James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
I can’t remember a Christmas where I watched so little Christmas TV as this one, which is a shame in a way, because I do think that mammoth sessions in front of the box are the key to feeling truly Christmassy. Going to church helps, too, obviously, but it’s never quite enough. The only way
David Hearsey, DFC, was a bomber pilot. Here he recalls participating in a raid over Leipzig in his Handley Page Halifax in February 1944. We set out on an easterly heading across the North Sea towards the Danish coast. I told the gunners, Wally and Ted, to test their guns and fire a few rounds
My favourite programmes this week were Cold Steel: Ray Mears’s guide to the knife-fighting techniques of Anders Lassen VC (Channel 4, Monday); Das Reich: From Poland to the Ardennes with 2nd SS Panzer Division (BBC2, Wednesday); Richard Holmes’s Kohima and Imphal: the Untold Story (Channel 4, Thursday); and Götterd
Patrick Hagen served as a wireless operator with 4 Commando Brigade signals troop. Here he describes the moment when, while guarding their exit route during a four-man hit-and-run raid on a radar site on the French coast, he and his friend Harry were discovered by two Germans. ‘There were only two types of commandos, the
Now obviously in the light of last week’s column I did try to find a subject this week which had to do with something other than war. But then I looked in the schedules and saw that there was one documentary on about the Somme and another about the city of Benares, and that was
Have you ever escaped from captivity by removing from your boot the serrated surgical wire cunningly disguised as a shoelace and sawing through the windpipe of your hapless, squirming guard? Me neither, but I know someone who has. He’s a lovely old boy, gentle, thoughtful, slightly melancholy and, but for that unsettlingly sardonic smile and
For some time now I have been aware that there was something badly wrong with my life without ever being quite able to put my finger on exactly what. Now, having watched Rome (BBC2, Wednesday), I know: I was born in the wrong place, 1,953 years too late. Take religion. I don’t wish to knock
I was waiting to go on The Jeremy Vine Show to explain why it was I thought Dave Cameron had done the right thing by evading the drugs question when I got talking to the next guest, an American scientist who has just written a book on the biological effects of TV on the brain.
Now that my children attend a state primary, I naturally have more of a vested interest in the future of our education system than I did in that brief moment of idiocy when I allowed my wife to persuade me that I could afford to send them private. I haven’t read what either of the
I’ll be honest. I’ve watched less than bugger-all TV this week. The three bridge evenings (one of them, get this, tutored by the legendary Susanna Gross) didn’t help, nor yet did the parents’ barbecue evening at our kids’ new school, and Wednesday night is Pilates night so obviously that’s no good, and you wouldn’t seriously
You were probably expecting me to watch Celebrity Shark Bait (ITV1, Sunday) but I didn’t because I was feeling a bit ‘been there, done that’ and, short of filming the celebrities actually being eaten, I couldn’t see how they could possibly have made it exciting. I expect there was lots and lots of build-up as
I spent most of last Sunday evening yelling insults at my TV screen. ‘Berk!’ I shouted. ‘Twat!’ Then later, ‘Oily creep!’ ‘Traitor!’ ‘Tosser!’ The first person to draw my ire was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He hadn’t hitherto been that high on my list of historical hate figures — poor old dying polio bloke with his
Unfortunately I was in deepest Wales on the day when TV made me briefly famous so I missed all the phone calls from friends saying nice things. I did pop into Builth Wells the next day, wearing the same glasses I wore on my TV programme, just in case anyone felt like recognising me. But
Quite the most important programme on TV last week — possibly all year — was Bjorn Lomborg on Environmentalism, part of Channel 5’s excellent Big Ideas series. It was well-argued, punchy, intelligent and persuasive, and it ought to become compulsory viewing in every school in Britain. But, of course, it won’t be for reasons that
For the first time since 1990 I decided not to go to Glastonbury this year. It was a purely practical decision: the drug intake needed to get you through those three days is so vast that it wipes you out for the rest of summer and, for a change, I thought it would be interesting
Quite the most upsetting thing I saw on TV all week was Bob Geldof on the Jonathan Ross show (Friday), talking about all the dead Africans who are found washed up on the shores of Lampedusa, between Libya and Sicily. So many, he said, that the mayor of Lampedusa complained that he had ‘literally’ no
To be honest, I haven’t been watching an awful lot of TV lately. It gets in the way of bedtime reading and an early night. You think you’re safe watching a programme at 9 p.m., which is when all the best ones are on, but that means you can’t start your pre-bed countdown (lights; cat;
Tragically, I missed the recent reality TV show in which celebrity love rat (and, weirdly enough, brother of my old riding teacher) James Hewitt was filmed receiving hand relief from a young woman desperate (very, clearly) to win £10,000. Instead I’m going to talk about something if possible even more depressing: Armando Iannucci’s new sitcom
Much as I love the nostalgic idea of the original Ask the Family, the reality was rather different. The questions were way too hard and made you feel thick even when you weren’t (Robert Robinson’s smug avuncularity served mainly to rub salt into this wound), and the families were really freaky, the parents never having
Did any of you catch me being rubbish on BBC4 last week? I was one of the talking heads on a series called TV on Trial, where various critic types argued over which of the past six decades produced the best TV. My job was to be rude about the Eighties, with David Aaronovitch defending