A deluge of darkest days

MAYBE I’m imagining this, but TV seems to have become very Hitlery of late. I don’t mean there’s a load of little Hitlers actually running it, although I do hear of certain TV executives who can be a tad dictatorial.

No, I mean there seems to be an awful lot of Hitler-themed documentaries.

Channel 4, for example, has been showing Hitler: The Lost Tapes on Saturday nights (directly up against Strictly – how’s that for alternative viewing?), poring over hours of cine-camera footage and hundreds of rare photos.

BBC4, meanwhile, has brought us Lost Home Movies Of Nazi Germany, focusing on the lives of Hitler’s citizens, up to and throughout the war.

And on digital channel Yesterday we’ve had THE BUILDINGS THAT FOUGHT HITLER (there’s another episode of that tonight at 9pm), Hitler’s Propaganda Machine and, well, a fair few other programmes with Hitler in their title. (I’d log on to Google to confirm what they’re called, only one’s search preferences can be used by tech firms to form a picture of one’s personal tastes and I don’t want to end up bombarded with ads for Hitler memorabilia, Hitler biographies, Hitler beach towels and suchlike).

And yet still it comes, because returning tonight to BBC2 is

RISE OF THE NAZIS (9pm), the programme that’s been looking at the way in which Hitler’s party seized control of Germany in the early 1930s and immediately set about redefining the word “evil”.

This concluding series does come with something of a spoiler in its title, in that it’s actually subheaded The Downfall.

But I don’t suppose there’ll be many viewers lodging complaints with the BBC for giving away the ending, other than maybe the kind who express astonishment whenever they’re expected to possess at least a modicum of knowledge of events from before they were born.

In this first episode we’re entering the final weeks of the conflict, and yet the Fuhrer appears to be in denial, or the 1940s equivalent of that.

Rather than surrender, he opts for total war, abandoning the conventional rules of engagement and targeting whatever and whoever he chooses.

Rise Of The Nazis obviously recalls one of the darkest, most horrific chapters in the history of the human race.And yet, like those other Nazi documentaries, it’s a compelling watch.

It’s an uncomfortable thought, but I guess we’ll always be grimly fascinated by the unspeakably awful depths to which human beings are capable of sinking.

Elsewhere tonight, Jamie Oliver shows us his shakshuka in JAMIE’S ONE-PAN WONDERS (C4, 8.30pm).