The Tattooist of Auschwitz – Sky Atlantic

  There’s been a lot of moaning in certain quarters about this series, on the grounds that the Holocaust shouldn’t be used as “entertainment”.  I beg to differ.  Yes, there are now dozens of Holocaust novels and numerous films, and I think that it’s all getting a bit much and arguably a bit exploitative; but the book on which this is based was one of the first, and it’s telling a true story.   As for “entertainment”, that’s the wrong word.  What it’s doing is rehumanising people whom the concentration camps dehumanised.

A few years back, someone moaned that Anne Frank shouldn’t be seen as the “face” of the Holocaust because most of her diary was trivial stuff about arguing with her family, finding Mr Dussel annoying and fancying Peter van Daan.   Of course she should, and of course it was.  That’s the sort of thing that teenage girls write about.  She was just an ordinary teenage girl, and Lale Sokolov (formerly Eisenberg), the main character in this story, was just an ordinary young man.  Who fell in love.  With an ordinary young woman.   In the most horrific circumstances in human history.  Because they were still human.   So, yes, it’s OK to have a love story set at Auschwitz.  It’s proving that, even after people were stripped, shaved, and tattooed with a number instead of their name, they were still human.

Yes, there are errors in the book.  The number tattooed on the arm of Gisela “Gita” Fuhrmannova, Lale’s future wife, is wrong.  There’s a reference to penicillin, long before it was widely available.  Some of what’s said about Josef Mengele doesn’t agree with other sources.   It’s obviously not great that there are errors; but it was written from an elderly man’s memories of what happened over half a century earlier, not as a textbook.

There’s also been some moaning about the casting in the TV adaptation.  Jonah Hauer-King, as the young Lale, speaks RP English.  Harvey Keitel, as the older Lale, speaks English with an Eastern European accent.  Er, folks, the young Lale would have been speaking his mother tongue (presumably Slovak?), not English.  So he wouldn’t have been speaking with a foreign accent, would he?!   There’s even been moaning because CGI was used to “reconstruct” an Auschwitz set, rather than filming at the real site.  How on earth could they have built the set at the real site?

The story’s quite well-known now.   In Bratislava, it’s demanded that one person from each Jewish household “volunteer” to “help the war effort”.  Lale goes, and finds himself being transported to Auschwitz, where he becomes one of those tattooing numbers on the arms of new prisoners.  One of the prisoners is Gita.  At the end of the war, they’re separated, but meet in Bratislava, marry, and later move to Australia.   Decades later, after Gita’s death, Lale tells his story to Heather Morris, who writes a book about it.

I’m not sure how well the decision to show the story as flashbacks worked.   We were shown Lale and Heather, and then flashbacks to Auschwitz; and jumping backwards and forwards between timelines never works that well.   We also saw the older Lale being haunted by visions of friends who’d been murdered, and by an SS office with whom he’d had a lot of interaction, which was also a bit confusing.  But I think that the programme did a reasonably good job of trying to depict the horrors of the camp, even showing black smoke coming out of the gas chambers, and Lale witnessing people being shot dead at random.  It tried.  It’s a very sensitive topic, and any book or film or TV series about it is always going to be controversial.  Sky have really done their best to *be* sensitive, with the series being directed by the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.

A week after the Holocaust memorial in Hyde Park was covered up because of fears that it was at risk of vandalism, and two days after Poland’s main synagogue was firebombed, watch this.  And just watch it.  Don’t drive yourself mad worrying about accents or exact numbers.  Just watch it, and take it in.

 

 

 

 

Changing Ends – ITV

  On the plus side, this series about Alan Carr’s childhood is set in the 1980s.  Alan’s very close in age to me, so this is very much my era.  The ’80s music makes a brilliant soundtrack, even though it’s a bit bonkers that songs from all parts of the decade are all being used in a programme set in 1986; and Alan’s parents, headmaster and sadistic PE teacher are all very well portrayed.

On the minus side, the adult Alan Carr “narrates” the programme, which is really annoying.   Instead of just letting the characters get on with it, he keeps butting in.  And the sole theme of the programme, which is that young Alan is not interested in football and prefers acting, wears a bit thin after a while.  Incidentally, I never knew that Alan Carr’s dad was the manager of Northampton Town!

