A refreshingly balanced look at the British Empire
The BBC has made an evenly balanced documentary about the British Empire. Just kidding! Portillo’s Empire Journey (Friday) was the latest offering from Channel 5, which has lately been upping its game in the history department.
This first episode focused on India. As Michael Portillo pointed out, there are those who like to gloss over the deaths and the looting and the subjugation of a nation because, hey ho, they left behind a civil service and an excellent railway. And then there are those who see the East India Company as the epitome of evil, and that is the end of that.
Portillo steered a middle course. When the facts were unassailable, he didn’t try to counter them: the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed by British troops, was a “slaughter”; the British shamefully broke its promise to grant home rule after asking Indians to lay down their lives in the First World War.
But when it came to the majority of those who ruled India during the Raj, and their attempts to “civilise” the natives, he attempted to give their actions some context. “Does that mean these people with attitudes we now regard as appalling – so condescending, so contemptuous – nevertheless they could have been conscientious and well-meaning?” he asked of an Indian academic, who replied that this was the case, but that the good intentions were also disastrously insensitive.
Portillo deferred to Indian voices throughout, rather than foist his own opinions on us (I’m thinking here of Jeremy Paxman’s Empire series of a few years ago). This was not the jaunty, peacocking Portillo familiar from his travel documentaries. I have no idea if he writes his own scripts, but there were some neat descriptions here – Clive of India was “the delinquent son of a minor Shropshire landowner”, the East India Co became “Britain’s biggest narcotics dealer”.
How, Portillo asked, has India come to terms with its colonial past? Do the famines, the massacres, the subjugation, not rankle? The curator of Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial replied that “it’s part of our soul and we carry it with acceptance and tolerance”. Of course, there will be many other Indians who take a less generous view.
In his closing comments, Portillo finally gave us his personal view: that India’s economic power and functioning democracy are the product of its relationship with Britain. You may agree with him, you may not. Good documentaries should prompt you to draw your own conclusions.
The thing about BBC Four, the channel that has sunk to the bottom of the corporation’s priority list and will reportedly soon fall off it altogether, is that it gives you programmes you never knew you wanted. David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema (Sunday) is a case in point. I had never heard of David Stratton, and never given much thought to Australian cinema. Yet after stumbling across this last of a threepart series, I now know more about both, and feel the richer for it.
Stratton is a British-born film critic and former director of the Sydney Film Festival, who hosted a movie review programme on television for 28 years. He loves his subject, and guided us through it with thought and expertise. What more can you ask in a presenter? He has his celebrity fans too and most of them popped up here: Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush and Russell Crowe.
This was not simply a history of Australian film, but of how Stratton had received those films over the years. A young Crowe starred in Romper Stomper, a film that Stratton refused to award a star rating on its release in 1992 because he was troubled by its extreme violence and depiction of neonazis. The director, Geoffrey Wright, reacted by throwing a glass of white wine over him at a party.
There were films here that were unfamiliar to me – The Castle, Lantana – and which I now intend to seek out on Stratton’s recommendation. Others I have seen, and was happy to be reminded of – even the short clip here of Rabbit-proof Fence reduced me to tears, which is partly down to the brilliance of that particular film, but also to the programme’s editing and the context it provided.
Stratton is not a presenter that you could imagine appearing on the main BBC channels. He’s 80, and his confession to being a non-user of social media would horrify the denizens of New Broadcasting House. This was not a flashy new show, or an original commission. But it informed, educated and entertained, and doesn’t that count for something?
Portillo’s Empire Journey ★★★★ David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema ★★★★