PODCAST 39 – THE BBC AT WAR

PODCAST ARTICLE 19 (FOR EPISODE 39)  - THE BBC AT WAR

Around Christmastime last year, I realised that September 2019 would mark eighty years since the start of the Second World War, and thought that it might be appropriate if we marked it in some small way in the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast.

After a bit of thought as to quite how to do this, I decided that I might look at some of the more significant BBC series from the archives that once attempted to tell some of the stories that were less well-known and which focussed in some way on the more “human-interest” aspects of living in an occupied country, or a high security prison camp deep in enemy territory, or the far east.

You’re probably already way ahead of me here when I tell you that I picked SECRET ARMY, COLDITZ and TENKO to examine, and decided that I’d better work my way through all three series in order to understand each of them more fully, even though wiser heads than mine had already thoroughly explored them both here and in other places.

This, of course, meant a lot of early mornings watching an episode a day to get through the one-hundred and two fifty-minute episodes that made up the entire runs of these three series, two of which I’d not seen any of since their original transmission, and one of which I don’t think I’d ever seen any of at all, apart from on clip shows.

It’s been a fascinating – and sometimes quite misery-inducing – journey, but there’s some great television drama in there, lots of which I hope to revisit at some point to explore in more detail, and I hope you’ll agree that it was worth doing as I explore…

THE BBC AT WAR.

Note: My indistinguishable mutterings of this text may be heard at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta039-episode-39 - this is the hopefully more distinguishable text version...

PROLOGUE:

Everybody, it seems, enjoys a good war. Well, obviously, nobody at all enjoys a war at all, and very few, if any, could really be referred to as good, but…

That’s not a great start is it? Let’s try again…

What I’m trying to say is that, retrospectively, viewers do seem to enjoy a war once it’s all over, the shooting has stopped, and everyone has started to pick up the pieces and begun the tricky process of rebuilding society enough for them to reconsider what happened, and start to look at it as a source of entertainment, and an opportunity to seek out some stories to tell, look for some heroes, and laud a few heroics.

British cinema in the nineteen-fifties was chock-full of blockbusters telling stories of soldiers, airmen, sailors, submariners, plucky communities surviving against the odds, miraculous escapes, tales of derring-do, and people doing extraordinary things against terrifying odds, both the survivors, and the victims, all of whom did their bit, often with the assistance of little Johnny Mills and his ever-so stiff upper lip.

And so it also was with television, although, with the more intimate relationship television can have with its audience, and perhaps because it generally had longer to tell its stories, there was time to take a more balanced, even-handed approach, and try to view things from both sides, especially as the result was already known, everybody already knew who the “winners” and “losers” were, and the audience could relax in the knowledge that everything was going to turn out fine.

Or was it?

It turns out that some of the most gripping and unpredictable stories were still waiting to be told, often from a far more unusual perspective, and often within environments that were both unexpected and which might be considered far less “victorious” than the stories that were being told in the movies from a couple of decades earlier.

Television started to turn its focus away from the obvious success stories of the war, and began to talk about the apparent failures where people were placed into impossible situations and somehow managed to come through on the other side, stories which also managed to lift the lid on the motivations of the people who were considered the enemy in those years, and shine a light on the human beings committing what were still the harsh and brutal atrocities, many of which were still vivid, raw and burning memories of many viewers who were still living when the programmes were being broadcast.

So many stories of the Second World War have been told by television, but I’m going to focus on just three of the best, which were produced by BBC television in the 1970s and 1980s, and all of which tell, in their own unique way, another side of the story.

PART ONE: SECRET ARMY

The first is SECRET ARMY, an fifty-ish minute drama series created by BBC Producer Gerard Glaister and broadcast across three series between 1977 and 1979.

This series already covered in great detail in a previous edition of “ROUND THE ARCHIVES” (Episode 25 if you’re looking) in a piece by the author of the definitive work on the series, Andy Priestner, whose toes I do not intend stepping upon.

However, having worked my way through the entire three series, I thought that I could, at least, share my thoughts upon what is still considered to be one of the best dramas of that type that the BBC ever produced.

These are the stories of LIFELINE, an escape route for Allied airmen who have been shot down by the Luftwaffe and are trying to get home to Britain. It is set in Belgium, mostly around the Café Candide run by Albert Foiret, from where the Lifeline itself is mostly managed by Lisa Colbert (Codename” “Yvette”) as played with quiet determination by Jan Francis, who, by day works as a nurse for Doctor Pascal Keldermans as played with suitably fruity gravitas by Valentine Dyall in “proper acting” mode.

Women seem to be the perfect cover for Lifeline as both the café’s singer, waitress, and Albert’s Mistress, Monique Duchamps (Angela Richards), and the plucky determined Natalie Chantrens (Juliet Hammind-Hill) are also heavily involved in this often fatal activity.

Also we should give a nod to Ron Pember who quietly gets on with life as the fixer, radio operator, and all-round nice guy, Alain, who gets into far more perilous situations than is good for either him or his family back at his farm growing the vegetables that he supplies to the Café.

During the first year, Lifeline do appear to have more failures than successes. Indeed, although at one point it is mentioned that they have got two hundred airmen home, hardly anyone seems to survive the journey during that first season.

