James Delingpole

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 room anywhere left to bury them. Now, obviously, Africans dying en masse is a bad thing. But I’m afraid what upset me far, far more was the fact that Ross allowed Geldof to get away with this lachrymose homily (which got a huge cheer from the audience, unfortunately) on a show normally characterised by its flipness, brazenness and irreverence. ‘Yeah, yeah, St Bob, save that guff for Parky,’ Ross might have said had he been on form.

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; front and back doors; nocturnal slug-/snail-killing session; dishwasher; bath; teeth; floss; four-year-old-daughter-weeing; semi-supine-lying-down-exercise-because-your-back’s-knackered; lost-book-finding; herbal-sleeping-pill-taking, etc.) till 10 p.m. at the earliest, which means lights out not much before quarter to midnight. Which, if you’re planning on getting up for your 6.30 a.m. swim, isn’t ideal. Or am I getting old?

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 The Thick of It (BBC4, Thursday). What’s depressing isn’t that it’s bad — it’s not: it’s quite brilliant, the new Yes, Minister — but that it dissects with such merciless accuracy the failings of the New Labour project that you find yourself thinking, ‘Phew! Thank God, we’ve finally seen through those charlatans.

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 had sex since their children were conceived, and the kids being the weirdy, mushroom-cropped kind who aren’t allowed to watch TV, only practise the cello and solve abstruse mathematical problems. Perhaps this is why I didn’t hate Dick and Dom’s Ask the Family (BBC2, weekdays) nearly as much as I hoped I would.

The programme I’m enjoying most at the moment is The Apprentice (BBC2, Wednesday), in which teams of men and women, all of whom have supposedly resigned from their high-powered jobs for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, take part in various business-related competitions and are whittled down week by week until there is only one survivor. His prize is a highly paid job with Sir Alan Sugar. (In the American version it was Donald Trump.) I say ‘His’ because on current evidence it’s almost certainly going to be a bloke who wins. If you’d seen the boys and girls in action during the flower-selling episode, you’d know exactly what I mean.

Can I tell you about my latest adventures? Oh, can I? Can I? OK, well I’ve been making a TV documentary for Channel 4 and, en route, I met the greatest concentration of Spectator readers I’ve ever encountered. Why am I so totally unsurprised to discover that yer typical Speccie reader spends his February in St Moritz riding the Cresta Run, hunts, prefers smoking and drinking to eating and wears plus fours and a ‘Bollocks To Blair’ badge? It’s a simultaneously delightful and disturbing thing, meeting your fan base. On the one hand, you get an idea what it is they like about you: in my case, the sound right-wingness and general don’t-give-a-tossness. On the other, you get a better idea of why it is that some of them think you’re a total arse.

The best pop video ever made was the one Mark Romanek directed in 2003 for Johnny Cash’s swansong — ‘Hurt’. It’s also definitely the bleakest. The Man in Black was on his last legs when he made it, a doddery, rheumy-eyed 72, and here you see him very consciously bidding farewell to his adoring wife June (who appears alongside him, choked with emotion, and who predeceased him, of cancer), his life and the trappings of wordly success. My favourite bit — actually, I’ve lots, like the perfect moment at the end where his huge hands slowly, pointedly, close the piano lid for the last time — is where you see him enthroned in his Nashville home, looking like some ravaged former god rendered cruelly mortal.

The thing five-year-olds most dread on their first day at school, according to Child of Our Time (BBC1, Tuesday), is using the dirty, smelly, alien toilets. I remember the moment well. Peeing in the urinal all men quickly learn to dread — the middle one — I was mortified to notice that the two boys either side of me were pissing themselves laughing. ‘He doesn’t know how to use his flies,’ said one boy to the other. And I didn’t. Mummy hadn’t shown me. Instead, I had dropped my trousers round my ankles, just as I did at home. But cosy homeworld, I suddenly came to realise, no longer counted for very much.

Dear, lovely but dangerously optimistic and quite often wrong Matthew Parris had a go at me in the Speccie the other week when en passant he mentioned TV critics who don’t like TV. This was terribly unfair. I don’t hate all TV, just about 99.5 per cent of it, which still leaves lots of room for stuff I do like, such as Peep Show (Channel 4, Tuesday and Friday), Line Of Fire (History Channel, Monday) and Blackpool (BBC1, Thursday). Blackpool is so good that I’m sure it’s going to become one of those landmark series that everyone refers back to all the time (cf. The Singing Detective, Our Friends in the North...), thus annoying the hell out of all the people who went, ‘“Comedy musical set up North with David solid-but-dull Morrissey”?

A few years ago on a Caribbean island, I tried smoking crack. It tasted absolutely delicious, like toffee bananas, and for about ten minutes I felt quite fantastic. But I still don’t think it’s nearly as stupid or addictive or bad for you as I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here (ITV1). I promised myself, as I always do, that I wasn’t going to watch it. But during North & South (BBC1, Sunday) — which I like but would probably like more if I weren’t slightly worried about the liberties I gather it has been taking with the novel — I couldn’t resist flicking over every now and again to see how the latest bunch of nonentities were getting on in the jungle.

All last week I was in Holland with some of the splendid old boys of 4th Commando Brigade, commemorating their liberation of Walcheren island 60 years ago. I asked them whether they felt they’d benefited from their wartime experiences and most of them said yes. ‘When you’ve been through all that, you come out knowing you can handle anything,’ said a twinkly-eyed fellow called Pat Hagen. ‘And it’s a useful thing to know because what you have to realise is that life is always hard. After the war I faced obstacles every bit as tough as I did during the war. You’ve got to learn to deal with them.