James Delingpole

One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to be total rubbish, meaning I’ll for ever have thousands of viewers’ wasted lives and disappointment on my conscience. But my even greater fear is that I’ll peremptorily condemn something after one or two episodes which subsequently reveals itself to be a near-masterpiece. This almost happened with Locke & Key (Netflix). ‘You realise I’m watching this on sufferance. The second you’ve seen enough to review, we’re moving on to something else,’ declared the Fawn. And I could sort of see her point.

Ever since the end of Gomorrah season four (Sky Atlantic) I have been bereft. I eked it out for as long as I could, going whole weeks without watching an episode — rationing it and savouring it as you do when you’re down to your last Rolo. But eventually I could put off the climax no longer, I watched them all die — as everyone always does in Gomorrah, so I’m not spoiling anything — and now I’m on the hunt for a substitute. So far the most obvious candidate is Narcos: Mexico season two (Netflix). This contains most of the same key ingredients: bling, convoys of vehicles ripe for ambush, drugs shipments, betrayal, tense stand-offs that could end up either in extreme violence or a cunning, game-changing new arrangement, torture, etc.

SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear to watch any more. And I’m only slightly exaggerating. Where else, anywhere from the BBC to Channel 4, would you see a woman being punched in the face and made to cry by an ex-SAS soldier for your amusement and delectation? Where else would the competition not be rigged in one way or another so as to ensure that the appropriate race and gender mix made it through to the end? Yes, of course it was shocking a few weeks back watching midwife Louise Gabbitas, 29, get thumped several times in the head by a bloke. Especially when we viewers knew that he was in fact undercover ex-special forces and had been sent to spy on her.

Sky’s latest bingewatch potboiler Cobra can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be an arch, knowing House of Cards-meets-The Thick Of It satire about parliamentary intrigue. Or a full-on post-apocalyptic thriller in the manner of Survivors or The Walking Dead. It ends up succeeding in neither. The premise is that a powerful solar flare is heading towards Britain, leaving the government little time to prepare, and subsequently causing all manner of chaos: plane crashes, hotel fires, escaped prisoners, mass blackouts. Will mild, likeable Conservative prime minister Robert Sutherland (a miscast Robert Carlyle), his fractious cabinet and his civil service prove up to the job of extricating Britain from a new Dark Age?

According to Nielsen Media’s ratings service, 17 million people watched ‘at least a few minutes’ of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman on Netflix over its first weekend. Impressive. Rather less impressive, I'm guessing, is the proportion who actually made it to the end of this excruciating ordeal of an embarrassment of a movie. If it was even close to 50 percent, I'd be surprised. Some critics are saying its Scorsese's best since Goodfellas. Don't believe the hype. Though it reunites arguably the all time greatest trio of mob movie actors — Joe Pesci, Robert de Niro and Al Pacino — it's not the performances you notice, but their age. De Niro is 76, Pacino 79 and Pesci 76.