A powerful look at one of the darkest days of the Troubles
The recent Yougov poll which asked Conservative members what they would be prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve Brexit did not propose the ultimate option. Would they rather have Brexit than peace? The question loitered discreetly in the background for most of The Day
Mountbatten Died (BBC Two), Sam Collyns’s powerful commemoration of one of the blackest days of the Troubles, when the IRA murdered British royalty and blew up 18 members of the Parachute regiment, while an innocent civilian was shot in error.
“He would have been astonished,” said Mountbatten’s biographer Philip Ziegler, exuding plummy English detachment, “that there were IRA members interested in his existence.” Their target styled himself Mountbatten of Burma; his granddaughter was named India, after the country whose partition he oversaw. But these grand imperial associations were no defence when the IRA’S South Armagh brigade snuck onto his unguarded fishing boat, moored in the village of Mullaghmore just south of the border, and planted the bomb that would kill him, his daughter’s mother-in-law, his grandson and a local teenage boy.
The story of both atrocities was carefully stitched together from every perspective: witnesses, rescuers, those who survived and the relatives of those who didn’t, all in different ways were still scarred and bereaved. To observe a cultural neutrality, the voice-over was spoken by the Scottish actor Bill Paterson.
Remembering terror does funny things to people; India Hicks wore a brave smile and apologised for her tears as she recalled being packed off to Gordonstoun days after the state funeral, where that night in her dorm someone cracked the most appalling joke about her grandfather’s murder. “The mindset would have been operational,” explained Kieran Conway, who had been the IRA’S director of intelligence. “Kill them, without too much reflection.” He emitted a stab of laughter that mingled cold callousness with baffled regret.
Conway confirmed that it was Martin Mcguinness who signed off on all this carnage. Put in this clarifying context, the handshake in 2012 that the Queen offered to Mcguinness became an ever more profound symbol of reconciliation.
The 40th anniversary falls with the troubled border once more at the heart of geopolitics. “The problem with peace,” concluded the veteran Irish journalist Olivia O’leary, “is you have to keep working at it.” Essential viewing for our leaders.
What do you do with dull forebears? Kate Winslet is much the biggest star in the current run of Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One), but there was nothing stellar about her ancestral narrative. Lightning struck again as Katherine Ryan, the delightfully perky comedian, clambered about her family tree in Canada. But this was a very different style of unearthing nothing very interesting.
Her goal was to disinter some form of English heritage and buy some cultural credit with her British-born, rank-pulling daughter Violet – to “move up in the world, backwards”, as she put it. And she wanted to explore her mother’s lesser-known lineage which, when she was a child, was somehow never discussed: “We were overscheduled.”
But her journey back to the snows of her native Canada yielded only doughty forebears who strived and loved and bred without troubling the headline writers. There was a Wesleyan Methodist preacher who was the first principal of a college in Toronto. Back more generations there was a couple who traded in Newfoundland cod who lost everything at sea, including one of their sons.
Winslet would have rent her garment at such a reverse. Ryan, whose whole shtick is about being essentially unserious, managed a sad emoji face. But if her history lacked oomph, you get something else with Ryan, which is the joyous lack of an off switch. She’s always scoping a conversation for the next quip. Did she reckon she resembled a good-looking ancestor who wrote poetry? “I don’t really know what I look like naturally any more. That ship has sailed.”
The story ended in Corfe Castle in Dorset where a forebear once owned a pub and got into trouble for being lippy with a pair of magistrates. His home was, disappointingly, not actually a castle that she could boast about to Violet. “She won’t know it’s a village,” Ryan said. “We won’t tell her.”
The Day Mountbatten Died ★★★★★ Who Do You Think You Are? ★★★