James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
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My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons. Really, if the whole
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Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s
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Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with the Peter Weir movie and wanted to gauge for myself how horrible it must have been. En route I met up with a young Australian who was training to be an actor (in my false
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Because I’m reckless, stupid and irresponsible, I normally get landed with the biggest, most obstreperous hunters. But the other weekend the riding school boss, Jane, decided to allocate me a different horse to ride. It was a smallish grey called Potato. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked one of the regulars. ‘Oh he’s lovely!’ she said.
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Blimey, there has been so much good stuff to watch on telly of late: the Grand National, the Boat Race and the Masters; The Island with Bear Grylls; the final of University Challenge (bravura performance from Caius’s Loveday, though how the winning Cambridge team’s hearts must have sunk when they realised that the public intellectual
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A bit late, I know, to put in a bid for Jeremy Clarkson’s old job. But I think I might just accidentally have rediscovered my inner petrolhead. What happened was this. We’d just replaced our old sensible family car (a Ford Mondeo) with another sensible family car (a Skoda Yeti), only to realise that it just
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Ever since Boy got back from school my work schedule has fallen to pieces. Every few minutes, just when I’ve got my concentration back after the last interruption, Boy will burst into the office and say, ‘Dad, Dad. How good are you on obscure New Zealanders?’ Or, ‘Quick, Dad, it’s your subject: reptiles!’ Or, ‘Dad,
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There was a letter to the Daily Telegraph last weekend which depressed me more than anything I’ve read in ages. It reported the visit by a social worker to an elderly woman who made her a cup of tea. The young social worker was shocked by what she saw. Not only did this bewildered old
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There’s a scene in the finale of season six that embodies everything that’s so right and so wrong with Mad Men. Don Draper, that fathomless enigma of a Madison Avenue copywriting anti-hero, is pitching for the Hershey’s chocolate account. Hershey’s represents that dream combination — an American brand legend that has never really advertised before.
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I was on the phone to Girl, thinking of something interesting to tell her. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘And this afternoon I’m taking Daisy to the vet to get her put down.’ ‘Why?’ said Girl. ‘Oh, you know. She’s two years old now, so she’s had a pretty good innings. Plus her fur’s got really
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One of the most satisfying phrases in the English language is: ‘Sorry. I’m afraid I have to go to a parents’ evening.’ I love it because it’s such a perfect excuse for turning down dreary social engagements: you come across like someone who takes his parental responsibilities seriously but at the same time, if you
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My favourite bit of The Great European Disaster (BBC4, Sunday) was the lingering shot that showed golden heads of corn stirring gently in the breeze. It was captioned ‘Europe’. I cannot even begin to describe what a powerful effect this had on my subconscious. It was worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. Indeed, when I experimentally turned
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Are you Lush or are you Aldi? Me, I’m Aldi all the way. So much so that when someone — usually my daughter — tries to drag me anywhere near one of Lush’s painfully ubiquitous high street cosmetics shops, I respond a bit like the Antichrist does in the ‘it’s just a church, Damien’ scene
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Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to show their true colours: morris dancing has been made compulsory for every able-bodied male between the age of 30 and 85; in ruthlessly enforced union flag street parties, brown-skinned people are made to show their
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This is an extract from this week’s magazine, available from tomorrow Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to show their true colours: morris dancing has been made compulsory for every able-bodied male between the age of 30 and 85; in ruthlessly enforced
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God it’s nauseating when an exact university contemporary of yours turns out to have become a hugely successful investor with a fund worth many millions. The bit during our meeting where I most wanted to throw up my ravioli was when this fellow — Guy Spier his name is; read PPE at Brasenose with my old
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There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.(Thucydides, 5th century BC) I love that quote, inscribed on the walls of the Imperial War Museum, because it tells you so much both about the reason wars happen and about
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Did you know that 2014 was the hottest year ever recorded in the entire history of the world? Probably you did because it’s been all over the papers. Not only that but President Obama slipped it into his State of the Union address and the president of the World Bank quoted it at Davos and
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Probably the two greatest advances in western culture in my lifetime have been the Sopranos-style epic serial drama and the advent of TV on demand and/or the DVD box set. I don’t think I’m saying anything weird or contentious — or indeed original — here. For example, I’m writing these words at the end of
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Reading Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, as I have recently, you cannot help but be struck by what a perfectly idyllic place rural England must have been (at least for a young man of independent means) in the run-up to the first world war. Sassoon wrote it, of course, in middle age after he’d served
