How religion makes waves
WE TELLY lovers are well used to the anniversary phenomenon. TV programmes cluster around significant dates, commemorating 100 years since this, 75 since that, or 20 since the other.
Right now, it being 70 years since VE Day and a hundred since Gallipoli, you don’t need to switch your TV on to know what sort of documentaries are showing.
In two months, it will also be the 427th anniversary of the Spanish Armada. This being a bit of an odd number, we can either assume that someone at the Beeb has an odd taste in numbers, or ARMADA: 12 DAYS TO SAVE ENGLAND
( Sunday, BBC2) is just too good to hold off until August ( the month in which the great event took place), or until the 450th anniversary in 2038.
It’s one of those shows that’s trying hard to look like an event, even if it isn’t. There are actors dressed as Elizabethans, computergenerated ships and sea battles, Dan Snow as lead man and a sort of war room with a pair of young, dashing history professors moving model ships about on a map.
The critic in me would love to say this doesn’t work but actually, it does, rather well, adding drama and urgency to something usually treated as a dull footnote in textbooks.
It’s helped, not a little, by the vast amount of source material to hand, much of it coming from Elizabeth’s nemesis, Philip II of Spain. A dour, monkish figure, Philip spent his days micromanaging every aspect of an empire that stretched from Peru to the Philippines, generating so much correspondence that Prince Charles’ black- spider letters look like Post- it notes.
We can see right inside the history, the tussles between Philip’s highborn, useless naval commander and his clever, self- made deputy.
From the other side, we can see the sheer terror of the situation England was in. Elizabeth’s coffers were bare. She’d equipped Sir Francis Drake’s navy with state- ofthe- art guns, making it easier for him to menace Spanish galleons, attack Spain’s coast and ultimately provoke the Spanish Navy into sending an invasion fleet.
Now, with the 125- ship Armada on its way, there was no cash left for gunpowder and shot.
On one level, this looks like an antiquated story, royal despots slugging it out with cannons. On another, you can’t help but see parallels with modern times.
Philip II was a pious Catholic, who believed God had given him a mission to save the heretic souls of Protestant England. That may have been 427 years ago, or 450, it makes no difference. We’re still menaced by people who believe in Holy War.
The title 1945: THE SAVAGE PEACE ( Sunday, BBC2) stems from a joke the German troops used to make. “Enjoy the war, because the peace will be savage.”
They weren’t wrong, and, as this upsetting film showed, many of the victims of peace were the innocent ethnic Germans scattered throughout eastern Europe. As the war came to an end, the nonGerman populations turned on them with unutterable violence.
There was a lot of video- nasty stuff, some of it captured gleefully, other bits filmed by people appalled to have woken from one nightmare and plunged into another. I’m not sure I needed an hour of it, to be honest, although historically, it’s important that such a collection of images exists.
It reminds us that there’s a savage in all of us.