James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change
You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous week putting together all the essentials for a successful stay: personalised bags of truffle-flavoured popcorn and pretzel nibbles for their bedside; hand-blended, sensually curated bath salts; layer cake flavoured with honey from your private hives;
Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows –
Wouldn’t it be marvellous if instead of going to work every day we could contract out the tedium to avatars of whose daytime activities we could remain blissfully unaware? This, in essence, is the premise of the dystopian drama Severance, but I’m not sure it’s a fantasy many of us actually nurture. Noël Coward once
Netflix is the television equivalent of pasta and ready-made pesto: a slightly desperate but acceptable enough stand-by when you’ve got home late, you haven’t time to prepare anything more nutritious and at least it fills the gap without too much pain or fuss. It is an adamantine rule of television that foreign-language dramas are always
American Primeval should really be called Two Incredibly Annoying Women In The Wild West. Yes, the first title is more clickbaity, whetting the prurient viewer’s appetite for the savage, primitive violence that splatters over every other scene. But the second is more accurate. Not since Lily Dale in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire have I rooted
It’s odd being lionised for something you did so long ago you’d almost forgotten you were there. But this is what has been happening to me on social media these last few days, as a result of clips of me on a 2014 BBC3 political debate programme called Free Speech going viral. Free Speech was one of those
If your heart sinks at the prospect of a thriller series starring Keira Knightley as a highly trained undercover agent with unfeasible martial skills, join the club. The reason I was drawn to Black Doves was when I realised it had been written by that master of tongue-in-cheek, ultraviolent, popcorn TV, Joe Barton (Giri/Haji). However
We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: James Delingpole’s article from November on the new BBC Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed to get off relatively lightly from the attentions of the
Do you remember that nagging sense of mild disappointment as you sat through Dune 2? You’d been impressed by Dune: bit of a recondite plot if you hadn’t read the book but great to look at, with an austere art-house aesthetic, like Star Wars for people with an IQ. But then the sequel sold out.
Wolf Hall is one of the few remaining jewels in the BBC’s tarnished crown. Presumably that’s why it was allowed to get off relatively lightly from the attentions of the Beeb’s resident diversity commissars. Yes, I recognise that I may be a terrible reactionary, completely out of tune with the times. But I think I
The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of early 19th-century England. The latter is Jane Austen as reimagined by a wannabe Jilly Cooper with a first-class degree in historical revisionism; the former is a bit like what The West Wing might have been
All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three episodes, I quite understand why. This is coffee-table spy-drama porn perfectly calculated to satisfy all manner of lurid and exotic tastes. There’s sniper-rifle-assembly porn; foreign-property porn (the Jackal’s gorgeous mountain retreat near Cadiz with a
Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I have just cheated and looked up on the internet the shocking final plot twist in Disclaimer and now I have been relieved of a massive burden. No longer need I watch any more episodes of this weird, creepy, pretentious, contrived and prurient series just to see
I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama is good it can be very, very good, as we saw with Spiral, Les Revenants, and, maybe the best series ever made about spies, Le Bureau. But La Maison is not in their league. This
The Perfect Couple is an exemplar of that genre sometimes cynically known as ‘poverty programming’: dramas that train all of us non-billionaire folk to be content with our miserable lot by showing us that even if we did have lots more money we’d actually really hate it. They’re all secretly messed up, treacherous and unfaithful,
Kaos is a new Netflix gods-and-monsters black-comedy blockbuster that will scorch your screen and fry your brain like a thunderbolt from Zeus. It’s sick, cynical, brutal and very, very dark but it’s so well acted, ingeniously plotted, moving, inventive, funny and addictive that I fear resistance may be futile. Playboy Poseidon hangs out on his
Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out of shoebox at midnight, lick road clean, eat a couple of bits of coal gravel’) relocated to mostly 20th-century Japan and Korea. There’s so much misery it makes Angela’s Ashes look like Pollyanna. And there’s
30 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Richard Madeley reads his diary for the week (1:01); Cindy Yu explores the growing trend for all things nostalgic in China (6:00); Lara Prendergast declares that bankers are hot again (11:26); Pen Vogler reviews Sally Coulthard’s book The Apple (17:18); and, James Delingpole argues that Joe Rogan is ‘as edgy as Banksy’
My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s harder than you think. Especially when you’ve got kids calling constantly from the sitting room: ‘Dad, Dad, it’s Romania vs Burkina Faso in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball and there’s been a tremendous
