IN THE ABSENCE OF HITLER
37 Days BBC 2 6 th -8 th March 2014 The BBC has promised to “explain why the First World War happened”. Consequently over three nights last week it gave us this docudrama, a reconstruction of the diplomacy leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. And if you wanted a presentation of the classic British historical position, that it was all the fault of, well in this presentation some , beastly Germans, this was that case. Scriptwriters of this sort of serious docudrama seem to find it impossible to resist the temptation to introduce an element of the comic, and ‘37 Days’ proved no exception. In the first episode this took the form of the Austrian ambassador to Germany who came on like a cross between Larry Grayson [1] and Salvador Dali. He being just the most preposterous of a host of excitable foreigners, including a scattering of pantomime villains. In comparison the British, particularly the foreign secretary Edward Grey, came across as calm and mea...