It’s not bad, but a few jokes about something *other* than young Alan not being interested in football would be greatly appreciated.   Three episodes of the same jokes get a bit much!   But it’s worth watching for the ’80s soundtrack.

The Famous Five: Peril on the Night Train – CBBC

  If the BBC want to make adventure programmes for kids, that’s very nice … but it’s really annoying that they’ve used the name “Famous Five” and the names of *the* Famous Five for stories which have got virtually nothing to *do* with the Famous Five!   This one had some loose connections to Five Go Adventuring Again in that it involved a tutor called Mr Roland trying to steal Uncle Quentin’s work.   Was that the book which kept going on about blueprints?   If so, I remember reading it when I was about 6, and taking it to mean that Uncle Quentin did all his work on blue paper.  Maybe he did!

In this version of events, Uncle Quentin was in the process of inventing a machine which could “decode everything”.   Yep, yet again, the BBC seemed to have got the Famous Five mixed up with Indiana Jones, The Da Vinci Code or possibly both.  They’d also chucked in a bit of Agatha Christie, with mysterious goings-on on a sleeper train, and a dash of Nancy Drew, with people being drugged.  And even an element of Dallas, in that one of the baddies had a stetson and a southern drawl.  (Baddies should not have southern drawls.  I like southern drawls.  However, there were German baddies as well.)   Plus there was a scene in which the Five got stranded in the Scottish Highlands and were seen walking over a mountain, which had echoes of the end of The Sound of Music.   And the Loch Ness Monster made an appearance.  So it was certainly eclectic!

As in the first episode, Anne was too young, Dick had mysteriously turned into a geek, George wasn’t stroppy enough and Julian wasn’t annoying enough.  Well, he was really, really annoying when he said “gotten away with it” instead of “got away with it”, but that was the scriptwriters’ fault, not his.  “Gotten,” FFS.  Ugh!!

However, if you tried to ignore the fact that a programme called “The Famous Five” had absolutely nothing to do with the Famous Five, it was really quite entertaining.   It had a proper historical context, with a lot of talk about war coming and the need not to let Germany gain any technological advances (although it was odd that Anne seemed so keen on TV, which wasn’t exactly a big thing pre-war).  The scenes of “peril” on board the night train (which was a train to the Scottish Highlands) were actually quite good, and Dick’s geekiness worked well in terms of being able to pick up a Morse code signal from a radio/wireless.   And, apart from the reference to the machine being able to decode everything – and, to be fair, it sounded more like an Enigma machine than the sort of thing featured in Indiana Jones films – it was generally a lot more realistic than the first episode.  No caves caving in!

It ended up with the kids cleverly outwitting the baddies and outsmarting the Army.  That felt more Five Find-Outers than Famous Five, although I’m not sure that Enid Blyton would have allowed any of her characters to outwit a posh army officer (outwitting Mr Goon was OK, because he was common), but it was certainly Blyton-esque.  I wish that the BBC had stuck with some of the original Blyton storylines, but I did genuinely enjoy this.

 

 

Royal Kill List – Sky Showcase

  It’s always good to see historical programmes on Sky Showcase, and they did very well to get Joseph Fiennes to be one of the narrators for this one.   Could we just lose the constant swearing, though?   It’s very tiresome.  Having said which, Charles II probably *did* swear a lot, if only to prove that he wasn’t a Puritan!

The theme of this series is the quest to hunt down the regicides, i.e. the people involved in the trial and execution of Charles I, who were excluded from the general pardon given at the time of the Restoration.  Those already dead, including Oliver Cromwell, were dug up and executed posthumously.   Several others were executed, and others were sentenced to life imprisonment.  Some were pardoned, and a few escaped.

It’s not talked about very much, possibly because it doesn’t fit with Charles II’s image as “the Merry Monarch” – lover of many women, father of many illegitimate children, frequent visitor to the theatre and to Newmarket, etc etc.   The fact that he was engaged in secret deals with the French gets overlooked, as well.  I suppose we’re all willing to forgive him anything because the Restoration got rid of the horrendous rule of the Cromwells.   Why Oliver Cromwell so often scores so highly in “greatest ever Englishmen” polls is beyond me.   The man banned Sunday football.  And mince pies.   And closed the theatres.  He also fined people for swearing, so everyone involved in historical programmes on Sky TV would have been very poor if they’d been around in his time.   No wonder that Charles II’s reign is fondly remembered!

