James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
Another year over and it wasn’t all bad, you know. Here are some of my personal highlights. Best birthday parties: my dear old friend Liz Hogg’s 90th and my dear older friend’s Jim Lovelock’s 100th. The latter, in the Orangerie at Blenheim Palace, was possibly the most unboring semi-formal social occasion I’ve ever attended. My
It has been a while since I’ve considered the vexed question of Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’. More than 30 years, in fact. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my Anglo-Saxon tutorials with dear, lovely, gentle Richard Hamer. And now he is the author of the standard translation being used by my children on their own university
True to the Andrew Roberts rule that the only bearable series on TV these days are ones with subtitles, I’ve started watching Der Pass (Sky Atlantic). Not unlike The Bridge and The Tunnel, it starts with a dead body exactly straddling a border, thus requiring the intervention of detectives from two national jurisdictions. This time,
Speed is in my blood. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all used to race cars in their youth. We even have a hill-climb specialist car part-named after us, the Dellow. Just after I’d passed my test, my dad let me share the driving in his V12 Jag en route to our holiday home in Devon.
Edwardian England deserved everything it got from those killer Martian invaders. Or so I learned from the BBC’s latest adaptation of The War of the Worlds (Sundays). Everything about that era, apparently, was hateful, backward and ripe for destruction: regressive attitudes to women and homosexuality; exultant white supremacy (cue, a speech from a government minister
The highlight of my country calendar is when I’m lucky enough to be invited to what even the host describes as ‘the world’s best worst shoot’. It’s the worst shoot because the bag is often truly atrocious. This year, for example, in the course of six or possibly seven drives — the details are hazy
‘Here’s your new Sunday night obsession…’ the BBC announcer purred, overintoned and mini-orgasmed, like she was doing an audition for a Cadbury’s Flake commercial, ‘… a dazzling drama with a stellar cast.’ My hackles rose. Did no one ever mention to her the rule about ‘show not tell’? And my hackles were right. His Dark
How sorry I felt for the poor man who died this week stuck up a 290ft chimney in Carlisle despite desperate attempts — helicopter; cherry-picker — by the emergency services to rescue him. We’re so used to the idea that no matter how precarious or remote our plight — be it stranded kids deep inside a
In an uncharacteristic fit of almost-robustness, Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan has said she is ‘open-minded’ about scrapping the BBC licence fee and replacing it with a Netflix-style subscription service. Good idea. What would we actually miss if we didn’t subscribe? Not an awful lot in my view. Some people cite David Attenborough’s nature documentaries but
I’ve nearly finished my latest screenplay, Drift. It’s a reimagining of a British imperial atrocity which took place in Natal in 1879 and was subsequently made into a disgracefully jingoistic 1964 movie, and despite its problematic subject matter — the bad guys won — I reckon it will be a shoo-in for an award at
I have never ever watched a TV series I have enjoyed more than Succession (Now TV). There’s stuff I’d put in the same league, maybe — Fauda, Babylon Berlin, Band of Brothers, Utopia, Gomorrah, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and so on — but absolutely nothing beats it. It is, quite simply, a work of pure,
‘Hands up which other university parents are bloody glad to have got rid of their lumpen, food-gobbling, space-invading kids…’ When I tweeted this the other day having just dumped my offspring at Durham I got accused of being a bad father. But I don’t think I am. A bad father wouldn’t have been labouring in
Sir Lenny Henry, the former comedian, is wont to complain to anyone who’ll listen that there isn’t enough ‘diversity’ on TV. Really, he should watch Top Boy (Netflix). Apart from the odd token walk-on whitey — skanky crack addicts, nasty immigration officers — it’s wall-to-wall BAME casting opportunities. The protagonist, Dushane (Ashley Walters), is black.
It’s not often that you come across a book that completely transforms your understanding of the world. Just recently I’ve read two. One, Tom Holland’s Dominion concerns the debt we all owe — not just vicars and popes but atheists and social justice warriors — to Christianity’s revolutionary (and frankly still shocking) message that the
Because the rise of the Nazis is a topic so rarely mentioned these days, least of all in schools, the BBC has produced a helpful three-part explainer of that title (BBC2, Mondays) showing why the story of Hitler is even more relevant today than it was in the 1930s. Back in the day, the BBC
You know that awful, gnawing, depressing feeling you’ve got right now? The one that notices how shockingly early the sun is setting and how shabby and played out and autumnal the borders are looking and how listless and flat everything feels what with no holidays to look forward to and the house empty of kids?
Brassic (Sky One) feels like the sort of TV comedy drama they last made about 15 years ago but would never get commissioned now, certainly not by the BBC. Almost all of the main characters — apart from love interest Michelle Keegan — are white, male and heterosexual. And it’s set in the kind of
Now that my youngest has got her A-level grades, I’m finally free to say just how much I have loathed the past 20 or so years I have spent helping my children with their English homework. This is a sad admission. After all, I studied English at university and still love reading classic literature and
Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (BBC4) began with some footage of kids queuing up outside a warehouse rave in Stoke-on-Trent in 1991. It was at once banal and extraordinary: everyone was white; nobody was overweight; none of the clothes were designer, expensive or branded; nobody wore facial hair.
Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former
