A Town Called Malice – Sky Showcase

This is all about the ’80s music.  There isn’t much of a plot, but it’s worth watching for the soundtrack.  Amazing music.  However, it’s rather worrying that the hardfaced matriarch’s played by Martha Plimpton – am I the only one who thinks she’s still a teenager and going out with poor River Phoenix?

The plot, such as it is, is that a young couple from a family of London criminals accidentally kill a police officer, and run away to the Costa del Sol to live with an uncle who claims to have loads of money but hasn’t.  They then get mixed up with local criminals.  Everyone swears a lot.  The girlfriend shoots the uncle.  It’s not brilliant stuff but, as I said, it’s worth watching for the music.

Advertisement

Funny Woman – Sky Showcase

Hmm … I still can’t quite make up my mind about this, but it’s definitely improving as the series has gone on.  I nearly gave up after one episode, on the grounds of a Londoner (the series is based on a book by Nick Hornby) showing a working-class Northerner thinking that “eau de toilette” was pronounced “eau de toilet”.  Not funny.  Not even remotely funny.

However, it’s got a lot better since then.  And I really do like the character of Barbara, played brilliantly by Gemma Arterton; and the programme’s portrayal of the showbusiness attitudes of the 1960s towards a pretty girl with a regional accent is probably not inaccurate.  We’ve seen Barbara, leaving behind her family and friends in Blackpool to seek fame and fortune in London, struggle to get a foothold in the industry but keep on fighting and win a TV comedy role.

There were plenty of showbusiness opportunities in the North in the 1960s, and I’d rather have seen her try her luck with Granada than all the awful cliches of a Northerner in London; but this isn’t bad, and I’m glad that I stuck with it.

Atlantic Crossing – Drama

I feel a bit guilty for watching this, because it’s caused quite a bit of upset in Norway over its historical inaccuracies.  I refuse point blank to watch The Crown, so I probably shouldn’t be watching this.  But it’s entertaining, and there’s not a lot else on on a Saturday night #excuses.  And I’m enjoying it.

When the Nazis invaded Norway, Crown Princess Martha, niece of the Swedish king, and her three young children, including the future King Harald, were evacuated to Sweden.   However, their presence there was seen as threatening Sweden’s neutrality.   The programme strongly suggests that King Gustav had Nazi sympathies, something which is a moot point.   As the situation worsened, King Haakon, widower of King George VI’s aunt Maud, and Crown Prince Olav, together with the Norwegian cabinet, were evacuated to London, but by then it was too late for British forces to be able to evacuate Martha and the children safely.  President Roosevelt, who’d met Olav and Martha on a state visit just before the war, sent a ship to evacuate them to the US via Finland.

The series strongly suggests that there was some sort of romantic friendship between Martha and FDR, which almost certainly wasn’t true and is what’s upset people in Norway.   So far – I haven’t seen the whole series yet – the suggestion is that he was infatuated with her, not that she reciprocated his feelings and certainly not that there was any impropriety.   But it does suggest a very close personal relationship.   It also suggests that Martha held far more sway over him than she really did – to watch it, you’d think that she’d been personally responsible for the entire Lend-Lease Agreement!

So, historically accurate it is not, strictly speaking but it draws attention to the sometimes neglected struggle of occupied Norway, and it makes for good TV.   I still feel a bit guilty about watching it, though!

Hotel Portofino – ITV

This didn’t tick too many boxes for originality, but it definitely ticked the box for glorious scenery (mostly filmed in Croatia, but let’s pretend that it’s the Italian Riviera) and plenty of different brewing dramas.    A posh-ish British woman has opened a hotel in Portofino in the 1920s.   Could we have a bit more about her family’s background, please?   I’m curious as to whether being called Ainsworth means that they’re from Lancashire.  She’s got an alcoholic husband who spends all their money, a grouchy war widow daughter with a child, and a dilettante son who’s a) scarred by his experiences in the war and b) possibly the object of affection of his best friend.

There are a lot of other stock characters.   Two Innocent Young Ladies, one accompanied by a snooty mother, the other by a hypochondriac aunt.  Two Flashy Americans.  Two Northern Servants.  Some Charming Italians, but also some Dodgy Italians with links to the rising fascist movement.

It’s not very original, as I said, but the shots of the coast were stunning, and the shots of local streets and markets were gorgeous as well.  There’s a lot going on, and we’ll see how it goes.

The US and the Holocaust – BBC 4

This three two-hour episode Ken Burns film made for some very uncomfortable viewing at times, and was clearly meant to.  I don’t think it was meant as direct criticism of the US, but it certainly raised some questions about isolationism and tight immigration controls at a time when the media’s full of reports of terrible persecution.  Viewers were informed that, even after the war, when people had seen the newsreels showing what had happened at the concentration camps, polls showed that most Americans opposed admitting refugees.  It also reminded the viewer of some of the less savoury elements in parts of American society, ending with footage of recent hate crimes and the storming of Congress.  There was certainly a great deal to think about.