But Charles really did go after the regicides, which I suppose is understandable, and this was an interesting take on things.  It also showed the future James II doing a lot of moaning at his brother, and getting very narky about the influence of the infamous Barbara Villiers.   The reign of Charles, like the reign of his grandfather, tends to be overlooked, sandwiched in between the Civil War/Interregnum and the Glorious Revolution.   Despite the fact that half the aristocratic families in the country are descended from his various offspring by his various mistresses!

This went a a bit OTT for a docu-drama, but it was always entertaining – and, unlike the irritating stuff that the BBC churn out these days, made no references to current political events and didn’t include a load of woke drivel.   It was certainly colourful!   But I do think that it was a bit hard on Charles.  It made him look very bloodthirsty, whereas his actions were really quite mild under the circumstances.   Sky’s history programmes often seem designed more to shock than to do anything else.  But, hey, at least they don’t lecture you like the BBC’s do …

Mary & George – Sky Atlantic

  Hmm, the jury’s out on this one.  On the one hand, well done to Sky Atlantic for making a drama series set during the reign of James I and VI, rather than yet another series about the Tudors.   Although we all know about the Gunpowder Plot and the Mayflower, this period, despite being incredibly important in British, Irish and American history, does rather tend to get overlooked as people jump from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the build-up to the Civil War.   On the other hand, why does every historical drama on Sky (and Netflix) have to be so overblown?   Is it really necessary for every other word to be a swear word?  It reminds me of when I was 11, and everyone used to swear all the time to show how cool and grown up they were now that they were at secondary school.  We’d got over it by the time we were about 13!   And would someone please tell that bloke from Shameless that his character was from Warwickshire, and would therefore *not* have spoken with a broad northern accent?

Our main man is George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham, who for some strange reason appears in The Three Musketeers as a rather heroic sort who is in love with Anne of Austria, but is best known in the UK for being the “favourite” of King James and for then being assassinated after making himself incredibly unpopular, due to a series of foreign policy cock-ups, during the reign of Charles I.   The series is based on a book, which I haven’t read, but which rather bizarrely claims that George poisoned James.   The other prominent character is George’s mother Mary, who pushed him to prominence … although both her ambition and her influence are being rather exaggerated here.

It’d probably be better if Sky didn’t seem so determined to make everything “outrageous”, but it’s certainly not bad, and it’s always good to see a historical series set at a time which doesn’t receive enough attention.

 

The Princes in the Tower: the new evidence – Channel 4

This was a programme in which Philippa Langley tried to convince Rob Rinder and TV reviewers that the Princes in the Tower were not murdered by Richard III, but escaped and went to the Continent.  There was nothing in it which couldn’t quite reasonably be explained by the traditional story, and none of Philippa’s claims convinced me at all.  Sorry, Ricardians, but I remain convinced that Richard III murdered the princes.   But it’s very frustrating that we just can’t know for certain.

Some of it wasn’t “evidence” at all.  The story of what happened was written in Henry VII’s reign, we were solemnly informed.  Well, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t true, does it?   And there were reports all over Europe that the princes had been murdered by Richard.  Even less convincingly, we were told that no-one would have murdered children because it was a religious society.  Tell that to Arthur of Brittany!   And, if you’re talking about religious people, how likely is it that Thomas More would have written a pack of lies?

Then we were told that Henry needed to know that the princes were dead because he was going to marry Elizabeth of York, effectively declaring the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville legitimate.  Well, there are plenty of grounds for believing that Richard was also thinking of marrying Elizabeth, even though she was his niece.   Anyway, Henry claimed the throne by conquest, not in right of his wife.  I’m not sure how any of what was said about that was supposed to be relevant to anything, except that we were told that Henry looked for the princes and couldn’t find them.  Well, that would have been because they were dead!

The programme made virtually no reference to Elizabeth Woodville.  Some people think she was involved in the Lambert Simnel plot, but Philippa Langley didn’t mention it.  Nor did it say very much else about Elizabeth of York, who would presumably have recognised her own brothers had they turned up.