In fact Curtis, the RAF agent John Curtis (played by Christopher Neame) is an escaped airman who then gets sent back to Belgium by Anthony Ainley in the first episode, and the rest of the season seems to involve more airmen getting killed by their supposed rescuers than getting down the line at all.

The always magnificent Bernard Hepton is ostensibly the star of the series, but quite often he is given very little to do other than look worried. Happily, Bernard Hepton’s “looking worried” acting is worth watching, and his character takes more of a central, brutal, and occasionally quite tragic role in proceedings as time goes by.

Despite becoming the character most associated with SECRET ARMY, and the character after which the brief but memorable sequel series KESSLER is named, Clifford Rose as Gestapo Chief Kessler makes far less impact at first than you might have expected, although the memorable image of his white hair, rimless glasses, and emotionless manner does tend to chill you to the bone whenever he appears.

Sometimes, however, his endless quest to break the Lifeline - and basically round everyone up, put them against a wall, and have them shot - does have a little of the futility of Inspector Gerard in THE FUGITIVE about it, as our heroes keep on getting away by the skin of their teeth by wading through the corpses of their allies.

That is, of course, a far-too-flippant reading of what is an astonishingly chilling performance, which, simply through the knowledge that he is very much based upon the real-life actions of actual human monsters, stays with you long, long after the episodes – and the series – are over.

Of course, it’s giving nothing away – given that he gets a sequel series with his name in the title - to point out that, by and large, he actually gets away with it. That he gets away with it due to the greed of an American played by John Ratzenberger, long before he played the ineptly self-obsessed postman Cliff Clavin in CHEERS, is an irony that does not escape me.

And some of those crimes are monstrous, although fairly often the awful results are simply because of people having the fear of the awful knowledge of what he will do to them if he catches them, and taking matters into their own hands instead.

After a year, Jan Francis left the series, and eventually ended up spending several years being JUST GOOD FRIENDS with a pop star with a terrifying blond perm.

Right in the middle of the second series, there is a Christmas episode which comes as something of a surprise. Also featuring in the second series is a mildly farcical episode about missing and forged paintings which seems to have been a major inspiration for the plotting of the sitcom ALLO, ALLO which owes a lot to SECRET ARMY as its inspiration and, quite understandably, thoroughly vexed the cast of the original drama series.

Meanwhile the Luftwaffe Colonel with a heart, Major Brandt, played with excellent subtlety by Michael Culver, loses his wife and son to allied bombing and is never really the same after that. Also, some of his friends and acquaintances get implicated in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and things go downhill for him fairly swiftly after this, and he does not return for the third series.

Series two ends with the D-Day landings and the imminent liberation of Belgium, so you might think that this story of escape routes and double-dealing might be drawing to a close, but you’d be wrong.

The series that I remember most from first broadcast is the third and final one, when the Germans are fleeing Belgium and leaving the Belgians to sort things out for themselves and therefore, those who have been living double lives appearing to be collaborators, are rounded up with the actual collaborators, and things do start to get memorably tricky for a while.

Human beings and what they are capable of doing to each other in the name of righteous indignation is a strong theme of this particular run, and, because we have got to know our heroes, and realise just what injustices are being taken out upon them, those episodes remain strong and almost impossible to endure.

From the very first episodes, SECRET ARMY demonstrates the claustrophobic terror of living under occupation with the second episode "Sergeant on the Run" excellently showcasing this claustrophobia and fear during a raid on a café with eyes all watching and nobody knowing quite who to trust, and managing to find in its economic storytelling, whole new levels of bleakness.

This is truly gripping stuff, if by “gripped” you mean "clamped in a vice with the whole world applying pressure." Later episodes such as "Bait" are very much an examination of what human beings (like rats) when backed into corners are capable of doing to one another.

Over the course of series one, the real wartime stock footage, and the moments of rank incompetence (which suggest on occasions that Lifeline do far more harm than good for dramatic purposes, despite those conversations suggesting otherwise), perhaps the most hurtful loss in that series is that of Herr Gruber, the kindly bank manager who has been taking dreadful risks to assist Lifeline.

He is portrayed with immense kindliness and dignity by James Bree, who gets a lot of stick for his performance of the Security Chief in “The War Games” (Patrick Troughton’s epic final DOCTOR WHO story), but is rather wonderful in this.

With Curtis heading back to Blighty at the end of series one, and series two beginning with the loss of Lisa, ironically to allied bombing, and his frustrated disabled wife having died in a fall down the stairs leaving him for free to carry on with Monique, we find Albert stepping up to become the mastermind behind Lifeline for the remainder of the series, which is just as well, as they are constantly being infiltrated by Nazis posing as British aircrew, or communists posing as pianists, and, despite his endless funding and supply problems, he can – and does - trust no one.

Meanwhile, we are treated to a rather more even-handed portrayal of the Germans than is usual in British tales of wartime, because, as they spend more time at the Restaurant and tensely interact with our heroes, and despite being an utterly ruthless psychopath, Kessler is shown to have a more human side, and the more sensitive Major Brandt is even allowed an ordinary family life before his own downfall, and more allied bombing raids, devour him.

