Television
Foreign affairs
James Delingpole
Quite possibly I am the only person in the whole of Britain not to have seen Survivor. This is because I have been in Botswana, researching the heavyweight political piece that will finally establish me as a serious journalist and cause newspaper editors all over London to shout, 'Quick. Get onto the contractual lawyers. We must pay this man lots of money before our rivals do.' Maybe.
One thing I forgot to do, though, was to tell darling Liz who edits this column that I'd be going. I only remembered just now when I got back from the airport — Tuesday a.m., my absolute latest deadline — which didn't leave her any time to get Marcus Berlunann to fill in for me, not that he needs the money, if we are to believe that piece he did for the Telegraph entitled something like 'Ha ha piss off journalism, you're rubbish and I don't need you any more because I'm going to make millions from my screenplay instead.'
'But don't worry,' I said to Liz, 'even though I've been on the plane for 12 hours and I'm incredibly knackered and I haven't seen any English TV, I'll just cobble you something together based vaguely on the drivel I saw on cable in Gaborone, shall I?' Liz said that that would do nicely.
OK, so here's what I saw on TV in my hotel room in the Gaborone Sun in Botswana. Two good-looking black South African sportsmen, cricketers maybe, fielding phone-in questions from white-sounding people mainly in Johannesberg; some sort of Le Mans-ish motorsport; more cricket; some very bad music videos indicative of the fact that, despite a brief burst of trendiness when it stopped being run by Dutch Calvinists, South Africa is still stuck pretty much in the pop cultural dark ages; a smiley black man and a smiley blonde girl exploring Lesotho's tourist opportunities on big, chunky motorbikes; Sky News footage of John Prescott thumping that bloke who threw eggs at him.
The Prescott footage was initially quite exciting. But elation soon turned to monumental depression as I realised that this would be a surefire vote-winner among the disenchanted Old Labour faithful. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing hadn't been carefully choreographed by Alastair Campbell. It also reminded me that there was an election on, so I vowed not to watch any more Sky News lest I defeat one of the main objects of not being in Britain for a week.
My resolve held out quite well thanks to the straight-to-video distraction of some sort of Seven Samurai remake starring Antonio Banderas and (I think) the Scottish actor last seen buggering Ferdy in the final episode of This Lift, about a group of surprisingly wussie vikings who help the nice, put-upon villagers defeat the evil hordes of wolfskin-wearing horsemen. Sadly, I missed the first bit in which, presumably, we would have been encouraged to develop our hatred of these wolf people. So when they got wiped out I felt slightly sorry for them.
The following night, I was rescued from election/boring SA sport hell by a film called Stigmata in which an American girl whose mother has given her the rosary which once belonged to a dead Padre Piotype priest suddenly starts bleeding from her wrists etc. It started out quite promisingly with some spooky Omen meets The Exorcist atmospherics. But when the stigmata started trying to drag the girl underneath her bathwater and drown her, I just couldn't take the film seriously. I mean, stigmata — they're supposed to be nice, friendly, saintly things, aren't they?
Still, the fact that I got that far into the movie shows how desperate I was. No doubt if you work for Bain or Intactaflow (or whatever Andersens call themselves these days) you get used to this lonelybloke-in-soulless-international-hotel-gagging-for-any-form-of-distraction-no-matterhow-cheap-or-demeaning scenario. But for me it was a revelation. It really is amazing what unutterable rubbish you'll watch to pass the time in these situations.
Nonetheless, just occasionally, you can end up learning something useful. Stuck in Johannesburg a couple of years back, I remember sitting through a documentary which — get this — left me with a detailed understanding of the origins of the tribal conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi. And in Gaborone, II learned something similarly astonishing (though of slightly less geopolitical import): that Giles Brandreth is not a prat.
I discovered this after, accidentally flicking back to Sky News, I saw him interview
ing Martin Bell. Bell was trying to make Out that the white suit he insists on wearing (despite the massive expense and inconvenience it must cause him in dry-cleaning bills, generally being extra careful when eating curries, spaghetti etc.) was not a gimmick or a trademark. And Brandreth, politely, amused but with a steely firmness which had me going 'Yo! Giles! Way to go!', assured him that it was every bit as much a gimmick and a trademark as the teddy-bear jumpers he himself used to wear in his days as an MP. There were two things that pleased me here. First, Brandreth's delicious cynicism in having been prepared to dress up as a complete buffoon purely in order to get voter recognition. Second, the way he so expertly skewered Bell's pompous and absurd attempts to claim that being a bluff, no-nonsense people's ex-war correspondent he was somehow above the mire of traditional politics.
Um. Will this do, Liz?
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