Hallelujah for this gagpacked religious comedy
In a list of television characters least likely to abandon all reason and join a doomsday cult, the exceedingly rational Will from The Inbetweeners would surely be near the top. Yet here he is in Everyone Else Burns (Channel 4), running his family through apocalypse drills in preparation for the Day of Reckoning. “Pack your bags and get down the stairs,” he instructs them after bursting into their rooms at 4am, “before your soul turns to ash.”
Ok, this character isn’t Will. He’s David Lewis, a father-of-two who works as a parcel sorting agent and has the worst bowl haircut ever created. But he’s played by Simon Bird, who is doomed to repeat his Inbetweeners
character, just with different hair, for the rest of his days (see also: Friday Night Dinner). The same intonation, the same mannerisms, the same air of righteous indignation.
If you can get past this (and perhaps you have never seen The Inbetweeners,
or just love the character so much that you’re happy to see him in everything) then there is much to enjoy here. It’s not a comedy going for cheap laughs about Christianity. It is a show about family, and it has a lot of heart. David is the overbearing patriarch whose dreams of becoming a church elder are constantly thwarted. His longsuffering wife, Fiona (Kate O’flynn), and teenage daughter, Rachel (Amy James-kelly), are starting to wonder if there may be more to life than waiting for everyone to burn in the lake of fire – Rachel starts to fall for a boy from down the road, and Fiona is casting envious glances at her businesswoman neighbour, Melissa, played by the always-watchable Morgana Robinson.
It’s a great premise. Much of the comedy comes from the subversion of norms. David and Fiona are appalled that Rachel has studied for her exams when she should have been out preaching. “Straight As, five out of five for effort. Where did we go wrong?” they cry.
Every line has a comic payoff and every character, from the leads down to the supporting players, is wellwritten. This may be a sect but everything is recognisable: David’s rivalry with church elders Kadiff Kirwan and Arsher Ali, one of the funniest things here, could just as easily happen in the office or at the golf club. And there are truths about family and friends that make it seem like more than a throwaway sitcom.
What springs to mind when you hear the word “Holocaust”? This was the question that opened James Bulgin’s film, How the Holocaust Began (BBC Two). Most likely you will think of somewhere like Auschwitz, and the Nazis presiding over processed mass murder.
But Bulgin, a historian from the Imperial War Museum, wanted to show us something different. Largescale executions of Jews began taking place in 1941, as the Germans made their way across Eastern Europe. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out many of these murders. But the chilling truth presented here was that they did not – in fact, could not – act alone. They needed not just the tacit support of the civilian population, but their active participation. Ordinary people facilitated, and sometimes carried out, the mass killings of men, women and children.
The documentary contained horrific footage – a “home movie” shot by a German soldier – of people being marched into trenches and shot in the head. Spectators gather round, smoking and talking, to watch. It was a terrible thing to see. But equally unforgettable were the words of Faina Kukliansky, whose grandmother had been rounded up in Alytus, Lithuania, and taken to a forest along with 2,500 others to be murdered. Kukliansky had discovered that this was done by local townsfolk and even school children: “That confirms what my uncle used to tell me… That probably his classmates killed his mother.” The scale of local participation was clear when Bulgin told us that the Einsatzgruppen unit here consisted of just six men.
The figures kept coming: at one site in Ukraine, with the SS now involved, Jews were shot at the rate of 1,600 an hour over two days. According to Bulgin, it was then that the Nazis began to realise that mass shootings were unsustainable, and began developing alternatives that would be both more efficient and more discreet. Apparently, the Germans were concerned that the executions were having a detrimental effect on soldiers’ mental health.
Some countries are reluctant to admit to this shameful past. A Lithuanian author said she had been branded a traitor for writing about it, and spat at in the street. But it is crucial that we understand how the Holocaust was able to develop; blaming it all on the Nazis is to turn a blind eye to the darker side of human nature.
Everyone Else Burns ★★★★ How the Holocaust Began ★★★★