James Delingpole

What would you say is the most successful comic-book series in history? If you’re thinking Tintin you’re not even close. (Curiously enough, even the now largely forgotten Lucky Luke scores higher.) If you’re thinking Peanuts, you’re getting warmer. And if you named Asterix, good try but that’s only number two. No, the hands-down winner, with total sales exceeding 516 million, is a Japanese manga called One Piece. One Piece? Me neither. It’s quite unusual these days to chance upon a massive cultural phenomenon – the series has been going since 1997, with 1,093 chapters so far – of which one has never once even heard. But this, I suspect, will be the experience of most viewers approaching the Netflix adaptation.

Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third of ours, the smaller talent pool would make the Antipodean edition look like thin gruel. But a bit like with the cricket and the rugby, size clearly isn’t everything. UK MasterChef now resembles one of those joyless austerity dishes you cobble together from crusty leftovers you found languishing in the fridge. But the Aussie one has had my entire family addicted and yearning for more for the past fortnight. I suppose it’s partly down to the way Australia sees itself.

In the year 2023, the Neo-Roman Empire was at the height of its powers. A potentially restive populace was kept in check using a time-honoured technique known as ‘Bread and Circuses’. The ‘Circuses’ part consisted of a remarkable piece of technology in which spectacles could be beamed directly into the homes of the citizenry, filling them with awe, wonder, gratitude and a sense of their insignificance in the sweep of history.

Some years ago, Mark Millar (the creator of Kick-Ass, Kingsman, etc.) hit on yet another brilliant conceit for one of his comic-book stories: a three-part series based on the premise that Bible-believing Christians are right, that the Antichrist walks among us and that only the second coming will save us – eventually – from the horrors depicted in Revelation. Since the late 1960s, screenwriters have tended to give the devil all the best tunes ‘I have nothing but happy memories of growing up as a Catholic, and I wanted to do a book about faith that was both intelligent and respectful,’ said Millar. ‘If we can do a thoughtful take on Batman surely we can do the same with Jesus?

It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do cheat occasionally with series like the one featuring the delightfully grumpy, chain-smoking Cormoran Strike, but on the whole I can’t stand the mix of predictability and implausibility: all the goodies will be female and/or ethnic; the murderer will always be white, middle class and male; no one ever gets arrested for misgendering someone on Twitter because in the parallel universe of cop TV the police still actually think it’s their job to solve crimes. So, your options are either to watch classic episodes of The Sweeney or to find a cop series from one of those countries where the old values still prevail. India, for example.

I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University Challenge. But unfortunately, I understand from people who knew the Eton, Cambridge, Yale and Grenadier Guards historian, playwright, critic, polymath millionaire and scion of the upper classes that he chose to compensate for his privilege by embracing progressive causes. So, chances are, the shade of Bamber is thrilled to bits at seeing his old quizmaster’s seat occupied by someone who drops his aitches and pronounces ‘h’ where it should be aspirated and landed a mere 2.2 from hearty, insufficiently medieval Downing. Bambi’s successor Jeremy Paxman probably isn’t too bothered either.

If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was the subtle message of Eldorado, a documentary that pretended to inform us about the real-life background sexual milieu to Cabaret and Babylon Berlin, but was really much more interested in promoting its political view that Weimar Germany with its sexual promiscuity, rampant drug use and anything-goes view on ‘gender’ represented some kind of paradise on Earth which we should seek to emulate. A voice-over told us what to think: ‘They feel intimidated by this rapid change. The pace of change is a source of frustration to just about everybody. If you’re a radical, then change is happening much too slowly for you.

Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond. Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he was played by wry, capable Sean Connery or playful, tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore. But he definitely ought to have been a shoo-in for the horror show that the Bond franchise has become: dour, humourless, pumped up, ponderous, portentous, joyless… In his latest vehicle, Elba plays high-level negotiator Sam Nelson, an ordinary man yet possessed of a very particular set of skills.

I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow across gently or stroke inside to feel the soft, delicate skin; they can’t jump hedges; and the kit you’re expected to wear on them is quite hideous – not a smart, black, 18th-century-looking coat but vile, garish, deeply unflattering and unsexy Lycra. Still, after watching a few episodes of Tour de France: Unchained, I’ve softened my position slightly. Say what you like about those infuriating, car-impeding, road-hogging cyclists but the ones who participate in the big international races don’t half have some balls. (Three actually, if the stories I hear about the effects of those uncomfy saddles are correct.

Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t you? The intelligence services would be queuing up to employ you for interrogations; top law firms would pay you top dollar to act as their adviser; you’d win gazillions in all the poker championships; you’d never buy a dodgy second-hand car, not that you’d need to with all that money you’d have. Admittedly, though, your life and adventures would make for a very boring TV series because everything would be so easy. Hence the tortured premise of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, in which we are invited to believe that our heroine, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), has blown her skills spectacularly.

Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have been lying to us about the true nature of reality. This time – in Silo – the lie concerns the nature of the world outside the enormous silo in which our heroes and about 10,000 other survivors have been hiding for the past 100-odd years since some nameless apocalypse. Is it really as dangerous as the Powers That Be say? Or is this an illusion, maintained over a century of relentless official propaganda, designed to keep the enclosed populace frightened and in check? Silo began life in 2011 as a self-published short story by Hugh Howey – called Wool, not Silo – which he put out through Amazon’s Kindle Direct.

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what would become the world’s bestselling video game. The question you’re going to be asking yourself time and again – especially during the Lada-ZiL chase scene through the streets of Moscow in which our heroes try to elude the hatchet-faced KGB agents – is: ‘How much of this is true?’ And the honest answer is: ‘Not very much, actually.

War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year. But I doubt many other critics are going to rave about it or even notice it, for some of the very same reasons that I think make it so cherishable: it’s meandering, episodic, understated and made in Norway, with subtitles. Originally released last year as a feature film for the international category of the Oscars (where it was overshadowed by the more in-your-face All Quiet On the Western Front), War Sailor is the most expensive Norwegian movie ever made. But there’s nothing showy or obviously big budget about it.

I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly frivolous creator of Succession Jesse Armstrong, for example, is that he is very easily bored by grown-up subjects such as big business, finance, corporate structure, legal affairs or anything involving depth and seriousness. Which ought, you might think, to pose a major problem for someone constructing an epic drama – loosely based on the Murdoch family – about the struggle for succession in a global media empire. But Armstrong’s saving grace is this: most viewers are not interested in such tedium either.

Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his seventy-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the British royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed. Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the "lightskin lottery," he says) complaining to Oprah: "I didn’t know how racist they were." "It’s the royal family!" expostulates Rock. "They’re the OGs [Original Gangstas] of racism. They’re the Sugarhill Gang of racism." (The 1980s cultural references give you an idea of the age of Rock’s mostly black audience at the live recording in Baltimore.

Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or not the royal family are racist must have made him more than a million quid. Was it worth the money? Well, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure how well it will translate here, in precis, with all the swearing removed. At that altitude, bodies get frozen to three times their normal weight Rock begins by pointing up the absurdity of Meghan Markle (winner of the ‘lightskin lottery’, he says) complaining to Oprah: ‘I didn’t know how racist they were.’ ‘It’s the royal family!’ expostulates Rock. ‘They’re the OGs [Original Gangstas] of racism. They’re the Sugarnill Gang of racism.

My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of him and what little I knew – his massive, sweary, on-court tantrums – did not inspire much enthusiasm. But then I watched Break Point and realised that here was exactly the kind of man I’d like to be myself: someone so talented at what he does that he puts in no preparation and little practice; who prefers chilling with his mates and his family to the grinding tedium of work; who loathes rules and formality and won’t be told what to do; and who, despite all these self-generated handicaps, is still capable of pulling off the occasional stunt that proves his critics spectacularly wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi assassin, mysteriously imprisoned for nameless crimes, suddenly out of a job after the fall of the Berlin Wall, takes brutal revenge on all who betrayed her. It’s reminiscent not just of everything from La Femme Nikita, Kick-Ass and Kill Bill to the ghastly, grisly Killing Eve, but of any number of hitmen-out-of-retirement dramas (most recently The Old Man), plus every revenge yarn from the Count of Monte Cristo onwards, all seasoned with a delicate hint of Deutschland 83. But the thing about TV, you realise, is that originality is overrated, not to mention all but impossible. What matters is the detail, the tone, the handling.