A modest but momentous tribute to our ordinary heroes
In these politically turbulent times, the Second World War has been fetishised by excitable types as a toxic campaigning meme. My Grandparents’ War (Channel 4), which immersed celebrities in the facts of the war effort, has been a welcome and cleansing tonic. Rounding off the series, Carey Mulligan was the youngest of the four actors to take part. Thus, of all the forebears who were featured, her grandfather Denzil “Dens” Booth was the wettest behind the ears.
A teenager from a Welsh valley, he was fast-tracked into studying radar technology at Swansea University. In 1944, on the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable, he docked in Sydney where he was put up by a family with Welsh heritage. Mulligan had barely known him, so it was intensely moving to hear him come alive in a letter from the Australian women who remembered trips to the cinema with him 75 years ago.
Then, just 21, Booth’s horrendous task at the Battle of Okinawa was to calculate in mere seconds the line of attack from kamikaze strikes, one of which exploded only feet away from him. The story of suicide pilots was a test for Mulligan’s intellectual empathy. A campaigner for the charity War Child, she went to Japan in search of clues to the mentality that could convert boys into human torpedoes. To explain it proved a cultural leap too far for the two elderly Japanese men she interviewed. It took American professor Mordecai Sheftall to picture the moment the ultimate sacrifice was requested: “Who wants to be the milquetoast who says, ‘I don’t think I want to do it’?”
The series which has magically produced ancient veterans like rabbits from hats sprung a pair of nonagenarian veterans of Indefatigable on Mulligan, who was suitably awed. Roy Hawks, a former pilot who knew of her grandfather, had fun watching footage of wobbly fighter planes crashing on a floating runway. “That’s how not to land,” he chuckled.
Less jauntily, Harry Anderson recalled the kamikaze attack that killed two friends sitting next to Booth. “The sweet sugary smell of burning bodies never leaves you,” he told Mulligan. “There we are, it’s history, isn’t it?”
In a momentous series, these modest old co-stars have had one last national duty to perform: to show that they are not figures of calcified myth, but ordinary heroes who harbour no hatred of yesteryear’s defeated foe.
After one episode of Sticks and Stones (ITV), I was hopeful it would turn into a revenge comedy. In the end Thomas Benson (Ken Nwosu) connived a triumph over his bullying colleagues, but to deliver it Mike Bartlett’s script had to bend itself into weird and fantastical shapes.
Take time: the plot required Thomas to have an unconvincing inability to keep an eye on the clock. His watch, very conveniently, had broken. Then there was the idea that work colleagues know nothing about one another, which played fast and loose with the audience’s credulity.
Thomas’s chief tormentor Isobel (Susannah Fielding) turned out in a climactic reveal to be the wife of the very bully who had made his life a misery at school. It felt entirely coincidental that Thomas went to this figure to ask for help. Because he didn’t know they were married, when Thomas did gain his revenge, he had no idea his victory killed two birds with one stone.
Nothing made sense, least of all rich-as-croesus Isobel working as a sales underling in a business park. When she revealed her true colours, who didn’t think, I bet Thomas will be getting all this on his smartphone?
Fielding was icily convincing as the string-pulling puppeteer. Nwosu was highly watchable as a victim you really rooted for. Performances aside, Sticks and Stones never quite managed to moult its original skin as it made the move from stage to screen (it began life as the 2015 play Bull). The strongest scenes had a theatrical intensity but somehow they didn’t sit comfortably in a naturalistic setting.
The problem was that Bartlett, who has spoken of being bullied as a child, transplanted that traumatic memory to a workplace context. His characters – especially the two sidekicks Becky (Ritu Arya) and Andy (Sean Sagar) – were essentially puerile fifth formers in business threads.
The conclusion was too trim: that like a judoka the victim can use an opponent’s superior strength against them and, in Thomas’s case, extort a million quid in return for silence. For anyone who has suffered real bullying in an office, there was no practical help provided by Bartlett’s bespoke office solution.
My Grandparents’ War: Carey Mulligan ★★★★
Sticks and Stones ★★