Just before things start to get really bad for our heroes before the end of this series, there’s even time amidst the tension and mayhem for that peculiar feature of almost every drama series, that “Christmas episode” of sorts, which features that eternal child star of the era, Keith Jayne, and goes some way towards proving that even the master miser - and occasional killer - Albert has a soft heart.

You also get to see Brian Glover playing a Nazi soldier, which came as some surprise to me, in a sensitive yet brutal episode dealing with the fate of child suddenly orphaned who is living during such evil times, and the influences acting upon all of the people involved.

The penultimate episode of series two has so many factions out to get our heroes that you begin to find yourself rooting for people that you really shouldn't, and, perhaps oddly, this is one of the few times that the far end of the Lifeline itself is revealed, as opposed to the smaller world of the (now Restaurant) Candide part of the chain, as the coast is reached, and the Aircrew are rescued by dinghy, albeit in return for arms for the communist arm of the resistance.

This means that the viewer also has very mixed feelings when watching the last episode of series two “Day of Wrath” especially with regard to the fate of one of the “not as bad as the other supposed bad guys” which, if you’ve seen that particular episode, you’ll possibly understand...

Series three starts off tense and very quickly goes stark staring terrifying, quite frankly. Things almost immediately start to get jolly brutal on both sides of the fighting, especially when Major Bradley (played by Paul Shelley) gets involved. These are stories set in the last days of the war in Belgium, and sometimes the overkill by our heroes seems a little too much when you consider the ordinary German troops biting the dust, although, of course, we must ask whether, as occupiers representing a totalitarian regime, any of them are completely blameless.

The difference between the rabid Nazis and the ordinary German soldiers are usually very blurred, especially when Hollywood is prepared to tar them all with the same brush, but the distinction is barely addressed when there’s wholesale slaughtering to be done.

And, amidst the excellent use of genuine Black and White footage – because it’s still surprising to me that the Second World War in the real world actually happened in full colour – (some eras just feel eternally “Black and White” in my mind) - spotting who the fickle finger of fate has marked down for the chop is becoming fairly straightforward by this stage.

It’s everyone.

Meanwhile, during the first half of the series, Bernard Hepton is off somewhere being theatrical, so Albert gets side-lined, locked up, and all of his performances were shot on film before the studio recordings, and Monique is left to step up to the plate, and take some of the worst risks, so that you do start to wonder whether anyone will make it through to the end and survive the war, especially with the free Belgians taking their revenge upon those the think are collaborators in some of the most memorable scenes in the entire series.

I won’t spoil those for you, other than to mention that some of the character’s fates seem far more unfair than others, but that’s life, I suppose (although you might want to stick your fingers in your ears for a few seconds if you don’t want to know what happens to one of them in particular).

Because, ironically, by not helping him and accepting his PoWs into custody, it is a British soldier who unwittingly ultimately gets Van Doekken (the German pacifist barge owner who never really wanted to involve himself, and who lost his wife to one of Kessler’s interrogations in an earlier episode), killed when a squadron of regrouping Nazis find him harbouring two deserters. This seems more bitterly ironic with him only recently having helpfully already pointed the finger for the liberating troops at the fleeing Obersturmführer Kessler as well.

And, once rounded up and locked up under an assumed identity, Kessler’s revenge on Reinhardt is just as brutal and unjust, as he manipulates a court-martial into getting this thoroughly decent-seeming decorated German airman, a man who apparently stood for everything Kessler himself did not, to pay the ultimate price.

The final irony is, of course, that the last escapee Lifeline assist is Kessler himself, as it is his mistress Madeleine who approaches Monique to get papers so that she can start a new life with her “brother” by escaping the ravages of post-war Europe.

All-in-all, a satisfyingly bittersweet end to an excellent series that lifted the lid on what was at the time one of the more untold stories of the Second World War, and to which we ought to give a quiet nod of appreciation, not least because it’s a series that has Anthony Ainley as a guest actor in the first episode, and John Ratzenburger, the future Cliff Clavin, as a guest star in the last.

PART TWO: COLDITZ

Meanwhile in the, by definition, more bloke-y world of COLDITZ, half a decade earlier, Edward Hardwicke, one day to be a memorable replacement Doctor Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes, got himself captured, and condemned to wear an unconvincing bald cap, before becoming a compulsive escaper from the various PoW detention centres that he was sent to.

It is only at the end of the first episode of the BBC series COLDITZ that we become aware that the castle prison run by Michael Sheard that Edward Hardwicke’s character Pat Grant has just almost successfully escaped from (but, unfortunately, been returned to), is not the Colditz Castle of the series title that we think it is, but some other – lesser - castle from where he is about to be carted away.

Happily for him, the Germans seem far more unlikely to just shoot Prisoners of War than civilians helping potential Prisoners of War, and so he gets sent to the legendary - supposedly inescapable - fortress of Colditz, and, for him, the rest of the series will eventually unfold pretty much as expected.

However, the first few episodes of COLDITZ do rather avoid going to Colditz itself for quite some time. Instead we are introduced one by one to the main characters over several episodes, in a structure that also served the beginning of BLAKE’S SEVEN rather well later in the decade.

