Tumbledown - Charles Wood

 Tumbledown is the other controversial Falklands Play.  Ian Curteis wrote the actual Falklands Play, a hymn of praise to the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, which was commissioned by the BBC soon after the war ended but shelved indefinitely when it turned out that the British public were not quite so gung-ho about the imperialistic adventure and had rather fallen out of love with Margaret Thatcher.  In the end it wasn't produced until 2000 by which time tempers had cooled but Curteis's technique had dated badly.  It was recently reshown on BBC 4 for the fortieth anniversary of the war.  It was very old-fashioned but I was impressed by the character of Curteis's Maggie (for clarity, let it be known, my hatred for Mrs T, whose reign of terror I endured in full, is second to none, my contempt for electioneering military escapades likewise).  Some of the other acting, however (who was that as Michael Foot?) was atrocious.

I digress...  Tumbledown is the other controversial TV play about the Falklands War, produced by the BBC in May 1988, despite the screeches of protest from the Daily Mail and others.  I can't remember why the Mail considered the true story of 21 year-old Robert Lawrence, who was horribly wounded just before the end of hostilities, was somehow controversial.  Lawrence was a hero, he responded heroically to his injury, and who was hidden from the cameras at the state memorial service in case he upset the viewers.  Who, war-supporter or not, wouldn't empathise with young Robert and his family, who behaved with magnificent dignity.

Wood was famously a dramatist of war.  His stage plays, Dingo, H and so on, are military-based.  He wrote both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Dick Lester's How I Won the War.  He was an admirer of the front line soldier, an enemy of war - exactly the stance required for this story.  He does it beautifully.  There are many profoundly moving moments - so much so that I couldn't bear to watch it again when it too was shown for the anniversary.  So I read it for the fourth or fifth time again.  Superb.

The Man Who Was Saturday - Patrick Bishop

 

The problem for a biographer of the politician Airey Neave is that it was interesting at the beginning and at the end with nothing of interest inbetween.  As a young man in World War II he escaped from Colditz and was the first British escapee to make it all the way home.  He went on to work with resisters in occupied Europe but, worthwhile and commendable as this was, he did most of it from a desk in Whitehall.  After the war he became a Tory MP, spending 30 years as an unexceptional backbencher.  In 1975 he organised Margaret Thatcher's successful bid for the Tory leadership.  She naturally offered him any job he wanted in the Shadow Cabinet and he chose, as his first and only front bench job, Shadow Irish Secretary.  This of course was towards the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Bombs on the mainland were starting and the IRA was splintering into ultra-violent factions.  One of these was the Irish National Liberation Army, which on March 30 1979 blew up Neave and his car as he was leaving the underground car park of the House of Commons.

In his lifetime Neave was known for the Colditz escape.  Now he is remembered, if at all, for his horrible death.  Those are the two events that interest Bishop in this book.  He provides good context for each and there was much that was new to me in relation to the Irish situation in the Seventies.  My main interest in seeking out the book, however, was another military disaster which Neave was witness to, and which he went on to write about - the siege of  Calais in which hundreds of allied troops were abandoned to fight to the death and so occupy the German army whilst the rest of the failed British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk.  Neave was there with a non-combatant searchlight squad (something I had not heard of).  He was wounded early on, quite seriously, and was ultimately taken prisoner.  There was enough here to satisfy me that I really need to get Neave's own book on the episode.

The problem, as I say, is the yawning 30-year gap in the middle.  Neave was happily married and kept busy with constituency work, work for an engineering company that employed him, and with a reasonably successful writing career.  But it's not enough to fire up any biographer.  When Neave accidentally finds himself wheeling and dealing over Mrs Thatcher's future, this reader can't help wishing he had failed.  I lived through Thatcher's reign of terror and I roundly hated her.  Neave, of course, didn't live to see what he had inflicted on his beloved country.  Bishop tries to mollify my kind of reader with regular disclaimers of the 'he probably wouldn't have agreed with her more controversial policies' variety.  Oh yes he would.  He put up with the senile Churchill, the useless Eden and the appalling Heath (who he actually hated).  Monetarism, deindustrialisation and mass unemployment were hardly going to worry him.