James Delingpole

The thing I really don’t get at all about The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, Thursday) is how the people involved could bring themselves to do it. I mean, I’m quite skint at the moment and in need of attention and acclaim and a better career. But I promise — no matter how much they paid me or how many column inches I might expect to generate or Baftas I might hope to win — that never in a zillion years would I do what this documentary has done to the British army. I’m not saying it wasn’t gripping viewing. Artistically, you could scarcely fault it. Militarily, I wasn’t quite convinced by the scene where a few insurgents armed with AKs and another with an RPG cause a British army section completely to fall to pieces.

Insomnia is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When, for example, I made up my mind that I was going to review the BBC’s new series Sleep Clinic (BBC1, Monday), I knew that later that night I would have enormous difficulties getting to sleep. This is one of the horrible tricks we insomniacs play on ourselves. We’ll have had maybe four or five good nights’ sleep in a row and the nasty little voice in our heads will go, ‘Well, you’re not seriously expecting to get another good night, are you?’ To which our nice, rational, sensible voice will reply, ‘Well, why not? I’ve been doing pretty well so far. I’m quite tired. I haven’t got anything major to worry about at the moment...’ ‘Oh, haven’t you?

In the last ten years there has been (a) an alarming rise (b) a slight but significant rise or (c) no statistically significant change in global mean temperature. Actually, the answer is (c) but if the one you gave was (a) or (b) I’m hardly surprised. How could it not be when pretty much all they show on TV are programmes with titles like Climate Change: Britain Under Threat (BBC1, Sunday) and Should I Really Give Up Flying? (BBC2, Wednesday). Climate change is happening, on this almost everybody agrees.

If Sean Langan isn’t the bravest, best and most likeable foreign correspondent on TV, I don’t know who is. And what a bumper week this has been for his admirers. On Monday, a Dispatches documentary (Fighting the Taleban, Channel 4) about the six-day battle he witnessed in Garmser, Helmand, when a half-platoon of British infantrymen and a couple of hundred Afghanis held out against several thousand Taleban. Then, on Thursday, another one (Meeting the Taleban, Channel 4) in which he gingerly approached a Taleban/al-Q’aeda mountain stronghold and amazingly came away with testicles intact and a halfway cogent interview.

There’s a programme I sometimes do on the right-wing guerilla media website 18 Doughty Street which I think you might enjoy. It’s called Culture Clash, presented by Peter Whittle, and it’s a bit like Newsnight Review would be if you took away the pseudery, the left-liberal cant and Ekow Eshun. Obviously, the production values are a lot ropier than you get on proper TV, and because the guests are generally less media-exposed there’s quite a lot of ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’. But what’s good about it is that everyone feels free to say what they actually think about the films, books and TV programmes they’re reviewing rather than going ‘Heaven help us. We’re on TV! Better take care!

‘Dad, Dad, we watched this really funny video at Ozzie and Ludo’s called Dick or Treat. Dad, dad. Daaad? Can I show you, Dad, can I?’ says Ivo, eight, while I’m trying to work on my computer. To make him go away, I try looking up the video at the web address he gives me, but it doesn’t work for some reason, so instead, I half listen, half work while he gabbles away as children do about this really funny video he’s seen. ‘Well, this Frankenstein monster comes to a girl’s house and says “Trick or treat” but she hasn’t got a treat, so he gets his willy out and she bends over and he puts it...!’ WHAT?

Before I go on, can I just ask: do any readers share my concern about the scrawny bum on the girl on the new Nokia billboard poster ad? For those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows a naked couple running, carefree, through the surf along a long, empty Atlantic-style beach. The chap’s backside looks absolutely fine but the girl’s one looks as if it has been doctored with Photoshop to make her buttocks seem less pert and attractive so as not to attract complaints. Well, I’m complaining. Meanwhile in TV world I have noticed that a horrid trend has become at least as annoyingly overdone as previous trends like home/garden makeover programmes and docusoaps.

It’s only since watching Stephen Fry’s brilliant Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (BBC2, Tuesday) that I’ve begun properly to understand why I am the way I am. Lots of people have suggested to me at one time or another that I should see a psychiatrist. ‘You’re so successful,’ they say. ‘How can you possibly think your life sucks?’ But in the past I’ve always put this down to their pitiful underestimation of just how much success I deserve.

Since every mafiosi’s favourite movie is Goodfellas and favourite TV programme is The Sopranos, I suppose similar rules apply to Islamic terrorists and Sleeper Cell (Channel 4). Probably, every Wednesday night secretive groups of sinister bearded men all over Britain tune in in the eager hope that this will be the episode when scary Faris Al-Farik (Oded Fehr) finally gets to blow thousands of infidels into a million pieces. I dare say they will also be watching to see whether American scriptwriters have any useful insights into the Islamic terrorist mindset. If so, they’re going be disappointed. Sleeper Cell is just another generic action-drama series like a cross between The Dirty Dozen and a slightly slower 24.

Back at church after a few weeks’ absence, I found the vicar in a terrible state. ‘Oh my dear chap, we’ve all been thinking of you. Is it true?’ he said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What you said in The Spectator about getting divorced,’ he said. ‘You must never take the nonsense I write seriously,’ I said. And all down the aisles, as the news spread (‘We’d been praying for you,’ one woman said), I could see waves of relief spreading through the church, and I thought, ‘How lovely. People actually care!’ But there are some things that are far, far too important to make jokes about, and one of them is England’s dismal performance in the World Cup.

Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked. He still is a friend, up to a point. We still have dinner together; we still fancy each other’s wives; we could still conceive of having a gay relationship together if, one day, we end up stranded for ever on a Lost-style island or we’re the only people to survive the Apocalypse; we still ring each other up now and then to bitch about all the successful writers we hate, and about how vile writing for a living is and how much more fun it would be to be entrepreneurs.

Really, it isn’t me who decides what TV programmes to review. It’s my wife. Like, the other night I’d started watching Ricky J. Dyer’s fascinating documentary I Love Being...HIV+ (BBC3, Monday) about pozzing up, the disgusting gay underworld perversion of deliberately getting yourself infected with the HIV virus by seeking unprotected sex with known carriers, and the wife came in and said, ‘Oh God! We’re not watching this, surely? Huh, this is just the sort of stuff you’d watch, because we know you’re gay really...’ So to shut her up I had to dig out some art programmes I’d ordered up instead.