The first episode, about the situation up to 1938, didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know.  I studied US immigration history in depth at university, so I knew all about the quota-based system and the eugenics-based arguments behind it.   The revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the WASP-only clubs, hotels and even housing estates, the German-American Bund, Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic propaganda, Charles Lindbergh’s American First movement … it was all familiar.  But hearing it all together, in this context, was definitely food for thought.   It was even pointed out that Hitler admired the Jim Crow laws and the deportation of Native Americans from their homelands.

The programme did try to present a balanced view, and it was made clear that, the majority of people in the US were horrified when reports of persecution began to come in, especially after Kristallnacht.  And the US did take in more refugees from Nazi-controlled lands than any other country, and there were some major anti-Nazi protests.   As the programme pointed out, organisations in the US which wanted to help were in a difficult position, with Hitler claiming that anything they did showed that Jews controlled American politics.  There was, however, also a fear that too much open protest by Jewish groups would lead to a rise in domestic anti-Semitism.

It was Roosevelt who called the Evian Conference to discuss the refugee crisis.   Pretty much every country represented there refused to do any more to help.

There were some absolutely heartrending accounts, mainly told through first person interviews with elderly people who’d been children at the time, of desperate attempts to bring loved ones to safety in America, only to be thwarted by red tape and demands for unaffordable financial bonds.  There were also accounts from Holocaust survivors, including Anne Frank’s stepsister.  It wasn’t just the quota system: it was the need to prove that the individual wouldn’t be a burden on the state.  It was a far cry from “Give me … your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”.  What vision of America did people actually have?   Or do visions not matter, only practicalities?  Unrestricted immigration isn’t practical, but should exceptions be made when people are clearly refugees, not economic migrants?   These are difficult subjects, and there was a lot of food for thought in this.   And of course it wasn’t just America.  Other countries did little to help either.

You got the feeling that FDR, left to himself, might have eased immigration controls, and brought the US into the war earlier.  But he was working in the face of overwhelming isolationist feeling amongst the American public.   Given the loss of American life in the Great War and the problems caused by the Depression, that was understandable.   It’s not the United States’ job to be the world’s policeman.   But was it her duty to stand up against the Nazis?

Of course, Pearl Harbour brought the US into the war, against the Nazis as well as against Japan.  By 1942, reports of mass killings were coming in, from prisoners who’d managed to escape and from the Polish Resistance, and then from Soviet forces as they advanced westwards.   There were some calls to prioritise trying to rescue prisoners, but the authorities felt that they had to concentrate on winning the war – and, at that point, Allied planes would have to have left from Britain and wouldn’t have been able to reach Poland.   Once the Allies were in control of Italy, the planes would have been able to reach the concentration camps, but didn’t have the precision to guarantee that they’d hit the gas chambers and not the housing blocks.

A poll in early 1943 showed that over half of Americans didn’t believe the reports of mass killings of Jews.   Even when the Soviets liberated Kyiv and American photographers took pictures at Babyn Yar, some of the American press presented the reports as Soviet propaganda.  It was stated by the programme that the government didn’t want people to feel that the war was being fought for Jews, in case that damaged morale.  I was expecting someone to point out a parallel with the Union side in the Civil War there, not making it a war about slavery – “Let us die to make men free”?? – but no-one did.   Most shocking was the attitude of the State department, which deliberately suppressed reports of atrocities which the Polish Resistance managed to smuggled into Switzerland, and stalled moves by the World Jewish Congress to send funds to help Jews in Hungary and Romania, then not under direct Nazi control.

By this point, the programme showed us, American Jewish groups were lobbying for action to stop the mass murder of European Jews, including a number of large scale rallies.   Eventually, in 1944, Roosevelt set up a War Refugee Board, which worked with diplomats from neutral countries to gain their protection for Jews in Hungary, and also bombed Hungary in a move to stop deportations.   After US reporters sent home pictures from Majdanek, liberated by the Soviets, people accepted that something truly horrific was happening, even if they couldn’t quite take in the scale of it.

When it came to the liberation of the camps and the end of the war, the programme did move away from American attitudes and focused on the accounts of the survivors, and of veterans who’d been amongst the liberators and one of the men who’d been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.   But then it told us that, even then, public opinion in America was against admitting refugees, and reminded us that the quota system didn’t end until 1965.

Then it finished with footage of some of the hate crimes and extremist marches which have taken place in the US very recently, and of the storming of Congress.   I honestly don’t think that this was meant as an attack on the US, which I love, which I’m sure Ken Burns, his fellow film makers and all those involved in the making the programme love, but it was a reminder that we – in the UK and everywhere else, as well as in the US – don’t always see what’s happening abroad as our problem, and that there are dangerous elements even within our own societies.  If you’ve read all that, thank you.  If you want to watch it all, it was shown in the US last year, and has been shown in both the UK and Australia, and possibly elsewhere as well, in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow.   It’s long and sometimes chilling, but it’s worth watching.