This means that episode two ignores the events of episode one almost completely, and involves David McCallum as a shot down pilot named Carter who spends his time pretty much doing everything that Lifeline in Belgium would find so very wrong, before not getting himself shot and, instead, as he has been such a trouble-maker, being told that he is being sent to the escape-proof, and now slightly more ominous sounding Colditz.

This is the other side of the story. What happens to an airman shot down in Germany when Lifeline doesn’t appear to help him on his way? His friend, an airman with two broken legs, seems happy enough to be carted off to a PoW camp, but the fate of the priest - who has tried to save some Jewish children and doesn’t appreciate the attention that Carter brings to his plans - seems less assured.

The start of this episode is unusual as it shows some of Carter’s home life before his last fateful mission and therefore features, for once, in what would be by definition a very bloke-filled series, an actual role for an actual woman, his wife Cathy, played by Joanna David.

It won’t be until episode seven that we get even a glimpse of another woman, and then two will turn up almost at once, in a tale of driving rain and the betrayal of a certain Dick Player (I kid you not!) by Davros.

Well, sort of.

The third episode starts with that Lieutenant Dick Player RN being washed ashore and, after several escapades, ending up in the hands of the Gestapo in Paris. Player is portrayed by that Christopher Neame chap again, who, as we know, would later feature prominently in the first series of SECRET ARMY.

Funny that. As someone who only really knew Christopher Neame from his role in the aborted DOCTOR WHO story “Shada”, I hadn’t realised quite how ubiquitous he was in 1970s television series.

In Paris he is interrogated, perhaps rather bizarrely, by another Doctor Watson, Nigel Stock, as some casting director’s peculiar idea of a Gestapo Officer, and his assistant, who is played by Terrence Hardiman, also later of SECRET ARMY.

Eventually, to prove his identity, he is taken to Berlin and interviewed by former Olympic horseman, Paul Von Eissinger, played with a lethal charm by John Quentin, who fails to persuade him to join the German cause, all of which finds Player finally being transferred across to the infamous COLDITZ castle (doubled by Stirling Castle for production purposes), and meeting the other new arrivals, a miserable Carter, and a less miserable Pat Grant, and, with a little bit of Polish humour, and, with a first glimpse of Paul Chapman as George Brent, the series proper can finally begin.

Having started as pretty much as an anthology series of stand alone stories with little more than the ominous threat of Colditz to tie them together, the show finally meshes together in episode four - unsurprisingly entitled “Welcome to Colditz” - in which we get a brief glimpse of Robert Wagner being bundled through a doorway, as we are introduced to the no-nonsense John Preston played by Jack Hedley, the new senior officer about whom, as is usual in such situations, the other prisoners are initially suspicious of.

Naturally, this “jumped up terrier” is made of sterner stuff, and is fully prepared to take one for the team, which means that, by the next episode, he is considered to be an all-round good egg as he sets up the plans and escape rotas for the prisoners under his command, for it is an officer’s duty to try and escape.

We also meet the delightfully bewigged Bernard Hepton, long before he swapped sides and became Albert, playing the strangely anonymous Kommandant, occasionally known as Karl. He has a son, from a second, younger post WW1 generation, and someone who is much more indoctrinated into the notion of Hitler’s war, and he worries about him, and this has the unusual – well, unusual for a British War Drama in those days anyway - effect of humanising the enemy and making them seem far more sympathetic.

After all, the officers controlling Colditz castle are generally battle-worn and unfit for front line service, hence their new lives in the charming backwater of Colditz castle, keeping watch after habitual escapees in an impregnable fortress four hundred miles from the Swiss border.

This has the air of making the whole series seem far less bleak than SECRET ARMY would ever be, and the optimistic streak that the constant hope for escape brings to the series gives us a far more comfortable viewing experience.

Happily the camp is under the control of the Wehrmacht - the ordinary, more humane, and less zealous and fanatical, soldiers serving in the German Army - and not the SS, a story strand that is initially covered in the fifth episode (“Maximum Security”) which, basically, involves a German administrative conference about prison security, and features a delightful turn from Michael Gough as a broken and embittered drunk German Officer.

Because we do need reminding from time to time that not all serving German soldiers were Nazis.

That episode also introduces Hans Meyer as Hauptmann Franz Ulmann, the new security officer of Colditz, and we get our second glimpse of the American prisoner Carrington, played by Robert Wagner, bringing our main cast, other than a few significant changes made for series two, to its full complement, and the main credits will henceforth reflect his star status, and side-line several of the amazing character actors we’ve already met to supporting player caption slides.

As an outsider and, worse still, an American, Carrington is, at first, not to be trusted, and suspected of being a German infiltrator. Certainly he doesn’t help his cause by being both a writer – (these ruddy intellectuals) - and, it would appear anyway, a Nazi sympathiser.

However this is just a ploy to get his urgent secret message out about the coming of Operation Barbarossa, an attempt which ultimately fails due to Gestapo intervention, but does raise the interesting concept of the escape of ideas in a series more usually focussing on more human efforts to escape.

The TV series COLDITZ was created by Brian Degas in association with Gerard Glaister, and would run for 28 episodes across two series broadcast between 1972 and 1974.

