James Delingpole
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Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s the Foreign Office’s job to keep us out of war at all costs, thus saving us blood and treasure. And, yes, I appreciate that Britain is no longer the force it was in the world, not after Suez, still less after the previous Heath administration begged and bribed and wormtongued our disastrous entry into the EEC.
Even so, you looked at the footage of Thatcher, then you looked at the footage of David Miliband pretending to be a big grown-up Foreign Secretary and bleating about how ‘we’ve got to be a country that approaches things in a serious way’, and you couldn’t help thinking, ‘Jesus! How did we fall so far so quickly?’
The programme, being the BBC, I suppose, was infected by this same self-hating, Milibandian malaise. Much surprise was expressed by the voiceover that we still have a ‘seat at the top table’ in international negotiations (as if, somehow, we were already 70th rather than our current — though not for long, eh, George? — 7th in the world economic league tables); the imperial grandeur of Palmerston’s Foreign Office building was repeatedly invoked not in pride but out of apparent embarrassment that the loser nation we are today could ever have had such an inflated idea of its own self-worth.
In the old days, we learnt, the Foreign Office’s mandarins were prone to the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’ — the mistaken assumption that, just because they thought with the nice sophistication of chaps who’d been to Winchester, so the thugs they were negotiating with did, too. That’s why top-notch foreign secretaries like Margaret Beckett and David Miliband were brought in: to get rid of all that clever, educated nonsense and replace it with something more forward-looking and modern and relevant. Apparently, the first thing Miliband did on taking office was to send out a pack to all our embassies containing a booklet of stickers of uplifting messages (‘Well done!’ ‘Good job!’ ‘You’re a star!’) with which to encourage staff. What a pity General Gordon didn’t have such resources available at Khartoum. It might have made all the difference.
Skippy: Australia’s First Superstar (BBC4, Tuesday) was more unfeasibly fascinating than a documentary about a rubbishy late-Sixties kids TV series about an implausibly intelligent marsupial has any right to be.
Unlike dolphins — the series was, of course, an Aussie rip-off of Flipper — kangaroos are quite incredibly thick. Even dumber than sheep, according to a kangaroo expert on the programme, and certainly quite incapable of being trained. To get round this problem, Skippy was kept in a hessian sack until she was needed. Then, dazed and confused, she (you can tell because only females have pouches) would be released in front of the camera, and encouraged to look in the right direction by members of the crew noisily banging pots and pans off-camera. Often Skippy would bounce off never to be seen again, so lots of extra Skippies had to be kept in sacks just in case.
The clicking noise Skippy used to communicate was a complete fabrication: kangaroos don’t make this noise in real life. Nor do they move their mouth in talking movements: to do that, the crew fed the kangaroos rubber bands. All the clever gestures — picking up things, playing the drums, calling for help on the radio — were, of course, done by humans standing off-camera, using a pair of dead kangaroo’s hands.
By some miracle, it worked. I loved it as a child. So, probably, did you. The 91 episodes filmed over two years were seen in 128 countries, though not in Sweden. The Swedes insisted that it was quite inappropriate that children should be shown animals doing things they couldn’t do in real life.
Final treat of the week was historian Lisa Hilton in Vampires: Why They Bite (BBC3, Monday) confirming something I have long suspected about my favourite evil creatures: that they have been slowly transformed from terrifying Satanic spawn into slushy fantasy fodder for pubescent girls. It’s SO wrong. One of things that made me the man I am today was being scared witless as a child by James Mason saying ‘the Master wants you!’ in Salem’s Lot. Stephanie Meyer, I hate you.
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