James Delingpole

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.

The Last of Us is widely being hailed as the best video game adaptation ever. Maybe. But it’s still a video game adaptation. On one of the early levels, for example, you have to escape from a zombie apocalypse that has broken out in Houston, with your truck and your guns, being careful also to avoid the military authorities who will shoot you on sight. Later, your mission is to climb through some sewers, up a ladder and into the hidden entrance of an apartment complex to retrieve the car battery you need to effect your escape from the dystopian hellhole that is post-apocalypse Boston. Instead of a virus, the deadly, world-changing threat is a fungus.

Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end, you can view the episodes in any order, meaning that each viewer has a slightly different experience. If I sound mildly sceptical, it’s because the novelty isn’t actually that novel. B.S. Johnson got there 54 years earlier with his 1969 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates, an account of a football match in which the chapters were loose bound so that they could be shuffled and read in whatever order you wished. A few years ago, I bought a rare first edition from Simon Finch which I thought would become very valuable but hasn’t because price is subject to demand and frankly there isn’t much demand for experimental 1960s novelists of whom hardly anyone has heard.

A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in which the populace lose most of their freedoms, are subject to endless testing and are corralled into gated communities. I’m talking, of course, about the wildly implausible plot of a dystopian sci-fi thriller called Hot Skull. On the downside, it’s a bit depressing, with relentlessly grey cityscapes so bleak it makes Blade Runner look like Pleasantville. On the upside, it’s Turkish which means that – as with the brilliant Russian post-apocalyptic drama To the Lake – you get a completely different, original and perhaps more honest satirical slant on the crazy world we’re living in.

They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they get the mix wrong – usually by overdoing the saccharine and mawkishness – it takes you straight down to Christmas hell and tarnishes your memories forever. For example, I will never, ever be able to watch Only Fools And Horses again, not even the actually funny episode where the chandelier falls down, because of an emetic, late-period Christmas special involving Del Boy, his unnecessary wife and – ugh – their new born baby.

The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management. 'There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,' this bizarre, horribly ill-judged and tasteless comedy/thriller series squeals at every turn. 'We’re just a bunch of lovable, kooky misfits doing our bit to defend your freedoms.' If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that one of the biggest baddies in the series – right up there with the evil Russians – is the Senate oversight committee responsible for holding the CIA to account. R-i-g-h-t.

Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous than the undigested, neo-Malthusian eco-propaganda that it serves up in its collaborations with Sir David Attenborough? More dangerous than its notorious movie Cuties, whose portrayal of hypersexualised children prompted a worldwide ‘Cancel Netflix’ campaign? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgvaXros3MY The Guardian’s main beef is that by flirting with speculations outside mainstream archaeology – Atlantis, giants, the survivors of the great flood and so on – the show ‘whispers to the conspiracy theorist in all of us’. But oddly enough, I found the opposite to be true.

TV currently abounds with ‘I thought they were dead’ revival projects: series in which your favourite 1980s movie stars are given a new lease of life and you are reminded – with luck – how much you loved them. Kevin Costner is doing very well in Yellowstone; Ralph Macchio is milking the Karate Kid legacy for all it’s worth in Cobra Kai; Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow had a decent run in The Old Man. Now it’s the turn of Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaQSScwZPbA But I shan’t be hanging around for the second episode. My main problem with it is the flawed premise. Stallone’s character –Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi – is a New York mafiosi who has just done 25 years in prison.