So what about the actual “evidence”?  Well, we were told that Margaret of Burgundy ordered weapons “for Edward V”.   That admittedly is a bit odd, given that this was around the time of the Lambert Simnel plot, and Simnel was pretending to be the Earl of Warwick, not Edward.  The whole Simnel plot’s pretty odd, it has to be said, because there’d been no speculation that Warwick was dead, so they must have known that all Henry had to do was produce the real Warwick.  But pretender plots are odd.  I mean, there were four False Dmitriis!

Philippa then claimed that the whole Simnel thing was actually about Edward V, and that the person crowned in Dublin was Edward V, her argument being that a lot of people turned up and a lot of people fought for him.   Well, a lot of those who fought for him were foreign mercenaries, who’d have fought for anyone as long as they were paid.  And a lot of people turned up at the coronation because Ireland was pro-Yorkist and they thought Simnel was Warwick.   They didn’t have Hello! magazine and the Daily Mail website to check what Warwick looked like, did they?!  And are we really supposed to believe that the Tudors somehow managed to suppress every bit of writing saying that Edward V was invading, and replaced it with writing about Simnel-claiming-to-be-Warwick?  Hardly seems very likely, does it?  And Philippa admitted that there was absolutely no “trail” of Edward after the Battle of Stoke.  OK, he could have been killed there, but could that really have been hushed up?

We then moved on to the younger prince, Richard.   Margaret of Burgundy apparently had a room in her palace known as “Richard’s room”.  Well, that would have been for Perkin Warbeck, wouldn’t it?   Maybe Margaret even genuinely believed that Warbeck was Richard.  He does seem to have pretty convincing.  The King of Scotland have him his cousin in marriage.   Margaret had never met Richard.  Nor had the Emperor Maximilian, who was also supposedly involved in backing “Richard”.  And a document was unearthed which was supposed to be Richard’s testimony of what happened to him after he was imprisoned.  Again, that could have been written by or on behalf of Perkin Warbeck: he’d have had to’ve given some sort of explanation of how “he” “escaped” from the Tower.   There was a mention of birthmarks.  What, like the Anastasia toe thing?!   Who would have known about any birthmarks which Richard had?   Maybe someone who’d attended him as a baby was wandering around Burgundy or the Holy Roman Empire, but it hardly seems very likely.

Next up, “Richard” pledged some money to Albert of Saxony, to be paid when he became King of England, in return for his support.  Again, this could all have been Warbeck.  The whole Warbeck thing went on for years.   There were lots of documents referring to “Richard” by name.  Well, of course they referred to “Richard”.  They weren’t going to say that Perkin Warbeck was planning to invade England, were they?!

Why didn’t Henry VII imprison, or even execute, Warbeck immediately?   Well, who knows?  He put Lambert Simnel to work in the palace kitchens!   The programme argued that Henry wouldn’t have wanted to execute his brother-in-law, if that was whom he genuinely believed Warbeck to be, but surely that’s exactly what he’d have wanted to do.  He’d have wanted him out of the way.

Historian Janina Ramirez commented that “Richard” ‘s testimony seemed a bit too good to be true – as you would expect from a forgery.   Experts confirmed that it was indeed from the 15th century, but, as they said, that didn’t prove who wrote it.

Rob Rinder said that Philippa’s argument was very persuasive, and that he was inclined to believe it.  Well, I’m not!   And what wasn’t even discussed was how the princes might have escaped.  It’s not exactly easy to escape from the Tower of London, is it?  And, if they’d escaped and gone to Margaret of Burgundy, Richard III’s sister, would Richard really not have found out about it?  Sorry, but none of what was said in this programme convinced me at all.

But, at the end of the way, we just do not know.  What’s really frustrating is that there are those bones which were found in Charles II’s time, and, now that we’ve got the DNA science, it would be possible to find out whether they really are those of Edward and Richard or not.  OK, it wouldn’t prove exactly when or how they died, or who was responsible, but it’d prove that they didn’t grow up and that they didn’t escape.   I understand the late Queen’s point that it’s not very nice to go around digging up bodies, but … well, it’s hard not to hope that the King might see things differently!

 

The Gunpowder Plot – Channel 5

  Thank you to Channel 5 for this.  The miserable council have cancelled the Heaton Park bonfire and fireworks display again, and it feels as if Bonfire Night’s getting squeezed out between all the over-commercialised Halloween rubbish and the shops putting out the Christmas stuff four months early.  The failure of the Gunpowder Plot was an important event in our history, and the tradition of commemorating it should live on.  This two-hour programme largely followed the traditional narrative, although just before the end it did suggest that Francis Tresham might actually have been spying for Cecil.  It also made the point that, had the plot succeeded, a large number of people would have been killed in the explosion.  The idea that the gunpowder of the time wouldn’t have been strong enough to blow up Parliament just isn’t true.