Stock Aitken Waterman: Legends of Pop – Channel 5

Back in the day, it was considered a bit uncool to like Stock Aitken Waterman songs; but everyone did anyway.   How could you not?   They were just so catchy!   The trio are probably most associated with their big hits of the late ’80s and early ’90s, working with either unknowns, like Rick Astley and Sonia, or soap actors looking to break into the music business, like Kylie and Jason.   But they worked with some big name established acts too, people like Bananarama and Donna Summer, who went to them because they admired their success.

This first episode focused on their early years, how they got together and some of their early singles.   It went into quite a lot of technical detail, which was something different, but it was largely an exercise in ’80s music nostalgia.  And, hey, I’m always up for a bit of that!  Loving this, thank you Channel 5!

No Place Like Home – Channel 5

I get very excited whenever a TV programme mentions the Cotton Famine, my dissertation topic, as this one did!!  I don’t usually watch this series, but I made an exception to see Victoria Derbyshire revisiting her childhood haunts in Bury, Rochdale and Littleborough, and enjoyed every minute of it.

It started by talking about a tannery works in Littleborough, which was founded by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and produced two-thirds of the leather used in Army boots during the Second World War.   Then it was on to central Rochdale, for the familiar stories of cotton mills, the Cotton Famine, Frederick Douglass’s visit to the town, and the mill workers’ support for Abolitionism.   The woke brigade are always so busy trying to make out that Britain was always linked with slavery that it was heartening to get this reminder of how strong Abolitionism was in mid 19th century Lancashire.

Then finally it was on to Bury, to visit the wonderful Bury Market, Victoria’s old school – Bury Grammar – and the Peel Tower, and also Warth Mills in Radcliffe, which was used as an internment camp as depicted in The Girl in.the Pink Raincoat.  All in all, it was a fascinating trip round some areas which I know very well, and made for very entertaining watching.

Made in the 80s – Channel 4

I’m not quite sure what the first episode of this was getting at, other than annoying me immensely by referring to the Soviet Union as “Russia”.  It sounded from the blurb like a fairly positive documentary, celebrating Britain’s many contributions to the world to the 1980s.  But it was actually mostly doom and gloom.  Most of the first episode was devoted to fears of nuclear war, with interviewees ranging from Holly Johnson to women involved in the protests at Greenham Common talking about … well, fears of nuclear war.  And it was rather obsessed with Raymond Briggs, but only in the context of, you guessed it, fears of nuclear war.

It also featured The Snowman, Countdown, Margaret Thatcher doing a Saturday Superstore phone-in, a brief mention of the Falklands War, and some talk about Saatchi and Saatchi.  But most of it was, yes, about the threat of nuclear war.

It did say a few positive things about British film makers; and it praised Margaret Thatcher’s important role in improving relations between the West and the Soviet Union. But most of it was miserable.  Where was the 80s music (other than Two Tribes, which was played because it talked about the threat of war)?  Live Aid?  Royal weddings?  Sport?  Anything, you know, cheerful?!

An hour centred on the threat of nuclear war, when I was expecting pop, rock and brightly-coloured clothes.  Thanks a lot, Channel 4!!

Malory Towers Christmas special – CBBC

  This had nothing to do with the books, but it was a very enjoyable bit of festive fun.  I’m so pleased that the TV adaptations have been popular enough to merit a Christmas special.  I grew up in the days when the educational Establishment disapproved of Enid Blyton books, so it’s wonderful to see the iconic stories being rehabilitated into popular culture.   It’s also interesting to see the much-maligned character of Gwendoline Mary being fleshed out and made more sympathetic.

This was just a two-part special in which, for various reasons, the characters featured in the main series ended up spending the Christmas holidays at school, but it carried on the themes of friendship, togetherness and teamwork, which are what the TV adaptations have really emphasised.  And Matron sorting out a broken-down car, and saying that she (like my grandma) drove ambulances during the War (no need for rescue by passing males!), was a nice touch.  It won’t work for purists, because it had nothing to do with Enid Blyton’s writings, but the spirit of the stories was there, and it made for a really lovely hour’s watching.

Royal Mob – Sky History

This – well, the first episode thereof – was acted out in a slightly silly way, with names flashing up on the screen to tell the viewer who each character was.  And it was odd that the girls’ brother was never mentioned.  But how brilliant to have a TV series about the fascinating Hesse-Darmstadt sisters – Victoria, later Princess Louis of Battenberg and grandmother of Prince Philip, Ella, who married Grand Duke Sergei and later became a nun, Irene, later Princess Henry of Prussia and, of course, Alix, who became the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna.  (Two other siblings died young, one of diphtheria and one of haemophiliac bleeding.)

The first episode largely covered the romances of the three elder girls, as well as their relationships with their British and Prussian relatives.  It rather unfairly claimed that Queen Victoria, played by Michele Dotrice – ooh, Betty! – tried to use her grandchildren’s marriages to extend her power over Europe, which was nonsense, but most of what it showed was interesting, if nothing new.  Thanks for this, Sky History: I enjoyed it.