Imagine discovering your grandad was a wartime spy!
My Grandparents’ War Channel 4, Thursday ★★★★★ Frozen Planet II B BC1, Sunday ★★★★★
The TV schedules were subject to change last week, understandably, although some shows held their ground. Doc Martin (ITV) did because nothing stops a grumpy doctor going about his grumpy business, and All Creatures Great And Small (C5) was not only back but Helen and James got married. Finally. So comforting, All Creatures Great And Small, particularly when the world feels disorientating. It is entirely predictable. Things go right then wrong then right again. But that’s part of its charm, and it is underwritten by a deep compassion that somehow soothes the soul.
But I’ve reviewed it on a couple of occasions in the past so, instead, on to My Grandparents’ War, which has returned for a second series. It’s a wartime Who Do You Think You Are? that attracts extremely well-known, high-calibre names.
I particularly remember Helena Bonham Carter from the first series, whose grandparents were extraordinary, total menschen, saved many Jews, and were called Bongie and Bubbles, because of course they were. This series will feature Keira Knightley, Toby Jones and Emeli Sandé, but kicks off with actor Kit Harington, who played Jon Snow in Game Of Thrones until the winter did finally come, damn it.
At the outset, Harington says he was particularly close to one grandmother, Pippa, but ‘I only knew her when she was old’. In other words, he could never see her as anything but old, which is the way. If you are young, old people are just old and when you are old enough to realise they weren’t always old, it is often too late. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t wish they’d asked their grandparents more questions, as sponsored or not sponsored by MyHeritage.
This show is, I would have said, Channel 4 at its most BBC, except that it kept dropping ‘MyHeritage’ into everything. ‘And now Kit is meeting an expert from MyHeritage…’ However, I’ve just mentioned it three times, so money well spent. Fair play.
His grandparents were fascinating on both sides. We’re not talking Danny Dyer being related to Royalty levels of revelation, but they’re up there. He had, he says, an inkling that his paternal grandfather, John Harington, might have worked for the intelligence services. There were rumours. But nothing was ever said.
Kit is thrilled to discover that his grandfather was a bona fide spy. He worked, at various times, for MI5 or MI6 and sometimes both. It was John Harington who was dispatched to the Caribbean during the war to spy on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who, it was feared, might be passing information on to the Nazis. (They had met Hitler and liked to hang out with Oswald Mosley. The Duke had been appointed Governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of Europe.)
And while John was in the Caribbean, he met and married Kit’s grandmother, Lavender, who was working as a code-breaker in Barbados, opening intercepted mail. They were engaged a week after meeting. Once, after they’d been apart, John hugged her so hard he broke her ribs. Touching, and romantic, but rather painful, I imagine. John probably knew Ian Fleming, and would have later worked alongside Kim Philby.
Meanwhile, on Kit’s maternal side, we have Pippa, who became a nurse at the outbreak of war and worked in an Exeter hospital, which is where she met Kit’s other grandfather, Mick, who was treated for an Army training injury. He would later win the military cross at the Battle of Monte Cassino but returned from Italy much changed, and they eventually divorced.
This gives you a proper understanding for how war transformed lives and what that generation went through. When I asked my father what he had learnt through active service he said, ‘that I was no less brave than anyone else.’ I should have asked him more.
On to David Attenborough, our favourite veteran natural world presenter, and Frozen Planet II, which is wondrously stunning, visually, and sets a new standard, as each of these series always does. (I never bother with any other nature shows.) But there is this compulsion to edit all footage into a mini-narrative, often in a Disneyfied way, while Hans Zimmer’s music soars. For example, those fledgling Emperor penguins who, abandoned by their parents, have to make their own way to the sea? They look cute as hell. There is jeopardy. Don’t fall into that ice crack! Watch out!
But in focusing on story, it sometimes omits information. How did the little penguins, for instance, who have to travel miles, know which way to go? I just have this image of someone in an editing booth shaping it to fit a (usually sentimental) narrative that has already been decided.
But having got that off my chest, it was packed with incredible images. That seal with the ‘balloon nose’ that makes him so irresistible to women. (He thinks.) The orcas ‘wave washing’ a seal from an ice floe, or the Siberian tiger hunting, caught by timelapse cameras that had been set to run for three years.
I now feel bad for having criticised it at all. I take it all back and apologise. Sorry.