Amsterdam has three main attractions: Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum; hookers in
windows; and Anne Frank in the attic. It’s a contradictory cultural
compendium in a contradictory city. You walk past the office on the canal,
above and behind which are the secret rooms the Frank family silently lived
in for two years; beneath it is a long, silent line of American-Jewish
students waiting to get in for half an hour’s empathy. And you know that
somewhere down this street or the next one is the house of the person who
betrayed the Franks. Unknown, unremarked, still secret, there is a room
where someone sat and thought: “After lunch, I must pop down to the Gestapo
and hand in that family in the attic.” The Dutch hid 30,000 Jews, most of
whom survived the war, but handed over more than 100,000, most of whom
didn’t.
The English translation of Anne Frank’s diary was published here in the 1950s.
It made a modest impact and went out of print. It was in America and, oddly,
Japan that it became iconic. In Germany, it was regularly accused of being a
forgery; too well written for an adolescent, they said. Anne did rewrite it.
She wanted to be a novelist, dreamt of it being published; after the war,
her father censored it to take out the critical things she had said about
her mother. After he died, they went back in.
Now, Deborah Moggach has, for the first time, adapted Anne’s own words, in a
five-part serial, The Diary of Anne Frank, shown over the week. It was made
in a naturalistic set with a starry cast, authentic props and costumes. Were
we supposed to see this as a literary adaptation or a historical one? A
drama-documentary or a war film? It wasn’t saying. Perhaps it didn’t know.
While the production values were unfaultable, and the performances,
particularly Ellie Kendrick as Anne and Tamsin Greig as her mother, nicely
judged, intelligently delivered and tastefully respectful, as a drama it
lacked context. It took it as read that we understood what sent the Franks
into hiding, and what the consequences of discovery would be. There was a
lack of menace; not much sense of palpable fear about what was downstairs or
outside. This production needed the suspense, even though we all know the
ending. In fact, knowing Anne will die is everything to this story. It’s
what raises it from a contemporary account to a classic tragedy; the pathos
of the inexorable destiny of this bright, honest, flawed, funny and
unbearably familiar girl, stalled on the edge of an adult life.
This slight play was stretched too long, with an intrusive soundtrack. It was, ultimately,
a small thing, a polite thing, a drawing-room drama. The act of making it
naturalistic, a re-creation, diminished the truth, stifled the pity. It was
a sentimental Jewish Big Brother and lacked real sadness and anger. It
couldn’t come close to the power of holding the book. The transfer of
a handwritten diary to a printed page is such a short step, it draws you so
close to the original moment. There are few things books can do that TV
can’t, but one of them is to be intimate in a way broadcasting can never
match, and it’s the claustrophobic intimacy that makes Anne Frank so
memorably sad. Of all the millions of words wrenched from the Holocaust, her
fragile, adolescent ones are the greatest mourning testament. As Primo Levi,
a man who wrote most heartbreakingly about the camps, said: “One single Anne
Frank moves us more than countless others who suffered just as she did, but
whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it’s better that way. If
we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would
not be able to live.”
With the violins of irony, The Diary of Anne Frank played all week
against the background news of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza. The
comparison between the Franks, forced into hiding, and the Palestinians,
proscribed, trapped and hopeless in this sliver of land that is the Middle
East’s attic, was inescapable.
The dogging of the English countryside continues apace. Albion’s latest suitor
is Nicholas Crane. There is something rather distasteful about the lens’s
lyrical licking of our country; the unquestioning, unremitting, unrequited
lust for the twee, twinky, touristy bits of Blighty. All those series of
elegiac rambles, with their moaning, breathless clichés, groping mountains
and valleys, come one after the other like charabancs in the Lake District.
