COLD WAR: Red Dawn BBC Two, 9:00PM Tue, 12 Nov 2013
A series of programmes
about the Cold war is an enticing prospect and is a subject long overdue for
thoughtful analysis. If this programme is anything like the rest of the series
that moment has not arrived yet.
It is not in itself a bad
programme, just monotone and one dimensional. It offers up a very traditional
perspective on the events of the late 1940’s, you will find the same narrative
in any school textbook. It was surely a mistake to rest the whole programme on the
voice of one man, the narrator Dominic Sandbrook. No other voices, aside from
clips from the archive, are heard and he appears to speak in sentences all concluding
in exclamation marks, his voice rising and falling like some pantomime villain
to make each point. One feels that if watching this programme with a child they
would ask, “Why is he talking funny?”
There are however some
priceless moments in the programme, not least archive footage of ‘The Red Dean,’
Hewlett
Johnson, receiving the Stalin Peace Prize. From this distance in time it is
difficult to know whether the Dean was wicked or vying for the stupidest man on
the planet award. Still in the light of Stalin’s crimes, well documented by the
early 1950’s, Johnson’s grovelling acceptance of the award is truly stomach
churning.
Liberal and sometimes lazy
use is made of Orwell, in a trend that seems now to be de rigueur for
documentaries about the period, though it is good to see the programme, i.e.
Sandbrook, avoid the mistake of presenting Orwell purely as a conventional cold
war warrior, i.e. hostile to socialism.
What would really be new
and provide genuinely fresh insight into the cold war period and what thus far
has been missing, is the experience of ordinary citizens living behind ‘the
iron curtain.’ Not Party apparatchiks or dissidents but ordinary people seeking
to live a normal life. How did they view ‘the West?’ How did they feel about
the Party and the ideology of communism? How did it feel to engage with Pioneer
activities, or attend May Day events? This narrative needs to be engaged with
soon, while those who lived through the era still have fresh memories.
The story of the division
of Europe is much more nuanced than the conventional
narrative as provided by Sandbrook allows. Perhaps we will get this more complex
picture later in the series. I live in hope.
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