James Delingpole

‘The Terminal List is… a dated and drably made eight-part military thriller that offers little intrigue or excitement,’ says the Guardian’s ‘east coast arts editor’ in a corrosive one-star review. Eh? Can we have been watching the same series? Let me give you an example of this ‘little intrigue or excitement’ and allow you to

I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV. But then, why should it be otherwise? Entropy has afflicted every aspect of our culture from holiday flights to the supply chain to the efficacy and integrity of our political and legal system to the

Just how edgy and dangerous is Ricky Gervais? There is no one more edgy and dangerous, we learn from no less an authority than one R. Gervais. He keeps reminding you of this at intervals in his latest stand-up special, for which he was reputedly paid $20 million (to go with the other $20 million

Having now watched it to the end, I would say that Slow Horses (Apple TV+) is by far the best TV drama I’ve seen in at least the last year: superbly acted and directed, ingeniously plotted, refreshingly free of annoyance. Oh, and I’d like to apologise to Mick Herron, author of the original novel series,

How thriller writers must miss the Cold War! Early John le Carré and Len Deighton had it easy when trying to create a convincingly menacing enemy: the Soviets, obviously. But their successors are forced to go through all manner of desperate contortions to generate their bad guy McGuffin. They can’t do Muslims because that’s Islamophobic;

Netflix’s share price has collapsed and a major factor, people are saying, is its relentless pushing of agendas. I think I have the solution. Perhaps it should follow the BritBox model and instead of making dramas it feels that audiences ought to like – e.g. the very creepy-sounding He’s Expecting, a Japanese series about a

The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation: if you were a child or a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, Savile was quite possibly the most famous person in your entire world. His show Jim’ll Fix It was the most popular on

The iron law of TV these days is that if you want to avoid series that are suffocatingly right-on the only way to go is foreign. Any TV emanating from the Anglosphere is guaranteed to be chock-full of intrusive anachronisms. Bridgerton,which reinvents Regency England as a melting pot of diversity, is an extreme example of

The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music critic I saw an awful lot – was Kanye West at Glastonbury in 2015. Perhaps he was making some kind of ironic statement on the nature of celebrity and fan expectation: blinding lights all focused

Jack Reacher is back on the screen and aficionados of the hugely successful Lee Child airport thrillers in which he appears must be hugely relieved. This time he is played not by pint-sized Tom Cruise but by someone much closer to his 6ft 5ins height: a musclebound giant called Alan Ritchson. Not having read any

It’s 1993 and you’re studying at a top agricultural college with a bright future ahead of you, perhaps in farming or land management, when a chance conversation with a barman all but ruins your life. The barman tells you that he is an agent working for MI5, spying on an IRA cell in college, one

It has taken me a while to watch Yellowjackets because I found the premise so offputting: in 1996 a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team crashes in the mountain wilderness, stranding the survivors for nearly two years. Through flashbacks, we learn that the girls went through some kind of Lord of the

One of my first jobs in journalism was as the arts correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. I’d hop on my motorbike in my greasy leathers (which I used to wear around the office, much to my then editor Max Hastings’s consternation) and zoom off to all manner of exhibition and gallery openings, many of them

A couple of years ago, in that near-forgotten era when we could travel almost freely, I canvassed social media as to what should be my relaxing but involving holiday read during a fortnight in Greece. One suggestion — and this is why you should never trust the literary advice of random strangers — was Robert

My late friend Alexander Nekrassov loathed the Beatles, which I used to think was a wantonly contrary position akin to hating kittens or blue skies or Christmas carols. What could there possibly be not to like, love and admire about the band that gave us ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘A Day In the Life’ and ‘Strawberry Fields

If it weren’t for this job I sometimes wonder whether I’d even bother watching TV at all. This mood strikes me particularly in those weeks when I find myself casting round for anything new and vaguely interesting to watch and I end up in front of something as epically dire as Sky’s new Dan Brown

I was turned on to Midnight Mass by Ricky Gervais who raved about it in one of his social media chats: ‘I absolutely loved it, and it got better and better. It’s like all the themes like love and death, regret, second chances, but it’s about good and evil in a biblical sense.’ Yes. Midnight