There’s a sort of sentimental fascism about them, an overromanticised
geological jingoism. While the presenters ramble, the cameras go by
helicopter, soaring over National Trust properties, being chased by a
sobbing orchestra. Their England doesn’t contain any suburbs or tower
blocks; no motorways, airports, no industry, no trading estates, no you and
me. It’s inhabited by an occasional dotty rustic, an endangered craftsman
and simple lock-keepers. Why do they continue to try to sell us this
ridiculous, bogus, thatched lie of a nation? I already live here, I want to
shout.
I know what it’s like outside. I know the godawful sodden Lake District has to
be shown from a helicopter, because it’s the only way you can avoid the
chronic traffic jams and don’t have to see the tearooms and crocodiles of
yomping pensioners.
Crane is a professional traveller who probably calls himself an explorer. He
comes up with after-dinner reasons to make unnecessary journeys, and then
writes books about them. In Nicholas Crane’s Britannia, he was following the
pages of a book already written by an Elizabethan Pevsner, which,
apparently, is really, really important and terribly, terribly entertaining,
but you really wouldn’t know it from listening to him. Crane has the rural
guide’s tic of speaking only in exclamatory truisms that point out, with
deep emotion, what we can already see. “This is a marvellous view.” “Over
there is the mountain.” “It’s raining quite hard now.”
Mostly, what we were shown was Crane in a red cagoule, walking purposefully
into the wind. He walked and he walked and he walked, accompanied only by
the Elgar tribute orchestra. The camera shot him this way and that way, then
this way again. If you turned the sound down, you might have imagined this
was a self-improvement programme on purposeful walking for the aged. He
walked well for a man of his advanced years. Sprightly was the word that
skipped to mind. I just looked him up, and blow me, but we’re the same age.
Crane carries an umbrella. It’s his leitmotif, his little eccentricity, his
trademark by way of some added, Tintinish character. For all its
wind-walking, postcard-trite, 1930s Shell landscape, Nicholas Crane’s Britannia
did show us one thing — that a man in an anorak climbing a wet hill in a
high wind with an umbrella is disproportionately and irrationally annoying.
They say Fiona Bruce has done wonders for the viewing figures of the Antiques
Roadshow. Now, who on earth thinks: “I don’t really like knick-knacks or the
people who flaunt them, but I do love that Fiona, so I’ll watch just for
her”? Well, actually, I did, and she is, it’s true, a thing of beauty; not
just decorative, but functional. I’m sure the BBC wouldn’t dream of selling
her, but, for insurance purposes, does it have any idea what she’s worth?
I’d estimate two Moira Stuarts. If a pair of dirty old collectors got into a
bidding war, she might go as high as an Anna Ford or an Angela Rippon.
There are two things I’ve noticed about the Antiques Roadshow.
The quality of the experts seems to have got a lot worse. They sound like
eBay salesmen or Oxfam shop volunteers; their suits are later editions,
their accents comprehensive replacements. And the other thing is the
antiques — they’re hideous. Either that means all the good stuff is
now owned by museums and gay men in Hampstead, or old stuff just isn’t
attractive any more. Perhaps I’ve just got to the end of brown furniture and
decorative whatnots, but there wasn’t a single thing I’d have given
houseroom to. Maybe, finally, I’ve come to the end of the past.
The Antiques Rogue Show was a silly punning title that belied quite a
neat little drama, the re-created real-life story of the faking of an
Egyptian goddess by a remarkably talented but socially inept amateur artist
and his ageing fantasist parents. It was told to us as if by a journalist
searching for the real story of the family. He didn’t find it, which was a
bit disappointing, because then neither did we. This being a TV play and not
Panorama, they could have just made it up. The clue was in a disclaimer at
the beginning, which said this was all based on a true story, but some of
the characters and scenes never took place. So, essentially, it looked
right, but it was a fake.
The Diary of Anne Frank (BBC1, Monday-Friday)
Nicholas Crane’s Britannia (BBC2, Tuesday)
Antiques Roadshow (BBC1, Sunday)
The Antiques Rogue Show (BBC2, Sunday)
