, very annoying about it. The annoying thing — and I don’t know whether this is a problem Wood herself has or whether it’s something which has been imposed on her by the BBC’s political-correctness-enforcement department; a bit of both, I suspect — is the way it keeps apologising for being white, middle class, middle-brow, post-Imperial and British. For example, in a scene where Wood goes to visit the ghats of Calcutta, her expert guide happens to be English.