When Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, was granted a sneak preview of the new PlayStation 4 at the BAFTA headquarters, his remarks will have resonated with men up and down the land.

“It’s very addictive,” he said. “I’d like to get one but I’m not sure how my wife would feel about it.” He later described himself as an “enthusiastic but quite useless gamer”. (Perhaps it’s the lack of practice.)

Now, I don’t mean to fuel the cliché. Many women are keen gamers, of course, and many men are not. But the paradigm of a husband secretly wishing he could be allowed free rein on the console, only to be thwarted by his no-nonsense wife, is one that will strike a chord in many households.

Including, to some extent, my own… Continue reading on the Telegraph website

At about this time of year, the reports will start coming in about how divorce levels soar over Christmas.

There can be no doubt about it: for a certain proportion of families in Britain, the only thing that maintains a façade of coherence is the fact that they manage to avoid spending time together. For them, Christmas ruins everything.

I’m not talking about those people, just so you know. Moving on.

Last week, a colleague of mine said that this year she was intending to go French. (She had interviewed a Frenchman, you see.)

Apparently, our Gallic cousins have an obscenely extended Christmas meal, in which each course can take an hour, a copious quantity of wine is knocked back, and the kids can come and go as they please.

Much better, she thought, than the high-octane burst of face-stuffing that defines a British Christmas meal, with the children being forced to sit up straight and eat their Brussels sprouts, poor dears.

Thus, my colleague is intending to abandon the formal British Christmas meal this year in favour of the more enlightened, Francophone approach.

To which I say: bah bloody humbug. There is just no point tinkering with Christmas. The festive period is fantastic, and I look forward to it every year. Without the awful aspects, it just wouldn’t be as good.

As Richard Nixon said: “Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” And he should know… Continue reading on the Telegraph website

I really didn’t want to like episode one of Backchat (BBC Three). My feeling was that we’d been fed too much hype already: that upstart Jack Whitehall and his grumpy father Michael. Their book, Him & Me; their countless joint interviews. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hadn’t even seen it, and I felt like I’d seen it all before.

But the programme was actually really funny. Barring the occasional rehashed joke, it was fresh and intelligent and, most of all, like an experiment that was just a hair’s breadth from going wrong. Which was all confected, of course. But which made, I’m reluctant to admit, compelling and entertaining viewing.

The interesting thing about it was that by rights the format shouldn’t have worked. You had Whitehall the younger behind a desk, University Challenge style, facing a sofa on which sat his guests (in this case the unlikely duo, Jeremy Paxman and the hardman cockney actor Danny Dyer). And on stage left you had Whitehall the elder, seated in a leather armchair and glowering over his spectacles.

As Jack conducted the interview, his father would occasionally butt in with sardonic remarks, and Jack would come over all embarrassed. Doesn’t sound very good, does it? But it was. Continue reading on the Telegraph website

Now, this isn’t a sentence one would expect to write very often in one’s career. But I bet Victorian zoos were good.

That’s where Timeshift: A Day at the Zoo (BBC Four) started its retrospective of the relationship between the British and our zoos. And it was pretty beguiling.

From its origins in Victorian Britain – and the first “scientific zoological garden” in Regent’s Park – to Gerald Durrell’s zoo in Jersey, this nostalgic documentary charted our love affair with the zoo. Wonderfully, it paid special attention to extraordinary animals that have captured the nation’s affections: Jumbo the preternaturally enormous Victorian elephant, and Alfred the gorilla, who became a symbol of Bristol’s wartime spirit. When he died, a nation mourned.

Yes, Victorian zoos. What fun! By the time modern kids see a lion in real life, they’ve already been pumped full of so much CGI that it’s an anti-climax. And when they are taken to the aviary, the only thing they’re interested in is which of the birds are angry.

But when the Victorians saw an animal, they saw an animal. You know? Continue reading on the Telegraph website

Yesterday, I met a chap called Matt Baxter. He’s an illustrator who runs his own design company and draws cartoons in the evenings and on weekends. The highlight of his working week, he told me, was drawing a comic strip for a children’s magazine called Phoenix. Apparently, this is the only comic available for children that is not connected to a television programme or commercial enterprise. The only one.

There are certain moments when it is driven home that the world has changed. This was certainly one of them. In my day – I was a sucker for comics – there was a plethora of the things in the newsagent’s each week. Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper; Commando, Roy of the Rovers; even something called Bog Paper (about which the less said the better).

Now, it seems, the medium has been comprehensively hijacked by big corporations who have taken children’s enthusiasm for this art form – and it is an art form – and turned it into an “income stream generator”, or some such gobbledegook. Sad.

I am not, I hasten to add, in any way squeamish about free market capitalism. There are many in Britain who seem to think that “profit” is a dirty word, and that “big business” is a byword for the devil incarnate. I am not one of them.

For these people are obviously wrong. In the fight between capitalism and communism, there has only been one winner. Is capitalism flawed? Yes, it is. Is it unfair at times? Of course. But there simply is no realistic alternative. The people who gripe against corporate Britain are doing so from the comfort of eternal opposition, whatever Russell Brand may say… Continue reading on the Telegraph website