James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
I do hope it’s a terrible winter this year: a total bastard where everyone’s snowed into their drives and those few who do manage to escape end up being slewed across the road or filmed in tragic tailbacks by drones for BBC news bulletins or stuck in ditches and having to tramp miles across icy
Apart from the next Game of Thrones, there’s nothing I’ve been looking forward to quite as much as The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime). I like Clarkson, Hammond and May, I like banter, I like political incorrectness, I like exotic scenery, I like cars, I like puerile jokes and I liked Top Gear. Take the same
So I made £250 betting on Trump to win the presidency. It would have been more, except that every time I got close to topping up my stake, this boring, mimsy, responsible voice in my head kept saying: ‘Now, now James. Don’t be silly. All your sensible friends who know much, much more than you
Everyone has a special place in their heart for the late Leonard Cohen – from his 80-something contemporaries to middle-aged musos to teenage girls. The last – quite unusual for an artiste of Cohen’s generation, especially one so apparently glum, uncommercial and downbeat – is largely thanks to his composition ‘Hallelujah’, which was what Alexandra Burke
Nairobi. February 1952. Laughing children brandishing sticks are driving an indignant bustle of ostriches up a rudimentary 1950s-Africa semi-bush runway towards the camera, when — WHOOSH! — right over their heads skims the exact BOAC aircraft in which the actual soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth flew to Kenya, as painstakingly rebuilt by the world’s top aircraft restorers
I’ve now just about reached that delightful stage in life where you’re no longer exposed to the horrors of other people’s children. This is because my friends’ offspring are mostly either safely away at university or virtually invisible in some far-off room staring at a screen, appearing only briefly to grunt some cursory greeting as
‘Adam Curtis believed that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence…’ You really must watch Ben Woodhams’s brilliant 2011 Adam Curtis-pastiche mini-documentary The Loving Trap, which you’ll find on
A few columns ago, I told the mortifying story of how I totally died at the Oxford Union. Today I’m going to tell you how I managed to avoid the same fate on a more recent trip to the Cambridge Union, where I spoke in a debate and opposed the motion: ‘This house would open
The brilliant thing about Hong Kong is that you don’t have to worry for a second about all the culture you’re missing. That’s because there’s absolutely nothing to do there except shop (I got a seriously nice bespoke dinner jacket for just £400 from Lafarfalla Tailor) drink and, most importantly, eat. Oh all right, so
The other day James Lovelock, the sprightly 97-year-old inventor of Gaia theory, told a mildly surprised Guardian interviewer that he wasn’t remotely worried about climate change any more. A far more plausible threat, he explained, were all the killer robots that would soon emerge and find no use for us inconvenient humans. Apparently this is
What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably riveting Philip Hammond speech, and head instead for the fringe event run by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor David Myddelton and Charles Moore. I can’t speak for my performance (modesty forbids me) but my
What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably riveting Philip Hammond speech, and head instead for the fringe event run by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor David Myddelton and Charles Moore. I can’t speak for my performance (modesty forbids me) but my
Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of the best TV these days, it’s on Netflix, which I highly recommend so long as you can cope with the technical complexities of getting it to appear on your screen in the first place. Yeah,
Since he moved to Hong Kong three years ago, the Rat’s Cantonese has been coming on apace. This has rather less to do with his language skills — never that much in evidence on his school reports — than it does with the fact that my stepson works in what is still, despite the mainland
Since he moved to Hong Kong three years ago, the Rat’s Cantonese has been coming on apace. This has rather less to do with his language skills — never that much in evidence on his school reports — than it does with the fact that my stepson works in what is still, despite the mainland
Did you know that Queen Victoria might never have married Prince Albert had it not been for an amazing stroke of luck on a woodland walk in Windsor Great Park, involving the queen’s beloved spaniel Dash. Dash, as good fortune would have it, managed to break his leg on a handy knife that someone had
I’ve just learned by heart another poem — my first in nearly 30 years. The one I chose was A.E. Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge’, not for any special reason other than that it’s part of the canon and that it happened to be in an anthology conveniently to hand by the bath when I decided
I think I might be turning into Alf Garnett. When I was growing up I saw him as an obnoxious, cantankerous, ranting old git that my grandparents’ generation seemed to find funny but who left me cold. Now I’m beginning to identify with him as an unfairly maligned and surprisingly youthful fount of wisdom whose
Did you see that odd photo of George Osborne looking shifty, queuing up in the Vietnamese jungle for the chance to fire an M60 machine gun? I found it interesting for a number of reasons. One, obviously, is that it’s probably the first time in five years Osborne hasn’t been pictured wearing a hard hat
You know when late summer has arrived because conkers are starting to form on the horse chestnuts, your eagerness to get the kids back to school has reached fever pitch, and another season of The Great British Bake Off (BBC1, Wednesdays) has begun. If it feels like there has never, ever been a time when