For the next two years, escaping from Colditz will basically be the plan; playing that “jolly boys” game where someone will exclaim “Well, I think it’s a damned good idea” and get the inevitable retort “Damned good!”, hiding escape kits in sneaky places, and ingenious nooks and crannies, which becomes ever more necessary when there are more and more searches after any escape attempt.

Sometimes it seems more like a cosy “Posh Boy’s Club” played out in an enclosed environment, because you can’t really have your main cast slowly diminishing in number, so there has to be a reason for several of them not to, and the series develops more of a “soap” format from time to time.

There’s also much obligatory scrambling across rooftops (both in studio and on location) with sheets tied together to make ropes, which will ultimately lead to the self-same problem that a series like “Prison Break” also suffers from; Once the escaping is done, what do you do NEXT if your series is to continue?

Well, as is often the case, other stories start to be told, like the story of a kangaroo court in which the men take it upon themselves to pronounce ruthless judgement on a supposed traitor - the topic of rough justice seems to have been a staple of seventies drama – which is also an episode in which Patrick Troughton auditions for his role as the troubled priest in THE OMEN.

And then there’s an insight into the faking – or otherwise – of mental illness in the astonishing episode entitled “Tweedledum” which takes place over such a long time period, that it seems, for the series COLDITZ, the war will soon be over.

There’s also a look at the comparatively humane treatment of captive soldiers in the tense episode “Court Martial” in which the reasonableness (or otherwise) of military law on both sides in a war is considered, and the rights of captive soldiers are explored. Interestingly, captive soldiers, the enemy, seem to get far better treatment than the civilians in occupied territory do in SECRET ARMY.

Or maybe that’s just because the two series are exploring different waters thematically. Certainly the later series is far more grim and brutal, and really does bring home the realities of war that the films and – to a certain extent – series like COLDITZ tended to play down.

Finally, as the series does seem to be treading water before introducing it’s big “end of season” escape story, we even get a “we’ve run out of ideas, let’s do a whodunit” episode in the form of “Murder?” (with a question mark) which does reintroduce the problem of what the Gestapo might do if they came in to run things, but seems a little out of place, really. It’s sort of like a prototype HART TO HART (with David McCallum playing Jennifer to Robert Wagner’s Carrington) only this time with Nazis, but it is a solid enough episode.

With a successful “Home Run” concluding the first series, the second does lose one or two key characters, but manages to carry on regardless, with the introduction of the totally fictional character of Major Horst Mohn in the second series, as played by the sublime Anthony Valentine.

We must briefly touch upon the swastika imagery which adorns the packaging for such series when they are released and, in the case of COLDITZ anyway, can (and does!) also feature prominently in the title sequence.

However distasteful the symbol might be (and, despite what some might suggest in recent times, it is very distasteful indeed) it is difficult to pretend it wasn’t there when dressing sets authentically and putting actors in authentic period costumes.

It does, however, make the viewer uncomfortable nowadays when it pops up on the credits (such things would not be allowed at all in modern Germany) and yet it should make us feel that way really and, as long as the packaging is not choosing to glorify it in any way, I think it’s acceptable graphic shorthand for underscoring just how brutal and wrong the forces of fascism were when they needed to be resisted.

Due to the nature of these stories, the caption credits for the series remain in a state of constant flux throughout, so it’s very easy to spot which character the individual episodes are mostly about, and who the genuine stars of the show actually are.

Funnily enough, the roots of something not unlike “Lifeline” get discussed in episode three of the second series “Odd Man Out” in which Carter’s wife is seen again [Woman alert!] and shows off her not inconsiderable talents for espionage, in an episode about the spy game generally, which ends with a long speech by Ian McCulloch which is extraordinarily powerful, and a moment of brilliant acting of the type studio drama was often capable.

As the series concludes, it becomes less about the escapes, and more about the effects of incarceration upon men imprisoned in Colditz Castle, with stories involving gamblers, and gliders, and over-sexed Frenchmen (“Woman in Colditz TV Series!” Klaxon!), before becoming more about telling the story of Colditz at the end of the war, and getting considerably bleaker as it does.

Like in SECRET ARMY, series two involves the ongoing story arc of the downfall of a decorated (and this time more dedicated) Nazi officer, and it is Major Mohn who performs this function, although his fate is far less bloody and unjust than that of Major Reinhardt in the later series.

When “Liberation” finally does come, it brings with it a certain amount of fear and jeopardy. Not least the fear that the Germans are going to dispose of any witnesses (i.e. the prisoners) as they depart, although the way that the German officers are ultimately dealt with as the Americans arrive is done with an unusual (and quite welcome) quiet dignity.

However, there is also a certain fear of the future as these long-incarcerated men look forward to their post-war existences. This being a fairly fictionalised account of the Colditz story, we never really find out what happens to any of them, apart from a few vague plans that they mention, we are left to wonder as the courtyard finally clears, and the series ends with more of a quiet respectful whimper than any spectacularly loud bang.

PART THREE: TENKO

Although, as my Dad would have reminded me if he were still around, over in the Far East theatre, things continued on in their own bloody war for several months beyond VE Day, and it is to the Far East that we turn our attention for the third of the series I wish to examine.

