James Delingpole

‘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.

One reason I find most TV thrillers such a huge waste of life is that the bad guys so often turn out to be evil capitalists, corrupt Tory MPs or sinister right-wing terrorist organisations. This owes more to the wishful thinking of instinctively bien-pensant scriptwriters than to reality. Since the war — or even before the war, if you accept that the Nazis were National Socialists — all the greatest threats to our existence and civilisation, from the IRA to militant Islam, from rampant trade unionism to communist imperialism, have come from the extreme Left, not the Right.

Until I had a daughter I used to think the problem with me and girls was me. But when you’re given the chance to observe the female of the species up close from birth onwards under home laboratory conditions, you soon lose any post-feminist illusions you might have about the blame for the war between the sexes being divided roughly 50/50. Chicks are great. I love their poppety faces, their pretty girlie clothes, and their darling little whims. But the fact remains that they should never, ever be taken as seriously as they think they ought to be taken. Do that and you might as well say to the lunatics in the asylum, ‘OK, guys. You’re in charge now!

‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’ the heroic Claire Fox asked on Question Time (BBC1, Thursday) last week, and the question was so shocking that the pinkos, class warriors and terrorist-sympathisers who comprise the majority of your typical QT audience weren’t sure whether to clap or hiss. The point the Fox Goddess (what I particularly like is the way you think she’s going to be another of those ghastly women but then she turns out to speak pure truth and wisdom) was trying to make is that all this government talk about giving schools more freedom is so much tosh. No state school, even if it wanted to, could decide: ‘Right, from now on we’re going to teach Latin and Greek and give all our children a traditional liberal arts education.

The older I get the less tolerant I grow towards any form of entertainment — a play, a film, a TV programme, a book, whatever — that doesn’t deliver sufficient value. Tempus fugit, mors venit, and the last thing I want to be doing in my declining years is wasting precious leisure time on anything that doesn’t amuse me, make me happier, teach me a useful new fact about the second world war or otherwise enrich my life. This is why, for example, I have resolved never to read another contemporary literary novel.

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 you’re ever going to trick your mind into conjuring up an approximation of all those Christmases you think you remember from childhood where cheery robins perched on snowy gateposts, the turkey breasts were never dry and the presents were always as exciting as you’d hoped they’d be is by brainwashing yourself with constant exposure to Christmas specials and Christmas movies and Christmas adverts, all lying sweetly about how Christmas ought to be instead of how boring it is.

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.