Finally, we have the full story of Blair’s war in Iraq
Dramatisations of well-known historical events are exciting because they fill in the gaps, showing us the behind-the-scenes moments that we always speculated about and craved to see, but which were kept hidden. Even if those bits are fiction, if done well, they feel true.
Well, this week a Radio 4 series and podcast applied a similar principle to a major historical event: the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, 20 years ago this month. Here are behind-the-scenes revelations, high drama and top secret developments, which until now could only be guessed. Except that, hang on, this isn’t a drama. It’s a documentary, and it’s all absolutely real. Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On
(Radio 4, Monday to Friday) has astonishing access to the major players in an infamous historical moment. Yes, that was the actual Tony Blair, discussing the private notes that he sent to George Bush. Richard Dearlove and Eliza Manningham-buller, former heads of MI6 and MI5 respectively, together told the story of how, after 9/11 happened, they boarded the first RAF plane from Brize Norton that could be scrambled to take them to CIA headquarters. They were intercepted by F-16s to accompany them through closed American
airspace as smoke from the burning twin towers drifted into the clouds around them.
The UN weapons inspectors, who were tasked with finding the weapons of mass destruction that America and Britain were certain Saddam Hussein was developing, were reunited here as old friends, laughing about the time they descended on a site that they had been assured by intelligence services was a mobile weapons lab, but that turned out to be an abandoned ice-cream van full of cobwebs.
Gordon Corera, the presenter and the BBC’S highly experienced security correspondent, has pulled off something remarkable in bringing all of these characters together. It felt not like the first draft of history, but something approaching the whole story. Crucially, Corera, who has spent two decades persuading these people – which include high-level politicians as well as other senior spooks from the CIA and MI6 – to talk, is sharp to any attempts by them to launder their own reputations, and brings a critical approach to every interaction. The result is a carefully assembled cast of fallible human beings who were acting sometimes wisely, sometimes brazenly, and sometimes in the realms of the absurd.
And Corera himself has been a figure in this story from the beginning. He was a young reporter for the BBC in 2001, and this series splices the new interviews with archive recordings of Corera’s reports on the ground at the time. The result is a deeply informed long view of the invasion and its origins, from someone who really knows. I’ve learned to be sceptical of podcasts and radio series where the host claims to be “obsessed” by whatever topic is at hand, but with Corera you really believe it, because this conflict has defined his career.
Shock and War is outstanding radio, and plaudits should go equally to Corera and to producers John Murphy, Ellie House and Claire Bowes. It’s also a happy reminder of what the BBC can achieve when it wants to, in a week where some of the decisions made by the corporation have been mystifying.
An ever-more essential companion to the news cycle is Roger Bolton’s Beeb Watch (podcast providers). Bolton, who used to present Feedback for Radio 4, now has his own independent podcast funded by subscribers, in which he is much freer to criticise the BBC at large when necessary. The podcast launched last autumn, and it’s really found its feet.
New episodes are released on Thursdays, so Bolton hasn’t fully covered the Gary Lineker furore yet. The most recent episode focuses on another point of serious tension: the sudden, controversial axing of the BBC Singers, as part of an overall new strategy for BBC classical music which seems to be, basically, to strangle it.
Bolton interviewed Paul Hughes, former Director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and of the BBC Singers, who resigned last summer after 23 years in post. Hughes was clearly exasperated by the decisionmaking, and his despair and fury all but spat from the radio. To axe the much-loved choir on the eve of their centenary, with no notice, wasn’t just stupid, he argued. It was actively cruel, both to them and to the public.
It was hard to disagree. The BBC is in need of more criticism like this if it hopes to survive. More importantly, it needs to listen to it. Because, in the end, this isn’t a drama at all: it’s real life, and the public are real people, and we deserve better.