Pigs’ heads and pickled radishes? It’s the scoff that Scousers love!

The Rebel Chef: My Restaurant Revolution 1944: Should We Bomb Auschwitz?

Chef Gary Usher has a simple philosophy for his customers: ‘Liking the food isn’t the challenge, trying it is.’ We saw proof of this in The Rebel Chef: My Restaurant Revolution (C4). Gary is on a mission to bring good, creative food to the masses.

After leaving school with no qualifications, he slipped into a life of drugs and crime until a job in a kitchen saw him fall in love with cooking. This show dealt with the opening of his latest venture — Pinion, a french bistro in the Merseyside town of Prescot.

Would locals be accepting of a menu that included pig’s head, steak tartare and pickled radish?

Street interviews suggested not. ‘ I think I’ll just stick with Wetherspoons,’ said one local.

Banks won’t lend to Gary, so he raises money by crowd-funding — asking people to give in return for free dining. he hoped to raise £50,000 for his project, but happily got £ 86,000, allowing him to transform a former betting shop into a chic restaurant.

financial director Claire was worried. There weren’t enough potential customers in the area and a huge retail park nearby provided stiff competition. By her calculations, Pinion would need to take £10,000 a week just to break even.

Street-cleaner Dave warned Gary that he must serve generous portions because: ‘ Scousers love their scoff.’ On the day before opening, Gary panicked. Was the restaurant too posh? The menu too intimidating?

But opening night was a roaring success with diners merrily tucking into raw steak and pig’s head starter. A year on, Pinion is going strong with hundreds of glowing online reviews.

Gary’s boundless enthusiasm and hard work left me rooting for him and his team. Now with six successful restaurants to his name, let’s hope he doesn’t ‘do a Jamie Oliver’ and overstretch himself.

The question of just how much the Allies knew about what was happening at Auschwitz was explored in 1944: Should We Bomb

Auschwitz? (BBC2). Rumours had circulated about the death camp, but until two prisoners broke out in April 1944, there had been no credible intelligence about the atrocities.

Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler achieved the apparently impossible when they escaped the camp and fled to Slovakia to tell the world of the mass extermination of Jews. having spent two years as prisoners — Wetzler as a registrar documenting arrivals and deaths — they confirmed that 1.5 million Jews had been gassed. They also knew that a new crematorium had been built to handle the 800,000 hungarian Jews the Nazis were planning on exterminating in coming months.

As a result of their information, the Auschwitz Protocol report was written and sent covertly to the War Refugee Board in Switzerland.

By July 1944, when the report reached Winston Churchill, the Nazis were gassing 5,000 prisoners a day. he supported an airstrike, but Sir Archibald Sinclair, head of the Air Ministry, wanted nothing to distract from the Normandy campaign. In any case, in September 1944, Auschwitz was bombed — accidentally — and 40 prisoners were killed.

frustrated, the author of the Auschwitz Protocol leaked his findings to the press and the story of the death camps became known to the world.

Told through dramatisation, the testimony of experts and surviving prisoners, the documentary was thought-provoking and compelling, and left viewers full of admiration at the risks Vrba and Wetzler had taken to tell their story. CHRISTOPHER STEVENS is away.