I spy a half-baked tribute
YEARS ago I auditioned to take part in a “spy training” reality show. I got past the “say something to the camera” stage but when the producers discovered I didn’t drive it was over. In the darkest hours of wartime perhaps the recruiters of the Special Operations Executive might have been more broad-minded.
Part history, part Apprentice in khaki, SECRET AGENT SELECTION: WW2 (BBC2) puts modern types through the gruelling procedures developed in 1940 in response to the Nazis’ sweep through Europe.
The brainchild of Hugh Dalton, who carried the splendid title of Minister of Economic Warfare, the SOE was intended to set occupied Europe ablaze through covert ops behind the lines. Ditching the strict hierarchies of the armed forces, SOE recruited foreigners, women, factory workers, artists and aristos.
Many of their stories have been locked away, classified until recently and last night some splendid case notes paid tribute to a few of those heroes. As with all good snippets though, you were left wanting more. Instead, you got the unreal reality show, a bunch of hopefuls doing assault courses and team-building exercises and blubbing to the camera.
They’re not a dull bunch by any means – drag artists, amputee army veterans, expert linguists and caddish property developers. It’s hard though to overlook the fact that not one of them is going to be parachuted into occupied France by dead of night.
Whether they’re prepared to say in an interview that they wouldn’t mind cutting someone’s throat, they aren’t going to have to, nor are they are going to be in a situation where someone might cut theirs.
In that sense, the mugging and capering and overdone theatrics of The Apprentice are more real because someone actually gets a job at the end of it. It’s hard to see why the story of the SOE needs to be told this way, even harder to see it as a fair tribute to what its agents achieved. They did their jobs and slipped off into the shadows. This lot pretend to do their jobs and get emotional on the telly.
Emotional scenes were thick on the ground in ancient Rome as the PLEBS (ITV2) lost one of their number in a tragic accident. With flatmate Stylax flattened by a marble block, his pals Marcus (Tom Rosenthal) and Grumio (Ryan Sampson) had to get creative when it came to meeting the rent.
As callous property developer Crassus, Robert Lindsay put in a performance that ranks alongside John Hurt’s version of Caligula, another Roman with a mean streak wider than the Tiber. Crassus however had an Achilles heel, his beloved turtle, Myrtle. When the boys threatened to evict Myrtle from her portable home, Crassus was forced to cough up compo.
The lads acquired a magnificent downtown property that just happened to have been a public lavatory and a new sidekick, Jason (Jonathan Pointing). Handsome as Apollo, thick as shield leather, Jason has a ring of Joey Essex about him while Grumio is a nod to the drunken kitchen slave in the Cambridge Latin textbooks still studied in British schools.
That’s one of the things to love about this sitcom, the way it blends the now and then. The boys’ initial plan was to steal some high-value art from Crassus’s villa.
Unfortunately, paintings hadn’t been invented yet and nicking a mosaic can take centuries.