Army’s sad jungle calls
TOMORROW’S wars will be fought remotely, with technicians in command centres with keyboards. Will that make them easier to start as well as finish? Watching MESSAGES HOME: LOST FILMS OF THE BRITISH ARMY (Sunday, C4) you could see why the people who lived through the Second World War were so keen to build a lasting peace.
This precious archive of film reels was uncovered by accident when some workmen were clearing out Manchester Town Hall.
Instead of chucking them, they gave them to Manchester Metropolitan University’s film archive team, who realised they’d found gold. The films were messages from local men who were absent for years on end during the war as part of the “forgotten Army”. This unhappy moniker sums up their position well for they were sent to the jungles of Burma with the near-impossible task of turning back the tide of the Far East’s fortunes. Riddled with malaria and other diseases, they fought, often hand-to-hand, with Japanese soldiers in unbearable conditions.
As a morale-boosting exercise, the Army sent out a film unit, so these remote combatants could record messages to loved ones.
These were then shown at local cinemas back in the UK, where no doubt many tears fell into the popcorn. It was hard not to feel sad now, seeing the forced jollity of these frightened young men, talking without saying anything to people they couldn’t see.
Some were stiff and awkward, some made cheeky jokes and sang. “Tojo can’t shake a man oo’s served his time on’t Corporation Bus!” Not one told the truth. It might have been fanciful imagining on our part but as the later films came on, there seemed to be even less pretence.
Blokes chattered on about their suntans, how they’d soon be home, Lancashire accents clashing with the palms and Irrawaddy River but you could hear the weariness. Those lucky enough to return rarely spoke of their experiences. Their messages didn’t either but they told us what we needed to know.
SACRIFICE (Saturday, Channel 5) was full of shocks, mainly because so many good people had taken part in a tale of such unspeakable badness. Rupert Graves played Duncan Guthrie, a Shetland Islander returning to his homeland with his American wife Tora who, after a string of miscarriages, was determined to adopt a baby.
It didn’t seem to strike Tora (Radha Mitchell) as odd that the entire population of the isle of Unst consisted of widowed men bringing up sons, solo. It didn’t strike Duncan either but that was because he was up to his neck in a sinister cult whose USP was the sacrificing of recently-pregnant women. It all began when Tora, a surgeon (who instantly found work in the tiny island’s gleaming, state-of-the-art hospital), decided to bury a dead animal. Naturally, she started up a handily-adjacent bulldozer with its keys in, dug a 12ft pit and found a woman’s body in it.
That was silly. So was the other state-of-the-art hospital just up the road, where young women flocked to give their babies up for adoption.
So was the bit when Duncan told Tora her miscarriages were his fault because he’d been taking “an unapproved male contraceptive”.
Ditto that the fairy-like “trows” of local legend were actually a warrior death cult being kept alive by a bunch of solicitors and quantity surveyors. The critic’s verdict? Less sacrifice, more of a waste.