Home from Afghanistan, to a swarm of unopened e-mails. But what’s this? “I am writing to you on behalf of ITV Productions to inquire about your potential interest and availability for the next series of the Bafta award-winning I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! . . . 2008 saw the likes of Martina Navratilova, George Takei, Robert Kilroy-Silk, Simon Webbe, Dani Behr and Esther Rantzen enter the jungle in one of the show’s most talked about series ... The British public votes to keep their favourite celebrity until we have a King or Queen of the Jungle ... Each of the cast members found the show to be a positive and life-changing experience . . .

“[ITV] are meeting with a variety of people to explore casting possibilities . . .”

Wow! I could be up there with Dani Behr, Esther Rantzen and Robert Kilroy-Silk. But then again . . .

Thin and overblown

It’s a great Buxton Festival again this year, but we approached the (French) Edwardian André Messager’s comic operetta Véronique last Saturday night in hopes more of entertainment than musical profundity. So it proved. It was fun. It was jolly. It was sparklingly produced, acted, accompanied and sung. And it was total pap. “I can’t but feel,” my companion, a devoted Wagnerian, said to me as we left Buxton’s magical opera house, “that after that, the First World War was inevitable.”

On Monday night my loyal secretary, Mrs Wright, and I were at the South Bank in London to see a revival of J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways, set in the aftermath of the First World War. This production was touched by genius. The special effects were riveting. On the stage of the Lyttelton was a cast whose brilliance as individuals and as a team I suspect this play will never have seen, or see, surpassed.

And it was pap. Trite, obvious, overdrawn and — like Priestley himself — struggling to say something, yet fatally uncertain what it was trying to say. I couldn’t but feel, trooping out into the Waterloo evening, that if Priestley is the outcome, the sacrifice of Passchendaele was in vain.

Why do we 21st-century Europeans beat ourselves up about “dumbing down”? We are performing a lot of this 19th and 20th-century stuff a great deal better than the 19th or 20th century ever did. And it’s pants. Dreary, flip, mediocre, stilted, shallow, obvious. Like Shakespeare’s tiresome plots, we solemnly give the classics a weight, significance and polish they can hardly bear. All right, I’ll say it. At least I’m a Celebrity . . . has a pulse.

Sick transit

Last Saturday my column on Afghanistan, headlined “Zoom in to the small tale that spells defeat”, aimed (by telling the tale of JMK, a local non-Taleban strongman close to President Karzai) to demonstrate the infinite complexity of just one (very) small piece of (very) local history dogging the efforts of a (huge) military operation to secure one (very) tiny corner of one (very) big province among (many) others. My story from Oruzgan was impossibly intricate. Now, from the Afghan blue yonder, an e-mail pings in to tell me — in kindly terms — that I oversimplified.

“Actually, the story ... gets sicker ... JMK’s nephew, X, has established himself as the ‘security’ strongman on the Kandahar-Tarin Kowt route. People can’t send anything without using his organisation and he charges $5,000 and upwards per truck. X is escorting at least 200 trucks a month — $1 million. He has a private army of 1,000 goons. A part, at least, of that money is going to the Taleban ... So it’s a self-funding insurgency.”

Tip off

An e-mail from BBC Bristol raises its e-eyebrow at my claim for a packet of crisps and a bottle of water on a train. In other circumstances I’d argue that trivial claims are more likely to be honest — but fair cop: I suspect that our MPs’ disgrace must be having a chilling effect on reimbursements well beyond those of politicians. Yesterday I decided not to claim for a $5 tip for a porter in Dubai, en route for Afghanistan, though once I wouldn’t have hesitated. Gratuities? Hm. We’re almost in Remembrance Day poppy territory here.

Boom boom

One line in Time and the Conways did strike a chord. A Utopian bluestocking, waxing rhetorical about the hopes that followed the war, cries: “We thought we would see the end of the world of boom and slump . . .” How the audience laughed.

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