Whilst COLDITZ was predominantly masculine series, with barely a woman in sight, this is totally turned around by the next series we’re going to consider, because thankfully – if there is anything at all to be thankful about in the story of the fall of Singapore – there are far more roles for women in the early 1980s series called TENKO created by Lavinia Warner.

Long the butt of an Ed Reardon joke, the story of TENKO was told across three ten-episode series between 1981 and 1984 (which surprised me as I was expecting thirteen a year), plus a “reunion special” a little later on, and told the story of a group of women imprisoned by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, and, as such, might almost be considered to be the antidote to COLDITZ, and the focus upon the European war generally.

There’s a surprisingly lengthy “ordinary lifestyle” preamble to the stories of the horrors of the internment camps which was actually filmed in Singapore, and which lasts for more than an episode. This helps to fill in several back-stories, introduces several characters, and demonstrates the inherent racism of the attitudes of British Empire.

These are mostly demonstrated by the reaction to the mixed-race Christina (Emily Bolton) despite her Scottish roots (an attitude which will – quite rightly - come back and bite them in the fullness of time) - and the superior (and presumed unassailably indestructible) manner generally displayed by the people in the colonial service community, and other facets of their privileged position in that society, demonstrates visually just how far the distance is that several of the women will have to fall.

After a surprisingly well staged shipwreck on the frightfully prescient cattle-truck that is one of the evacuation ships, we are slowly introduced to the survivors, who are immediately reduced, divided and separated, and the women are marched off to an uncertain future.

Because of all this, it is not until episode three that we reach the camp itself, and start hearing the soon-to-be-all-too-familiar bellows of “Bow! Bow!” and “Punish!” directed at these “Fourth Class Women” by the Brutal Lieutenant Sato, played with relish by Eiji Kusuhara, and – because it’s a 1980s series predominantly featuring women - the occasional flash of unerotic nudity.

This episode also features the first appearance of the sublime Burt Kwouk as Major Yamauchi, the commandant of this hellhole inside which the women find themselves.

How the various women choose to respond to their new situation tells us a lot about each of them, but it is the resolute – yet deeply racist - elderly prisoner Sylvia (Renée Asherton) who is the first to suffer the rigours of the “Punishment Hut” for refusing to bow.

Meanwhile, former society high-flyer, Rose (played by future “Dynasty” star Stephanie Beacham) finds a soulmate in the no-nonsense and far lower class Blanche, played with coarse gusto by the always excellent Louise Jameson.

Meanwhile, amidst the routine of cleaning and stoic British colonial philosophizing, it seems inevitable that it is Marion Jefferson, the wife of a British Colonel (as played by Ann Bell) who rises to the top and becomes “leader” of the British contingent, especially when Stephanie Cole’s no-nonsense Doctor Beatrice Mason proves far too busy (and far too unlikeably bombastic) to take charge, and we begin to discover the different priorities of the younger and older prisoners surviving in this dreadful place.

In episode four, the Dutch arrive, including the sour and selfish Mrs (“Metro Goldwyn”) Van Meyer (brilliantly played by Elizabeth Chambers), and the formidable Sister Ulrica (played by Patricia Lawrence) who we already met in full “unstoppable force” flow in the opening episodes, and, because these new arrivals have survived with their luggage – and their prams - intact, this leads to a growing sense of unease between the “haves” and the “have-nots”.

This feeling is not helped by the notification that the women will no longer have such help as there was from the natives, but will have to fend for themselves, and, with children in the camp, the arrival of a trader, the discovery of a pregnancy, and the brutal response to a kind gesture between two mothers, mean the niceties are over, even if, after the women have been taken off to do work, we are able to see those scenes all too rare in television drama, women just talking, as they share their nostalgia for better days.

By episode five we already have a dead baby for Dorothy (Veronica Roberts giving an astonishingly brutal performance when she gets the chance), and uncomfortable displays of deeply entrenched racism against the Japanese, and episode six brings with it the “What lengths Blanche is prepared to go through in order to get some Quinine” storyline which, with its accusations of rape, makes for an extraordinary hour of television.

This episode was written by Anne Valery and jumps, as it does, from the terror of Marion’s “interview” by the secret police, to the joy of a celebration of completing the building of a sickbay hut (which symbolically involves the commandeering of a baby’s pram as a makeshift truck), to the despair of the aftermath of the rape attempt, and some rough justice for the soldiers involved - who we finally see being led away to their own dark fate at the very end.

After these events, by the opening of the next episode, the women start to have the relative fun (if it can be called that), or perhaps escape, of a game of Rounders, which is interrupted by the obligatory childbirth scene.

I often wonder if there are special classes in playing childbirth scenes at acting school, as all series featuring women in key roles seem to find it necessary to have to feature one eventually.

Anyway, despite Yamauchi’s desire for some positive publicity, the results of this are suitably tragic, leading, in a roundabout way, into the series dealing with the - then still tricky in Primetime drama – issue of same sex relationships, which is addressed in a way that they never would (or could!) have with the “cheps” of COLDITZ a decade earlier.

