A Hitler documentary with a jarringly jaunty tone
Do you find that documentaries about Hitler are a bit negative? Always going on about the bad stuff he did. Honestly, can’t a man start a Second World War and engineer the Holocaust without people mentioning it all the time? Well, Channel 4 was on hand to lighten the mood. Hitler’s Supercars was a film which didn’t so much strike the wrong tone as belt out a jaunty musical number.
This was largely the fault of one man, the auctioneer and historian Chris Routledge. The premise of the programme was perfectly interesting: Hitler’s determination in the 1930s to dominate motor racing and set new land speed records, as a demonstration of the Third Reich’s power. Also, as the documentary reminded us, Hitler did like a nice car.
The contributors included James Holland, the respected historian, and Richard Williams, the journalist and author. Williams in particular treated the subject matter thoughtfully. Not so Routledge, who could not contain his glee at the whole thing.
“He just stood up to Mercedes-benz! ‘These guys are playing too, what you got?’” burbled Routledge, in a segment about Hitler deciding to split funding for a state-sponsored racing programme between Mercedes and an upstart rival, Auto Union. A new car design was “about one big thing: Teutonic power”. He was beside himself when discussing Germany’s sporting prowess in 1936: “What weren’t they achieving?” Mind you, when he did attempt sombre, it strayed into Alan Partridge territory, as when he discussed Bernd Rosemeyer’s crash during a 1937 land speed record attempt: “Rosemeyer was found with effectively not a mark on him. [pause] But he was dead.”
Holland did his best to set all of this in context, tying the growing success of Germany in Grand Prix races to the rise of the National Socialists in the early 1930s. But even he occasionally gave in to the excitement of it all, with language that wouldn’t be out of place on Top Gear: “There are lots of things the Nazis do really badly but one area where they are absolutely, stupendously good is in propaganda and PR. They nail it.”
Towards the end, the programme used computer modelling to work out that the Mercedes-benz T80 would have been the world’s first 370mph land speed car, if the war hadn’t broken out and put paid to the attempt. What rotten luck, eh? Anita Singh
Originality clearly wasn’t a priority for the makers of the glossy French sci-fi thriller The Last Wave (BBC Four). It shares its name with a spooky Australian whodunit from 1977. And the plot has been cobbled together from spare parts of Lost and glum supernatural drama The Leftovers. Despite all that, it effortlessly charmed as a slaloming slice of escapism on Saturday night.
The stunning coastal French setting, bathed in sunshine and caressed by waves that glimmer like emeralds, was one novelty as the six-part series opened with a double bill. Another was the fact that, even before things got weird and metaphysical, the citizens of the fictional seaside town of Brizan seemed to be caught in a wildfire of raging hormones.
English-language sci-fi is inevitably po-faced and humour-deficient. Here, when our heroes weren’t gazing at the huge scary cloud that had materialised just beyond the shore, they were nipping off for quick snogging sessions. It was like Game of Thrones with surfboards instead of swords.
The premise was bonkers. A cursed cumulus had manifested over Brizan in France’s sunny southwest. Soon it was swooping towards the beach, gobbling up participants in a surfing tournament. Five hours later the 10 wave-riders reappeared, subtlety changed yet with no memories of what had happened. Grieving mother Lena was haunted by bizarre dreams. Surfing champion Max, was plagued by migraines. And what about Thomas and his X-ray vision? Or teenager Mathieu with his healing hands?
Greedy developers were also in the process of turning Brizan into a vulgar resort town so it was hard to miss the ecological message. The cloud is presumably nature’s riposte. As an eco adventure The Last Wave prioritises thrills over chills and there’s no getting around the fact a big fluffy cloud isn’t particularly terrifying. But, with its mix of sun, the supernatural and over-sexed surfers, the opening chapters were pleasantly absurd. Shamelessly derivative it may be, but this giddy mystery nonetheless landed with the best sort of splash. Ed Power
Hitler’s Supercars ★★ The Last Wave ★★★★★