NetFlix – Page 2 – Delingpole World

Stop Whatever You’re Doing and Watch Suburra

I know I keep saying that in Decline of the West terms we’re all currently living in Rome, circa 400 AD. But now, on TV, there is actual proof of this in the form of a truly appalling reality series called Bromans (ITV2, Thursdays).

Bromans is like a cross between Love Island and Carry On Cleo, so shamelessly low, tacky and brain-dead that it makes Geordie Shore look like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Basically, a bunch of ridiculously buff lads strip off and participate in crap gladiatorial contests in which no one dies (thus entirely defeating the object), while their hot blonde girlfriends smoulder pointlessly in scanty outfits, and say stupid things like ‘I’ve gone 2,000 years back. I’ve never lived that far back.’ Then they have a typical cocktail party, just like used to happen in Imperial Rome, and — we are led to assume — shag one another.

What I like best about Bromans is its rugged integrity. There’s none of that relentless PC hectoring that Rod Liddle was rightly bemoaning the other day: it’s probably the most accurate reflection anywhere on TV of what young men and women are still really like; and because it’s all done ironically, clumsily and on the cheap it slips under the Guardianista outrage police’s radar.

Obviously, though, I’m not suggesting you should waste time watching it. Instead, what you need is your new favourite Netflix series, Suburra.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Netflix’s ‘Magic School Bus’ Warns Kids ‘Use Green Energy or a Monster Will Eat you’

Use alternative “clean” energy or a hideous monster will eat you. This is the heartwarming green message aimed at winning the hearts and minds of young children in the animated Netflix series The Magic School Bus Rides Again.

According to Newsbusters:

Episode 12, “Monster Power,” teaches kids that a monster will eat them if they don’t use alternative clean energy sources. Albert, one of the students, has seen a movie in which the evil monster loves pollution and is “coming for us next for what we’ve done to this planet!” With the class camping in the woods, Miss Frizzle and the other students help him come up with clean energy alternatives (wind, water, etc) so they won’t be eaten.

The series’ makers, Scholastic, have taken their cue from Soviet-era propaganda cartoons demonstrating the evils of capitalism through the medium of avant-garde animation. And also, probably from the Jesuits’ Ignatius Loyola who supposedly said: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

Actually, though, the “use clean energy or die” episode is by no means the worst one.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Unlike Father, Unlike Son: The Whitehalls’ Double Act

One’s crabby and conservative, while the other is genial and impeccably PC. No wonder Jack and his dad Michael make such compelling TV.

The Whitehalls

‘Oh really I don’t mind. Whatever you want to pay me. I just want to do this job and I’m really looking forward it. How much were you thinking?’ says Michael Whitehall in an unctuous, good-natured, amenable voice. Then, in an instant, having been told the imaginary amount, he turns savagely nasty and bangs his fist on the table. ‘No fucking way are you paying me so little…’

Watching Michael Whitehall jokingly re-enact how he negotiated his fee for his son’s new Netflix series, Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father, three things become abundantly clear.

First, that he must have been a brilliantly effective agent (shrewd, tough, terrifying) during his previous career, when he represented such stars as Kenneth More, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench and (Jack’s godfather) Richard Griffiths.

Second, that he really should have been on stage or screen himself much earlier (he became a star only in his early seventies), because his acting skills, timing and delivery are immaculate. (He’ll hate the comparison, but I was oddly reminded of the scene where Gollum’s good and evil sides have an argument in Lord of the Rings.)

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Netflix Is Great Because (Unlike the BBC) It Doesn’t Ram Its Politics Down Your Throat

Its documentary Daughters of Destiny, about a remarkable free school for India’s untouchables, doesn’t steer you to any conclusions but lets you think for yourself.

All this week I have been trying, with considerable success, to avoid being bludgeoned by TV programmes telling me in various sensitive and imaginative ways just how brilliant, heroic and historically maligned homosexual men are. I achieved this by sticking to Netflix.

One of the great things about Netflix (whose annual subscription costs just half the BBC licence fee, by the way) is that though it’s probably run by lefties it doesn’t try to ram its politics down your throat. Maybe this is one reason why its 100 million-plus subscribers are so much less resentful than BBC viewers: they’re being offered choice, variety, entertainment — not worthiness, race, gender quotas and compulsory indoctrination.

This week Netflix helped me catch up — under Girl’s instruction — with an addictively trashy series from 2012 about spoilt rich kids in New York called Gossip Girl; and also with a gripping documentary series — Captive — about how horrible it is being taken hostage. Best of all, though, was Daughters of Destiny — a four-part series telling the delightful true story of the Shanti Bhavan school in India’s Tamil Nadu province.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Nostalgic, Compulsive, Edge-of-Seat Entertainment: Netflix’s Stranger Things Reviewed

Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of the best TV these days, it’s on Netflix, which I highly recommend so long as you can cope with the technical complexities of getting it to appear on your screen in the first place.

Yeah, I know, all you bastard millennial types sneering at Granddad for his inability to do stuff that’s like so totally easy and obvious. But if like me you grew up in an age when there were just three channels and an on/off button, it’s a bloody nightmare grappling with this future where there’s an Amazon Fire TV Stick dangling from the back of your television and a SkyBox with a controller whose keys you can’t read any more because the letters have been rubbed off and a ‘source’ button you have to press on a different controller that doesn’t always work and a Scart lead you variously have to plug into your PlayStation or your laptop depending on some complicated shit I really don’t want to discuss any further because just thinking about it makes me want to kill myself.

If any of that strikes a chord, then you might be the right generation for Stranger Things, which, essentially, is a mash-up of everything that was wonderful about Eighties pop culture, lovingly recreated by screenwriting twins the Duffer brothers who (born 1984) are far too young to have experienced it first time round. Most especially, it’s a homage to the small-town America of the ET era. Instead of an alien — I’ll try to keep plot spoilers to a minimum, but it may be hard given that I’ve seen the whole of season one — the extraterrestrial role is played by a mysterious, cropheaded girl called Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) with spectacular telekinetic powers and some link to the sinister government research centre on the edge of town, where bad things seem to be happening.

The heroes are a perfectly cast gang of four cute, slightly nerdy, beguilingly odd-looking boys who play Dungeons and Dragons, roam free in the woods on bikes (like kids used to do before parents got paranoid) and, conveniently for plot purposes given that this predates mobile phones, communicate with walkie-talkies. In episode one, one of them goes missing and the rest of the season follows their efforts to find him.

But, of course, with eight hours’ worth of series you can achieve a lot more than you could in a movie. So as well as the boys’ perspective, you get that of the older, pretty teenage sister with her tangled romances, the burnt-out, chain-smoking small-town cop (brilliantly played by David Harbour), the nervy, anxious, desperate Mom (Winona Ryder) with her wacko conspiracy theories, and the spooky, ruthless government agents led by chilling, white-haired Matthew Modine.

There’s a delightful sense of texture, mood and place.

Read the rest at the Spectator.