Which brings us to Blanche and, in her own homage to COLDITZ, her failed escape attempt, which seems unsurprising under the circumstances, given that even Doctor Mason has tried to pimp her out again (this time to get much needed morphine), as well as the growing number of graves in the camp’s makeshift graveyard, with, symbolically, the baby’s pram now released from truck duties to serve as an occasional hearse.

This means that, whilst the normally unflappable Doctor Beatrice is loosening up (in an almost inverse ratio to the tightening up of the ghastly Mrs Van Meyer), the death of Judith comes as a body blow, and leaves Judith’s daughter Debbie confused enough to tag along uninvited with Blanche’s unwise escape attempt.

And, because of well-meant protective good intentions on the part of those Blanche thought she could trust most, those who promised Judith that they’d look after Debbie, they are caught and sent to be punished.

This is despite the recent softening and humanization of the fearsome Major Yamauchi in what is an increasingly astounding performance by Burt Kwouk, and even the old colonial Sylvia has started to become slightly less racist, at least as far as Christina is concerned.

But Yamauchi is unrelenting when it comes to punishment, and it is only through the selfless creation of hats, and a stirring rendition of “Jerusalem” (that I defy anyone not to be moved by), that the women are able to save Blanche from her ordeal.

The first series ends on notes of both optimism – the women find out about the existence of a men’s camp – and despair – because some of the names they hope to see are not listed, along with Doctor Beatrice finally cracking under the strain.

This is, perhaps bizarrely, a “Christmas episode” of sorts, (the women creatively improvise a “show” or “entertainment” in the middle, which is good, but does slightly outstay its welcome) and serves as a celebration of the entire first series, and marks the end for both the original camp, and several key characters who will not be seen again, as the women are marched off towards a new camp which can only instill a sense of foreboding.

In series two, the women, possibly for production reasons, arrive at their brand new camp, although this does means that several key characters like Sylvia and Nellie are lost along the way, the scripted excuse being that the group has been divided across two camps.

The protracted march that takes place across the whole of episode one – a lot of it spent in some exotic location – is quite literally a killer, in that Debbie is tragically lost, but does mean we gain the excellent Jean Anderson as Lady Jocelyn “Joss” Holbrook – even if (on occasions at first) she seems to be speaking words originally meant for Sylvia.

There is loss, heartbreak, and moments of joy during this terrible journey, but, as 1943 dawns, the surviving women find themselves at the top of a hill looking down upon their new home, a home which they (and we, as viewers familiar with series one) find both unpleasant and terrifying in different ways to the previous one.

This is, of course, peculiar. We were familiar with the old camp, and the strange ways of this one suddenly seem hostile and bewildering which is, of course, a brilliant dramatic conceit because the old camp was horrifying – not the sort of place any of us can imagine having to survive in – but this place, with its sense of order and spick-and-span lickety-splitness, and all run by the on-the-make Verna – played to brilliant perfection by Rosemary Martin - and the huge-of-eye and terrifying-of-temper Josephine Welcome as Camp Commandant-by-proxy Miss Hassan, somehow seems worse, although Verna’s stark statement to Mrs Van Meyer that “One must have order if one is to survive” speaks volumes.

Still, at least Marion finds a friend. Some friend she’ll turn out to be, but I digress. Meanwhile, the brutal storylines lead to a suicide, and an unwanted pregnancy, and Beatrice starts to see the light as her eyesight fails, and seeks solace in the piano she manages to retune. Meanwhile, sister Ulrica, reunited with the church via a priest, has a crisis of faith and takes a vow of silence.

Meanwhile – at least for a time, one of the “enemy” shows a kindlier side. Shinya is played by Takashi Kawahara who would later make a kindlier impression in the first series of A VERY PECULIAR PRACTICE as the mathematician Chen Sung Yao.

Suddenly, mid-series, as if there’s been some notification that storylines need to be wrapped up, certain characters start to reappear, and we hear of the sad fate of some others, and the series unfolds to reveal the terrible consequences of both hope and despair.

Liberation comes far earlier in the series’ run for TENKO than in the other series we have discussed, with the surviving women acquiring their dubious freedoms at the beginning of series three.

This leads to a perhaps more satisfying resolution about the fates of the main cast than we have previously been given, as we never find out about the post-war lives of the men of COLDITZ, and, whilst the lives of the SECRET ARMY Lifeliners is touched upon in the KESSLER follow-up, it is only really his story that is told in any real depth.

More satisfying perhaps, but I do wonder whether it was simply because the relentless grimness – or the lack of “cheps” on screen? – was simply thought too much for the viewers to bear?

So, with liberation comes the raiding of the camp stores, and these deprived women find themselves rather suddenly in a land of relative plenty, which leads to the inevitable realisation that so many of the deaths of the prisoners would have been preventable if only they’d been given such things earlier.

Meanwhile, suddenly finding herself in a position of authority, Mrs Jefferson has to learn to be pragmatic about cause and effect - “You blame American submarine” – when it comes to matters of Red Cross parcels that never arrived, and her sympathy for Yamauchi deepens, even though few would ever understand this.

Lizzie Mikkery’s character of Maggie seems to appear from nowhere in the intervening and untold two years of narrative, despite the sense of her having always been around, and she seems to just be there to play a kind of proto-Blanche because Louise Jameson is no longer around, and sometimes you really miss her.

