TV
James Delingpole cringes at London Spy’s gay sex scenes
The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so…
Not all crap TV is all that crap
Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of…
The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones
The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact,…
Hunted blows a fresh breeze through the stale world of reality TV
Television used to employ entertainers to entertain the public. Back then you could count the channels on the fingers of…
Was BBC1’s Rooney show more scripted reality than documentary?
Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the…
James Delingpole discovers the fons et origo of indie music
I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along…
ITV’s Midwinter of the Spirit is a satisfying example of Middle-England Gothic
For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’…
An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda - which is why the luvvies love it
What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…
Guns, tools and toffee apples - but no nudity: BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover reviewed
It’s hard to know whether the actor James Norton was being naive or disingenuous when he claimed in publicity interviews…
Finally James Delingpole gets why women are so angry
Finally I realise why women are so pissed off. It all goes back to the first codified laws — circa…
How many royal cliches can you fit into a single Channel 4 documentary?
In 2011, the Daily Mail carried a long story about how the Queen’s cousin Prince William of Gloucester, who died…
All that postwar anxiety about being vaporised by a nuclear bomb was a complete waste of emotion
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being…
Bohemian conformity can be just as suffocating as any other type: BBC1’s Life in Squares reviewed
On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers,…
Lucy Worsley reveals - yet again - that there’s more to the WI than jam and Jerusalem
Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles…
A documentary that ought to rank with the footage of British troops liberating Belsen
So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has…
As blatant rip-offs go, this one is shaping up nicely: Odyssey, BBC2, reviewed
This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob…
James Delingpole remembers why he never watched TFI Friday - because it's dreadful
‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday.…
Heroically unoriginal: Channel 4’s Humans reviewed
You’d think scientists might have realised by now that creating a race of super-robots is about as wise as opening…
BBC2’s Napoleon reviewed: does Andrew Roberts’s pet Frog need rehabilitating?
I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south…
Imagine if Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier: ITV’s Vicious reviewed
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
BBC2's Armada has something for everybody - including three yummy female historians
It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps…
A bit silly: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reviewed
BBC One’s 2015 choice of Sunday-night drama series is beginning to resemble the career of the kind of Hollywood actor…
Benefits Street reviewed: if anyone’s being exploited, it’s the taxpayers, says James Delingpole
My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated…
Don’t believe Orson Welles, says his biographer Simon Callow — especially when he calls himself a failure
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he…
Channel 4’s No Offence reviewed: ‘hugely entertaining and wildly unconvincing’
With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected…