You know the basic story.  Guy Fawkes & co – “the gang”, as the programme referred to them, led by Robert Catesby – rented a cellar underneath the House of Lords, smuggled a load of gunpowder in, and planned to set it all off during the State Opening of Parliament.  But someone sent an anonymous letter warning Lord Mounteagle to stay away, and so the plot was discovered.   The programme also went into the lesser-known story of how the plotters were found at Holbeche House in Staffordshire, and Catesby, Percy and some of the others were killed in a shoot-out.   Holbeche House is currently disused after the nursing home which used to occupy it closed down, and there’s some talk of the National Trust taking it over, although I doubt that they’ll want to pay for it.

And so we remember, remember, the Fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.  I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.   I know it used to get a bit out of hand at one point, but it was always good fun when I was a kid, and I think it’s really mean of the council to cancel the free public events!    Enjoy the fireworks, and eat some bonfire toffee and parkin buns.

 

 

The Gilded Age (Season 2) – Sky Atlantic

  It was good to have this back, on a dark and wet Monday night, but I wish they’d started with a quick recap of the previous series.  I couldn’t actually remember what some of the characters’ names were!   However, I soon got into it again, and the first episode of the new series included an interesting range of storylines.  We had the fat cats, both anciens riches and nouveaux riches, worrying about the rise of trade unionism, Peggy grieving for the loss of the son who was taken away from her, and Marian making a small bid for freedom by teaching art at a girls’ school – much to the horror of her aunts.   We also had the social-climbing Mrs Russell bidding for acceptance in the holiday resort of Newport, and the establishment of the new New York Metropolitan Opera as a rival to the New York Academy of Music.  The opening of the Metropolitan put us in 1883, which fitted in very well with the rise of the trade unions.  Meanwhile, the van Rhijns’ gay son continued to court the Russells’ unsuspecting daughter.

The clothes and the houses alike were super-glamorous, and it all made for an enjoyable 70 minutes’ viewing – escapism, but with that mention of the unions, together with a few scenes involving the servants, reminding us that the vast majority of people in New York City in the 1880s most definitely weren’t living in the lap of luxury.  A promising start!

All Creatures Great and Small (series 4) – Channel 5

It’s so good to have this back.  It seems daft to say that something set in 1940 is a relaxing escape from the stresses of the present day, but a) it’s still in the “phony war” stage at the moment and b) apart from Tristan’s absence, the war doesn’t really seem to have impinged on Darrowby as yet.   Everyone was far more concerned about Helen ordering too much gauze and Siegfriend being grumpy because he’d given up smoking for Lent.   There was also a storyline about James helping a boy from a poor family whose dog was ill.   And there were lots of scenic shots of the Dales.

I gather that things are going to become more serious as James and Helen wonder whether wartime is the right time to consider having children, and we’ve also got the issue of Mrs Hall seeking a divorce at a time when divorced people weren’t considered quite respectable, but, generally, everything in this programme is gentle and caring and just basically nice.   And that is very, very welcome!

Union with David Olusoga – BBC 2

David Olusoga usually gets on my nerves, but this series, on the history of the union between the nations of the United Kingdoms, looks like being really good.  A lot of what was covered in the first episode was very familiar stuff – Edward I’s conquest of Wales, the Ulster Plantation, Gunpowder Plot, the Glorious Revolution, the Darien Scheme – but it’s not usually all put together in the context of examining the formation of the Union.   We heard about the events, and also about the attitudes of the different countries towards the idea of union.   We also got to hear the opinions of various random people about the idea and history of the United Kingdom, which I’m not sure we needed, but some of what they had to say was quite interesting, and David had clearly made an effort to speak to people with a range of different opinions.

This episode finished with the 1707 Act of Union.   I completed on the purchase of my house on 17th July 2001, and I can always remember the date because it was 17/07.  I know that everyone really needed to know that.

Well done BBC 2.  The BBC’s history series have been a bit off recently, but this one looks very promising.