Some years ago, I walked around Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin.
It’s an astonishing building, based on a deconstruction of the Star of
David. A lot of Berliners had paid to look at it, proud that this beautiful
edifice representing modern, liberal, cultured Germany coming to terms with
its past was there. Nobody mentioned, or seemed to notice, that it was
empty. They hadn’t put the exhibit in. Berlin’s Jews were absent from
Berlin’s Jewish Museum, as they were from Berlin. It was a more ironically
poignant memorial to Germany than the Germans imagined.
I was reminded of Libeskind’s building as I watched The Relief of
Belsen (Monday, C4),a docu-drama on the liberation of the concentration
camp. “Where are the Jews?” I kept whispering. We were being shown British
and Germans, and Richard Dimbleby, and any amount of authentic-looking stage
management and set design; there were just no on-screen inmates. They were
referred to: they were down the road, round the corner, having a lie-in. Of
course, there are technical and practical reasons why you can’t get
holocaust victims as extras. For a start, you’d need so many of them. And
there is the problem of the look. It’s difficult to get that near-to-death
look. Where do you go for extras who are being starved to death? You can’t
do it with prosthetics, and you couldn’t do it with green screen, like
Jurassic Park. All things considered, perhaps it was more tasteful and less
squeamish to leave them out altogether.
So, without the embarrassment of Jews, we were offered a military version of
Dr Finlay’s Casebook, concerned with the knotty problem of how to delouse
and feed 30,000 invisible women and children. It was all done with a lot of
English phlegm and jaw-muscle-flexing, the sort of war-film acting I thought
we’d forgotten how to do. It was all strangely disengaged, less compelling
or moving than the average episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Whenever they needed
to show the horror that confronted the unprepared British medical crews,
they slipped in a bit of old news footage: the most horrifying,
memory-tattooing images ever to sear celluloid. Drama cannot compete with
that vision of hell, and should never be expected to. There is a memorable
film that was made at the time expressly to show the Germans what had been
done in their name and with their consent. There are also Dimbleby’s
original reports. It would have been far more potent to have shown them and
made a straightforward documentary about the logistics of relieving Belsen
rather than this drama documentary, which beggared the actors and belittled
the facts. I don’t believe any subject is beyond storytelling or
dramatising, but the holocaust comes right at the extreme end of the
envelope. There are good films that have dealt with it (Life Is Beautiful,
Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List), but to think you can offer up a
straightforward, episodic romp through a truth without victims is to
sanitise history in a way that would have warmed Himmler’s cockles.
Michael Mann’s new film, The Kingdom, a remake of Gunga Din, carefully and
faithfully, though I suspect unconsciously, makes Riyadh look exactly like
downtown LA. Presumably, this is so American audiences can understand quite
how unfriendly and dangerous it is for Americans. Throughout all of
civilisation, foreign, alien things that are frightening or threatening are
given the characteristics of things or people that are familiar and local.
It makes the fear accessible and believable. In the HBO documentary Ghosts
of Abu Ghraib (Tuesday, More4), tracking the background to the scandal,
we saw that the Americans had taken Saddam’s torture prison and turned it
into a down-home, Texas-style torture prison. What remained unchanged was
the Iraqis being tortured.
The programme began with that famous and overused behavioural experiment of
the 1950s, in which ordinary people were asked to inflict electric shocks on
invisible strangers. Many, many TV documentaries and reality shows have been
based on this piece of research. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib had remarkable access
to the soldiers who appeared in the photographs and the colonel in charge:
the only people to be punished for offences. The documentary comprehensively
proved that, far from being the sadism of bad soldiers, this was a planned
programme, explicitly ordered and condoned by the chain of command that
ended in the White House. For that, it was a satisfyingly well-researched
exposé, the best sort of television.
The problem was that, as in The Relief of Belsen, the victims were missing.
Where were the Iraqis? They were in the photographs, and there was an
anonymous interview, but this was essentially a story about America and
Americans. The perpetrators were American, and so, it turned out, were the
victims: the soldiers hung out as scapegoats by politicians, bullied and
psychologically coerced into doing things they wouldn’t naturally have
dreamt of. That was the point of beginning with the behavioural experiment.
The torturers were excused by the contemporary version of the Nuremberg
defence: they were only following orders.
Spooks (Tuesday, BBC1) is back for a sixth series, and in episode one,
the evil genius was an Iranian. The story is the old one: an infectious
nutter is about to give the whole world weapons-grade bird flu. One of the
things I like most about Spooks is that I don’t really care, so it doesn’t
give me sleepless nights. And that they’ve done away with smiling. It’s such
a relief. Nobody smiles, ever, unless it’s ruefully, cruelly or ironically.
They’ve also got rid of fear. Nobody is ever frightened – which is sensible,
because most of them spend their time in predicaments that would terrify
normal people. You or I would curl up in a soggy, smelly ball, plead and sob
and tell them what they wanted to know. Here, the minor characters are sent
off to certain death without so much as a quiver. This is strictly the
shoot-and-dial school of espionage. When they’re not emptying magazines into
the back of suspicious vans, they’re on the phone to each other, wondering
where they are. Mobile phones have changed espionage thrillers more than all
the WMD in the evil world. And I rather miss George Smiley, and the time
when all a spy could call up for backup was a damn good spooky soundtrack.
One wonders how hard the times, and how far Greg Dyke had to fall on them,
before agreeing to take part in Get Me the Producer (Monday, C4),
the TV version of the TV version of Alan Sugar’s business wannabes. Here,
the winner will be given a job with a top independent production company.
Apparently, the kids who didn’t make the cut for the final were given the
job of making this programme. Which once again proves the answer to that old
question: How many people work in television? About 10% of them.
People have been 'dying like flies' because of hanging baskets
maybe Sharon could adopt her - she would fit right in at home with Ozzys
Craig , Glasgow, Glasgow,