James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
To promote his new drama series about Aids in the early 1980s, Russell T. Davies insisted in an interview that gay characters should be played only by actors who are actually gay. This was maddening for a number of reasons, starting with blatant hypocrisy. One of the things that made Davies’s Queer As Folk so
‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve
Since freedom is in short supply right now, there’s much to be said for spending a nostalgic evening recalling the thrill of cutting loose and doing whatever you damn well please. So here are seven classic movies that take freedom to the extreme: Into the Wild (2007, Amazon Prime) Every so often, I like to picture myself in
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net — but I still think it most unlikely that I shall stick it through to the final episode. It’s not the style that’s wrong but the subject matter: do we really want to spend eight hours
Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse than to have been a Roman legionnaire in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9 AD. It was the Romans’ Isandlwana — a devastating defeat inflicted by native forces on what was
Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling about the implausible and anachronistic diversity casting. Mangrove was the West Indian-owned restaurant in Notting Hill which, in 1970, became the subject for a landmark Old Bailey trial involving nine of its habitués on trumped-up
My favourite The Crown blooper so far was the one recently spotted by a Telegraph reader: ‘As Head of the Armed Forces and Colonel-in-Chief of four Scottish regiments, the Queen would not choose The Atholl Highlanders with which to pipe her guests into dinner […] It is inconceivable that the Queen’s Piper would play any
‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the impending royal wedding between her nephew Charles and a pretty but gauche young thing called Lady Diana Spencer. Spoiler alert: none of the family will listen. Yes, The Crown is back on Netflix for its
Thank you, Spitting Image, for the nostalgia trip! Your new series on BritBox has rekindled with almost Proustian fidelity those feelings I used to get every single time I watched the show back in my lost 1980s youth: the bathos; the disappointment; the frustration; the despair; the perpetual astonishment that puppet caricatures full of such
If you love Fauda — and of course you do — you’re in for a long wait for season four, which isn’t due to arrive on Netflix till 2022. That’s why I had such high hopes for Tehran, which is written by one of Fauda’s co-authors Moshe Zonder. What, after all, could there possibly be
There’s a delicious scene in the new season of Amazon’s superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys. The chief superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) is introduced by a minion to a potential new member of his elite superhero group, the Seven. Homelander watches this bright new talent performing wonders in a gym-style training zone: the young man is agile,
‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas — whereby to qualify for the Oscars your movie must have the correct quota of gay/ethnic minority/transgender/etc people. This, he argued, will lead to the kind of leaden, politicised, phoney art we associate with communist regimes
Few things better capture the crazed cognitive dissonance of our age than this: that while we cower behind masks for fear of a virus so harmless in most cases that you don’t even know you’ve got it, we watch shows like World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji and think: ‘That looks fun. Wouldn’t mind having a
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While the government’s U-turn on A-level and GCSE results has been widely welcomed, universities are still in a dire state – why? (00:55) Plus, has Boris Johnson got the right approach in his war on fat? (15:00) And finally, are illegal raves during the pandemic socially irresponsible, or just young people sticking it to The
Every time I read that Britain’s anti-coronavirus measures are being jeopardised by a ‘small minority of senseless individuals’ holding illegal raves, my heart soars. Maybe there’s hope for the youth after all! I’d been beginning to wonder. In my experience, kids of about university age have been priggish and obedient about the government’s rules during
‘By the way, my name is Max. I take care of them, which ain’t easy, because their hobby is murder.’ Back in the early 1980s, when everything was lovelier, we were all so innocent that our idea of a brilliant and original new detective formula went like this: they’re sleuths — but they’re also rich
Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre as some critics are saying — the only things left worth watching on the BBC will be old repeats and foreign buy-ins like The Last Wave. A bit like The Returned (Les Revenants), The Last
There’s a scene in the French espionage series The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA or MI6 —where one of the characters loses a limb while on active service. ‘Excellent,’ jokes the station boss on his return. ‘This will greatly improve our diversity quota for disabled employees.’ This is why I
Jaws, Amazon (To rent or buy) Nothing says ‘Murica’ quite like insisting the beaches stay open – killer shark or no – because it’s the 4th July weekend. It’s why – during his brief libertarian phase – Boris Johnson once declared that Larry Vaughn, the Mayor of Amity, was the movie’s true hero. Apart from
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On this week’s episode, former police officer Kevin Hurley reads his piece on how top police officers get disillusioned in the job; Alicia Munckton talks about the private-state divide in education during this lockdown; and James Delingpole reviews Alan Bennett’s new Talking Heads, and explains why he’s not a fan.
