When I am King
James Delingpole
AChurch of England official has issued an apology to the descendants of Charles Darwin for the Church’s ‘anti-evolutionary’ fervour towards his Origin of the Species.
I wonder if in about 150 years’ time the BBC — presuming it still exists which I won’t let it do, I promise, once I’ve become your emperor — will make similar amends for having been wrong about absolutely everything from Israel, Europe, Islamism and multiculturalism to women, children, animals and, above all, global warming.
‘God, what a bunch of complete and utter ****ers we all were,’ their apology could say as it floats in shimmery holographic form over icy London streets dominated by minarets, wind turbines and huge packs of semi-domesticated polar bears. ‘We could have contributed something useful or interesting to the climate-change debate. Instead we gave you Earth: The Climate Wars (BBC 2, Sunday).
None of you will have seen it because you’ll have been watching Tess on BBC1, either going, ‘Phwooar, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that stuck on my relentlessly turning tragic wheel,’ if you’re a man, or ‘hurry up and die, bitch!’, if you’re a woman. So what, fortunately you’ll have been spared some rather dreary propaganda for the anthropogenic global-warming lobby, funded by you the licence-fee payer, and masqueradering with typically BBC disingenuousness as objective truth only reached after much soul-searching, research and hard thinking.
It’s the last part I objected to most. Every five minutes we had to have shots of presenter Dr Iain Stewart pulling faces and staring contemplatively at old news footage and scratching his chin. This demonstrated he was not just some eco-nutter pursuing an agenda but an ordinary bloke who could definitely be trusted because he was a proper, actual scientist — a doctor of geology at Plymouth University, no less.
But I’ve done TV myself and I know how these things work. Right from the commissioning stage — especially if, as here, it’s three hours’ worth of expensive prime-time — you know exactly which way your programme’s going to go. But you’re told to hide this as much as possible because TV execs have this obsession with perceived balance and with the idea of documentaries being a ‘journey’.
Stewart’s conclusion by the end of episode two was that the debate on global warming is over, GW is mostly our fault, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a nutcase on the extreme fringes, probably in the pay of Big Oil. This is what Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth. In fact, it’s what the green lobby always says, because it’s much easier to win an argument by closing down the debate than by engaging with your opponents’ objections, point by awkward point. But is it actually true?
Well no. I could point you towards hundreds of scientists — many in even greater positions of eminence than Plymouth Uni’s geology department — who still disagree quite vehemently with this thesis and have much solid evidence to back it up. Stewart is perfectly entitled to disagree with them, but not, I think, at our expense, while posing as an impartial seeker of truth on a channel which, regrettably, still has a reputation for reliability and authority.
Mind you, when as your emperor I do get round to torching the BBC (and slaughtering everyone) it means we shall have to learn to live without great programmes like Amazon (BBC 2, Monday) with Bruce Parry. This week, our delightful, smiley, native-loving hero was in coca country, chewing the leaves but not — unusually for him — doing the proper drug, perhaps because he’d seen how utterly disgusting the refinement process is (benzine, chlorine, you name it). That’s the last time you’ll catch me sticking that muck up my nose. Unless you’re offering and its really good pure base smuggled back in someone’s beehive hairstyle, say, but not, please up their bottom.
Finally Tess of the d’Urbervilles (BBC1, Sunday). My wife hates Hardy so much I was forced to watch it on my own, which was maybe for the best. When the Polanski version came out with Nastassja Kinski, my schoolmate Simon Nelson and I rechristened it ‘Toss’, and I have to say the Tess in this version, Gemma Arterton, is no less inspirational.
In all the pre-publicity, the BBC’s new serialisation has been bigged up as ‘rock’n’roll’ Tess and the antidote to Polanski’s Laura Ashley version. This is nonsense. It’s just beautifully cast, sensitively shot, intelligently scripted (by David Nicholls), not-mucked-about-with Tess. God, I hate watching it though. Has a novelist ever used his creation more cruelly? There’s never a moment where poor Tess has the slightest chance of escaping her tragic fate. She has to go to court favour with the d’Urbervilles because of the accident with the horse; she has to go with Alec on the ride where he rapes her because otherwise she’d have been torn to bits by the drunken harridans who are jealous of her beauty; and just when she might have been redeemed she ends up with the most vicious prig — Angel Clare — on the planet. My wife thinks it’s all too implausible. Me, I think Hardy’s the one writer who tells it like it really is. ❑
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