That’s not to denigrate the character of Maggie at all, and she is played with a delightful sense of vulgarity that is a breath of fresh air, representing in her sexual liberation a spirit of freedom seldom displayed by the other characters. 

Liberation is most significantly – and subtly - indicated by the flags being swapped at the internment camp, and by the different reactions of the Japanese soldiers to now becoming the prisoners themselves.

Then the focus shifts to Singapore and, perhaps surprisingly, the threat level doesn’t seem to diminish all that much. Certainly the sense of what has been lost whilst the women were incarcerated is significant, but there’s also a strange sense that they have all lost the unity, social levelling, and (sort of) friendship that they had found in adversity, and that loss is the one that hurts the most.

Christine’s “half British” status as the British influence in Singapore re-establishes itself becomes a major plot strand, as does the post-war danger of simply being on the streets in a time when collaborators and former Imperial masters are becoming targets for the dispossessed.

In amongst all of the coming and going, and rebuilding, and departures, I reached series three episode six which was another cracking script written by – surprise, surprise – Anne Valery, and the one which dealt with what Dorothy was going to do with her life after being attacked as a collaborator and a sudden, surprise reunion.

There’s a heart-rending scene staged in the studio set of Dorothy’s bungalow, which, even now, finds me wondering why Veronica Roberts’ television career wasn’t stratospheric post TENKO, because she is utterly amazing in it...

In fact, now that I come to mention it, I do find myself wondering why so many of these great actors were not seen in much afterwards. Apart from the obvious age and frailty of some of the older performers explaining one or two, so many of those brilliant young actors were barely heard of - on television at least – ever again.

And so the series carries on to its inevitable and heart-rending conclusion as the awful ties that bound these women together unravel.

Christine feels more and more shut out of the “Whites Only” world in a way she hasn’t experienced since the days of Sylvia in series one; Domenica Van Meyer gets a reality check after exaggerating her own bravery to a journalist and finally admitting to the fear she constantly felt, and once her own story becomes better known, she manages to become generally more human than we ever suspected; A returning Sister Ulrica has several vocational doubts and crises; Maggie’s life twists and turns in unexpected ways; Kate has a tragedy which makes her more determined to become a Doctor so that “some good” can come out of all this; and Marion realises that the life of a pampered wife to a Brigadier is really not for her.

Meanwhile Joss is determined to help the needy and we get more insights into her past life as the “Black Sheep” of the Holbrooks, and Beatrice is feeling unwanted, unloved and unnecessary in the darkening world she now finds herself in.

Ah… People praising Beatrice about how many lives she saved without telling her to her face is one of the more heart-breaking aspects of that final series, although, due to fateful circumstances, her future, along with that of all of the survivors of the PoW Camps seems more resolved as the series reaches its conclusion.

And over it all is the spirit of Major Yamauchi causing several conflicts and clashes between the women once under his dubious charge. Sympathy, hatred, and vengeance seldom sit well in such circumstances, but these scenes are played so excellently, despite some unfortunate costuming.

Special mention should also be made of Elspet Gray as Phylllis Bristow who makes a sterling addition to the cast at this point as their military liaison at Raffles; always keeping up her spirits in the face of a very difficult job indeed as she tries to knock heads together to get these broken lives back on track.

After one final tragedy, at which you are left raging that such a thing could even happen after these women who have already suffered so much reach the relative safety of Singapore, the series proper fades out in an oddly inconclusive manner.

Thankfully, the ties left hanging are resolved in a one-off TENKO REUNION set five years after the war, in which we discover many of the resolutions to those enticing plot strands, and which gives a satisfactory and “proper” conclusion to the series as a whole, something which is rare for these kinds of shows.

Across these three impressive drama series, the BBC managed to tell some of the more obscure and forgotten stories to come out of those years of conflict, and in doing so, reminded people that war really wasn’t all great escapes, stiff upper lips, gung-ho missions, and brilliantly planned offensives.

Sometimes it was about ordinary people, too; surviving against unbelievable odds in the face of adversity, and those stories always need to be told when the heroics are over and the battles won or lost.

And on the BBC, there were, of course also - perhaps because they felt enough time had finally passed – several opportunities to send up the war, with series like “DAD’S ARMY”, “IT AIN’T HALF HOT MUM”, and “ALLO, ALLO” taking a more rib-tickling, or less respectful, look at such times, and maybe that’s sometimes what’s needed, too.

Although the cast of SECRET ARMY might have disagreed with that, in regard to at least one of those series.

Of course, for the BBC, their war against enemies both old and new was still ongoing. After all, the old enemy ITV also had a few tales to tell, and their own series set in wartime such as DANGER: UXB and ENEMY AT THE DOOR were also classics of their time, and told the story of the war on the home front, whereas the series I’ve been talking about were very much about the war abroad.

And ITV did also have the trump card in that the definitive documentary telling the story of the Second World War - and narrated by no less a figure than Sir Laurence Olivier -  “THE WORLD AT WAR” came from via independent television, and that series is also worth a look.

Perhaps another time, eh?

Martin A W Holmes, Jan-Apr 2019