If only the Tories understood economics
‘I don’t think I’m quite as Austrian as you are,’ a Tory minister said to me the other day. And…
No pain, no gain
The best episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm are the ones that make you want to hide behind the sofa, cover…
Accept this as the new normal? Never
Not long after the Parsons Green Tube bombing, another of those viral, defiant-in-the-face-of-terror cartoons started doing the rounds. It was…
Rockies horror show
Tin Star, the latest Sky Atlantic drama, has a comfortingly familiar premise: Jim Worth (Tim Roth), an ex-detective from London…
The green giant
Environmentalism has gone too far; renewable energy is a disaster; scares about pesticides and chemicals are horribly overdone; no, the…
Straight to hell
No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it…
The heartbreaking story of Pecky, a young green woodpecker
Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green…
Norway’s noir
Valkyrien (C4, Sunday) is the hot new Scandi-noir series, which is being billed as Norway’s answer to Breaking Bad. In…
Dave’s kept his head down, so let him chillax
David Cameron was in the news again this week after being paid £1 million a minute to give a speech…
In praise of Netflix
All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in…
No true Tory can support this gender idiocy
I’ve had it with the Conservatives. For me, and I know I’m not the only one, the final straw was…
Dethroned by feminism
I’m a bit worried about Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic). Not seriously worried: there’s too much money invested, too much…
Let’s keep up the Moggmentum
‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns…
Cathar country
I once spent three months living in the Languedoc, writing my first novel. The highlight was the few days I…
In praise of braindead filth
Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…
The Bank of England is enslaved by groupthink
I do find it odd that I’m so often having to write about the science of global warming, species extinction…
Trouble in paradise
‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…
I don’t blame millennials for voting for Corbyn
On the morning after the election I was drinking coffee with one of my heroes, Sir Roger Scruton. We talked…
How the west coast was won
There’s an incredibly addictive old iPhone game called Doodle God where you effectively invent civilisation from scratch by combining basic…
Do penises cause climate change? Discuss
‘Why not think about Gender Studies?’ asked an advertorial aimed at prospective students in the newspaper I was reading. Actually,…
The great rock’n’roll swindles
Birds have been giving me a lot of grief of late. There’s Tappy — the blue tit who has built…
We owe it to hunt staff to repeal the ban
Though I don’t think much of Theresa May’s paternalistic soft-left politics, I do like her no-nonsense style. That Q&A she…
Serial offenders
Since completing season two of the brilliant Narcos, I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a replacement serial drama that is more…
Thanks, Jamie Oliver – you’ve stolen my childhood
Whenever I want to travel back in time to my 1970s childhood, all I need is a glass of Lucozade.…
The real deal
The other day I had a very dispiriting conversation with a TV industry insider. It turns out that everything you…
