James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
‘Stupid old bat.’ That’s what my father always used to say when Mary Whitehouse appeared on the screen, and the older I grew the more I agreed with him. What right had this ghastly woman with her horn-rimmed specs and silly hats and Black Country accent to stand between me and ‘the torrents of filth’ I would happily have watched on TV all day and all night? But Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (BBC2, Wednesday) wasn’t going to let us off so easily.
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.
In those distant days when I used to hang out on Facebook one of my favourite user groups was ‘I hate Catherine Tate and she shouldn’t be in the new series of Doctor Who.’ I don’t remember many of the members’ exchanges being particularly witty or illuminating, but then they didn’t need to be. The group’s name said it all, really. And now she’s arrived just how bad and annoying is she? Well, the good news is: not as bad and annoying as you might have feared. But, given how bad and annoying you feared she would be, I’m not sure that’s going to provide total consolation.
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.
Words you seldom hear at U2 concerts (or, indeed anywhere else): "If only Bono spent a bit less time in the recording studio and a bit more time on the international stage talking about global injustice, ah, bejaysus wouldn't the world be a better place?" After last weekend, right-thinking Radiohead fans may find themselves in a similar pickle. Is it possible - as Wagner fans seem to manage well enough - to divorce the man's politics from his art? Or will all future attempts to enjoy The Bends, OK Computer and In Rainbows be quite ruined by the memory of the toecurling, Climate Change special edition of the Observer magazine, guest edited by Radiohead's singer/songwriter Thom Yorke?
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.
When I was a boy my father and I used to spend our summer holidays collecting lizards. We’d prop a large bucket at an angle in a suitable spot, grease the rim with butter, put some rotting fruit at the bottom and wait for the lizards to get trapped. It’s the best way, otherwise they panic and shed their tails. Then we’d bring them back in our hand luggage in linen bags, which worked fine till the unfortunate occasion when a stewardess wanted to look inside and they escaped on the plane. We kept our lizards (and snakes and crocodiles) in a shed in our garden — called the Lizard House — and they gave us many adventures. Once, on holiday in Menorca, we discovered that there lived on one tiny, uninhabited island about a mile offshore a melanistic (i.e.
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.
Sorry, you’re not getting your Christmas present this year. Yes, I know what you want: one of those columns where I avoid TV altogether and just rant madly about myself for 800 words. Well, tough. It’s been one of the crappest, most hateful years of my life and, though I’m not holding you all totally responsible, I do think you must bear your share of the blame. You have not adored me enough. You have not showered me with sufficient — indeed, any — gifts. You have not bought nearly enough copies of Coward on the Beach or How to Be Right as perfect Christmas presents for all your friends. So all I’m going to do for the rest of this column is talk about TV. TV TV TV boring TV. Until you’re sick of it.
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.
It’s astonishing the people you find yourself agreeing with Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire Fox, say: ‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’ And she wasn’t asking it as a glib, meaningless flourish, in the way a Tory MP trying to impress might ask, ‘Why we can’t make our NHS system be the envy of the world?’ Claire Fox genuinely believes that a traditional, liberal arts education of the sort offered by Eton — Latin, Greek, rigour, dates — is best.
Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday) was heavily flagged beforehand as a drama that was going to annoy a lot of people. Naturally, I assumed that one of those people would be me. It came in two parts, the first telling the story of Sohail, a young Bradford Muslim recruited by MI5, the second about his sister, Nasima, who, would you credit it, becomes a suicide bomber. At the end, everyone dies. Kosminsky based it on interviews with British Muslims in ‘Leeds, Bradford, the Midlands and London’, though not, I suspect, with many people from MI5. Which is to say that the first episode felt more like Spooks than gritty, observational drama.
The thing I want to talk about this week is random and unnecessary tension-generation because it ruins almost every TV programme I watch and, once I’ve explained it, I like to think it will ruin all your TV viewing too. I’ll give you a classic example from Heroes (BBC2, Wednesday), a series to which I’m afraid I’ve become mildly addicted. I’m thinking of the episode where sinister Mr Bennet tries to stop his adopted daughter Claire from going to her prom-queen homecoming because he knows it’s her destiny to be attacked there by the evil serial killer Sylar. Does he a) say, ‘Look, Claire. I know about your superpowers. And by the way there’s a guy who’s trying to kill you, so best not go to the homecoming.
James Delingpole admits to ‘utter crapness’ as an investor in the past, but thinks he now has a winning strategy It has been over a year since I checked my share portfolio but when I did the other day I had the most pleasant surprise. Apparently, despite understanding next to nothing about the workings of the stock market, I had managed to net myself a cool £3,000 profit. ‘Warren Buffett eat your heart out,’ I thought — at least for the few seconds it took me to work out what had really happened. This wasn’t my real portfolio at all. It was my paper (or, more accurately, ‘screen’) portfolio, based not on any physical holding but on the information I typed into iii.co.
James Delingpole The American War of Independence is one of my least favourite periods and I expect it’s the same for a lot of Englishmen. For a start, the wrong side lost. Also, it’s fiendishly complicated, what with all the Whigs, Tories, Loyalists, Patriots, Frenchmen, Indians, Militia, Virginians, Marylanders, Light Bobs, Fusiliers and Continentals biffing one another in a confusing melee. And there is the lurking suspicion that, as Michael Rose has recently argued, it has depressing things to tell us about the US’s (and her allies’) current involvement in Iraq. Indeed, about the only thing that persuaded me to read a book on the subject is that it was written by Mark Urban.