His dark materials | 16 August 2018

Apparently there’s a new ‘character’ on University Challenge. I wouldn’t know. Last year, I vowed never again to raise my blood pressure by exposing myself to its new, gender-balanced questions: ‘Your starter for ten: which composer of Serenade for My Cat, rated by her father as the equal of Bach’s Goldberg Variations…’ Don’t know. Don’t care. You bastards ruined it, just like you ruined Sanpellegrino and Lucozade.

Same applies, now I think about it, to all the other programmes on the BBC. I never watch anything on it for pleasure these days: only out of duty — to see what the enemy is thinking — and also so I can keep up to date my list of all the people I’m going to have exiled to bare rocks in the Outer Hebrides when I’m king. It’s the kindest thing. They can live on puffins and inbred Soay sheep and discover their inner selves.

Two people I’d dispatch there immediately are Selina Scott and Stephanie Beacham. Yes, I thought they were innocent too — one that fragrant newsreader from the 1980s, the other the fragrant star of Tenko and Dynasty. But no — thanks to The Real Marigold Hotel (the BBC’s fake, patronising I’m A Celebrity for oldsters you’re mildly tickled to learn aren’t dead yet) — we learn that they are both slightly prickly, precious luvvies who can’t look at an Indian street scene without gushing about its ‘vibrancy’ and ‘diversity’. Such crimes cannot go unpunished.

So where do you go instead? Well, Netflix is the obvious place. This week, I’ve been trying out its answer to Louis Theroux — an amiable Kiwi called David Farrier who has the same-shaped glasses and the same insinuating manner but happily none of that weapons-grade cockiness they teach you at Westminster.