A salute to the walking embodiment of British grit
Why did we take Captain Sir Tom Moore to our hearts? Of course his charity effort was inspiring, but it was more than that. He represents the best of British. In The Life and Times of Captain Sir Tom (ITV), historian Dominic Sandbrook did as good a job as any of defining it: “He seems to personify virtues that we think we’ve lost. With his wartime background and his longevity and as a family man, he became the perfect avatar of what we would like to think that Britain could be.” Sandbrook also described him as a secular version of the Queen; I imagine the ever-modest Captain Tom would have snorted at that.
Narrated by Hugh Bonneville, this was a wonderful hour in Captain Tom’s company. His has been one of the cheering stories of lockdown, a testament to the spirit of optimism and just b-----ing on. He had hoped to raise £1,000 for NHS Charities Together by walking 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday. In the end he raised £33million. The documentary didn’t dwell on this, instead choosing to look back at his life.
It was a personal history, but also a chronicle of the 20th century. From a boyhood happily roaming the moors around Keighley with his motorcycle and his dog, to conscription at 20 and fighting in the Burma campaign, and on to a successful career and loving family. His was a story of hard work paying off; he became a wealthy businessman, but only after years as a labourer and a door-to-door salesman.
He never complained. “It was unpleasant,” was how he summed up the Second World War. He nursed his beloved wife, Pamela, through dementia, visiting her every day for the last five years of her life. “I had a contract, hadn’t I? In sickness and in health.” And as for free love in the so-called Swinging Sixties: “No, I was far too busy.”
His zest for life remains undimmed – here is a man who was holidaying alone in India and Nepal in his 90s. The charity walk made him a national hero, but even before that he was a man to be admired. Perhaps one of the lessons of the programme is that elderly people have fascinating stories to tell, and we should spend more time listening to them.
The new series of Crime and Punishment (Channel 4) opened with an episode that felt wearily familiar. Not because it was another documentary following the work of the police, although we have our fair share of those; but because the UK’S woeful record on prosecuting rape is a subject that drifts in and out of public discourse. This has to change, we say, and then it doesn’t, and the conversation moves on.
The deputy chief constable of Hampshire Constabulary, Sara Glen, is in no doubt where the blame lies. “These attrition rates are horrendous and it’s not through lack of effort from police,” she said, referring to statistics showing the tiny proportion of reported rapes that end up in court. Over to the Crown Prosecution Service, which argued that it can only bring cases where there is a realistic chance of conviction, and he-said-shesaid cases of consent are notoriously difficult to prosecute.
In order to illustrate this, the programme focused on two cases (in which the women waived their right to anonymity). In the first, a woman, Trish, had been tied up and raped with a knife to her throat, by a man who she feared would kill her. The man was her husband. The case went to court and he was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years.
The second case was a trickier prospect. Some university students encountered a man walking out of a bedroom in their house. In the room was a girl who they had also never seen before, naked and unconscious. The young woman was called Shannon and police established that she had met her alleged attacker in the street after emerging alone from a nightclub. She was drunk and unsteady, and he offered to take her home. Shannon had no idea how she ended up in a strange house and had no memory of having sex, although forensic examination confirmed that she had.
The police handled the case sensitively – in contrast, we saw a horrendous bit of footage from a 1982 documentary in which detectives treated a victim with contempt – and believed a crime had occurred. But the CPS didn’t think a jury would convict. Shannon described the decision as heartbreaking. A CPS lawyer said: “We can’t just bring bad behaviour to court.” The system needs to change, but it is difficult to know how.
The Life and Times of Captain Sir Tom ★★★★★
Crime and Punishment ★★★