James Delingpole

James Delingpole

James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Cash rich

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.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Competing children

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.

Saturday

James Delingpole

The right stuff

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”?

Saturday

James Delingpole

Clash of egos

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.

Saturday

James Delingpole

True courage

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.

Saturday

James Delingpole

With a little help from our friends

Blenheim, 1704: Marlborough’s Greatest Victoryby James FalknerPen & Sword Military, £10.99, pp. 144, ISBN 184415050X By rights the battle of Blenheim in 1704 ought to be as well known as Waterloo. It was just as momentous, just as exciting, just as victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. In fact you could argue — as Winston Churchill did — that it was the event which opened for Britain ‘the gateways of the modern world’. So how come all most of us remember about it today is that it was won by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and that it had a palace in Woodstock named after it?

Saturday

James Delingpole

Playing to posterity

My second most vivid memory of Brian Brindley — the first was the magnificent sepia risotto he served the first time I had dinner in his Georgian-style Reading dining-room whose walls had been painted a green so dark it was almost black — was the outrageously smelly fart he let rip as he wobbled into the bed next to mine when I went to stay with him one night, in the period after his disgrace, at his less grand new digs in Brighton. I remember lying there and thinking, ‘Should I make some jocund remark? Or should I pretend it never happened?’, which was always my slight problem with Brian.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Brooding ’bout my generation

Sixty years on, the crossing to Normandy was flat as a millpond, the sun shone, the helicopter from the Portsmouth to Ouistreham ferry’s British destroyer escort (there were three other destroyers, one French, one American, one Canadian) performed all sorts of clever tricks for our amusement, and our welcoming party comprised a Royal Marine and, later in the evening, a magnificent fireworks display from Omaha all the way to Sword. ‘Bet you wish it had been like this on D-Day,’ I said to George Amos, late of 47 RM commando, as we gazed over a sea rather different from the boiling, grey, vomitous, shell-ravaged killing zone which had claimed nearly a third of his unit killed, wounded or missing in June 1944. ‘Not really,’ he replied after some thought.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Cursed are the peaceniks

James Delingpole gives both barrels to the ‘pea-brained’ isolationists who fill the papers — even The Spectator — with their defeatist snivelling Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit. United you feel strong, happy, immune to the finger-wagging of health fascists and probably even to lung cancer, secure in the knowledge that for all their minor defects, tabs are basically great and possibly better than sex. But as the number of smokers in your circle dwindles, so too does your morale. You feel depressed, insecure, let down. You start wondering whether maybe it’s not time that you too did the cowardly thing and went over to the other side....

Saturday

James Delingpole

Ideas received or rejected

Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really need to have been somewhere weird like Harrow to understand. Initially, I felt the same way about I’m Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me. Like Root, it’s sure to be found in every middle-class downstairs loo everywhere by the time Christmas is over, but on my first flick-through it seemed to me to fail in its most important duty: casual browsability.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It's absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it's the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it's funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it's at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it's better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you reach it, turns out to be so blindingly brilliant that you go, 'Bugger me. That was a brilliant ending.

Saturday

James Delingpole

The grim reefer

They say that if you can remember where it was you had your first skunk, you probably haven't been smoking enough. But I can, quite distinctly. It was at the party of the daughter of a well-known literary agent, in the basement of their house in Notting Hill; the year, give or take, was 1991 and I was just getting ready to leave – having failed to pull again, probably – when I was stopped in my tracks by the most extraordinary smell. Skunk is called skunk for a very good reason: because it, smells exactly, but exactly, like skunk. I didn't know this in 1991. We were all skunk virgins then – apart, that is, from the groovy trustafarian dude I could see across the room, smoking in what appeared to be the epicentre of that intense, skunky smell. 'Aha,' I thought.

Saturday

James Delingpole

DIY down the ages

One balmy summer afternoon in my final year at prep school, a group of my fellow-prefects and I gathered under the apple trees on the slope by the croquet lawn where only prefects were allowed, and reminisced about the five years we'd spent together. 'Do you know, Delingpole,' said one of them, 'it was you who taught us all how to wank.' This is possibly the nicest compliment anyone has ever paid to me and even though it was completely unwarranted - branleur? moi? - I have endeavoured to live up to it ever since by broaching the subject with friends, acquaintances and strangers as often as decently possible; by collecting wanking anecdotes (the man caught in flagrante by his au pair; the man whose father decided to appear on a ladder outside his bedroom window just when. . .

Saturday

James Delingpole

The penis mightier than the sword

Next time you're stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break the ice? 1. In mammalian terms the male of Homo sapiens is spectacularly endowed - his penis, when erect, being roughly three times larger than a 400lb gorilla's. 2. In Pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian men were so fearful of vaginal blood that they would hire Aethiops (famed for the blackness of their skin and the enormousness of their members) to deflower their brides. 3. The biblical 'sin of Onan' had nothing to do with every teenager's favourite pastime but in fact referred originally to 'coitus interruptus'.