Forget real history, the Beeb only cares about celebs now
When World War II ended in europe, Britain did not hear the news straight away. The German generals signed the surrender not on May 8, 1945 — the date we now celebrate as Ve Day — but in the small hours of Monday, May 7.
The documents promised a halt to all hostilities by the end of the following day, but to all practical purposes, the war was over on the 7th. The German people were told of their final defeat within hours.
In Britain, however, the news was held back, to appease the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who had his own devious reasons for suppressing the announcement. It was not until the evening that Churchill proclaimed the next day would be a national holiday.
Tens of thousands of Londoners spilled out into the streets on the 7th, in a spontaneous celebration, and all along the Thames boats sounded their whistles and hooters in a cacophony of joy. The impromptu party was ended by a thunderstorm and a downpour.
none of this could you have learned from VE Day: Remembering Victory (BBC1). The whole 90 minutes was devoid of the quirky detail or meticulous research that makes for good retrospective TV –— all we got was celebrity reminiscences. This was like getting a history degree from the University of The One Show.
The chief fact we discovered was that plenty of people who joined the street parties on the 8th later went on to be famous. Some of them, like David Attenborough and the lovely actress June Whitfield, became proper national treasures.
It’s nice they have happy memories of the victory celebrations, but their stories were rarely very illuminating. Some, like veteran TV presenter John Craven and actress Miriam Margolyes, could barely remember the night: they were only three or four years old at the time.
There must be many people with far better tales, but they were ignored: the Beeb has decided normal folk are boring. That’s a bitter irony, since — as a much better programme on C4 pointed out last week — status and fame were so irrelevant on Ve night that the future queen and her sister were able to slip out of Buckingham Palace and join the revelries, as ordinary Britons.
Because the celebs didn’t have anything too riveting to tell, the show ran out of material after 40 minutes. So director Mary Cranitch ploughed on, leaving her title behind and asking about anything she could think of. Rationing, the black market, holidays at Butlin’s and even the weather came up, with a segment on the winter white-out of 1947.
The actor Patrick Stewart talked movingly about his father’s struggle with shell-shock and alcoholism, and CHRISTOPHER STEVENS Craven’s description of his dad’s return after more than three years in a Japanese prisoner- of-war camp was heartbreaking.
But these stories belonged in a programme about the demob years, not shovelled into a mishmash that failed to get to the real heart of Ve Day.
The Stranger On The Bridge (C4) also seemed to run low on material. This film followed the search by 26-year-old Jonny Benjamin for the Good Samaritan who talked him down off Waterloo Bridge and saved him from suicide.
Too often C4 treats mental illness as a freak show, with series such as Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners. Thankfully, this piece of detective work was handled more sensitively, because Jonny was still in a fragile state. But director Sam Forsdike trod so softly that some important questions were never addressed.
Why would 38 people, many of them attention-seekers, come forward claiming to be the selfless stranger? Where were the psychology experts to explain this nasty phenomenon?
When we finally met Jonny’s saviour, neil, he was patently a bloke with a sunny disposition. his presence could cheer anyone up, but we never found out exactly what he said to Jonny on the bridge, to talk him back from the brink.
Instead, there was dreary footage of baked beans being emptied into a pan, and tracking shots through London crowds — lazy filler, in other words. Like the Ve Day programme, this was an opportunity for excellent TV wasted.