My plan to cut the BBC out of my life entirely is working well. Apart from the occasional forgivable lapse — that excellent Margaret Thatcher documentary; Pointless and Only Connect because they’re the only programmes we can all watch together as a family — I find that not watching or listening to anything the BBC does is making me calmer, happier and better informed.
I’m also learning stuff about myself that I never imagined possible. Like the fact that I have a massive man crush on the rap star Kanye West. Though I’ve long been a fan of his albums, I went right off him as a person a few years ago when he headlined Glastonbury and played quite the worst, most self-indulgent, dreary set I have ever had to endure: no decent tunes or hook, just Kanye the egotist and some glaring white lights shining full in your face as if to show how much he despised you.
But then I watched him on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction (Netflix) and I urge you to do the same, especially for the moment when he brilliantly wrongfoots his interviewer David Letterman. Letterman, you may recall, was just about the biggest talkshow host of the 1980s, 90s and Noughties. Then he retired, apparently to deal with some heart and anger-management problems, grow a snowy beard and reinvent himself as a dignified, nurturing father-confessor figure, looking like a bluesman, dressing like Karl Lagerfeld and acting like New York’s most expensive therapist.
For about ten seconds I was charmed by this schtick (‘Gosh, I hope I look that good at 72!’) but pretty soon I realised he was the same smug, insinuating, achingly right-on phoney he ever was. The key moment comes when Kanye, after discussing his bipolar disorder (which he refuses to treat with drugs, preferring to enjoy what he calls ‘ramping up’), chooses (in his oblique, meandering way) to lament the climate of fear that has been generated among men in the witchhunt atmosphere of #MeToo.
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