Piers Paul Read - The Dreyfus Affair

The book begins by reminding us quite how many books have already been written on this subject.  What is needed then is a clear, readable account of what actually happened.  Personal knowledge was probably limited to Devil's Island, antisemitism and 'J'Accuse!', so I was looking forward to adding to flesh to those bones.

One problem with the affair is the dizzying amount of people involved with outlandish double or triple-barreled names.  The old houses of Europe are all involved as are the inner echelons of the French armed forces and government.  Luckily this book successfully guides us through these complications admirably while keeping the narrative moving at an impressive pace.  The lengthy dramatis personnae at the end of the book is a highly useful addition though.

We learn much about Dreyfus himself, in many ways a thoroughly unlikely and inconsequential figure thrust into an event with international repercussions.  A career military man who cheated on his wife and spoke in a turgid monotone is an unlikely hero.  What makes him that is the jaw-dropping treatment that he received when first accused and then convicted of treason.

After the conviction. his treatment is purely vindictive.  Dreyfus is not only deported to be incarcerated on a prison island complex from which he couldn't possibly escape, he is exiled to a tiny island to serve out his sentence on his own.  Things could be worse one thinks, exiled on a desert island is not the end of the world.  Except that it was, imagine the exquisite mental torture of being confined to a stockade where you could hear the waves breaking on the shore, but couldn't see them? This was life for Dreyfus for almost four years.  The reason?  A panic that his supporters would turn up and help him to freedom.

The book leads us neatly through the affair and to the eventual pardon for Dreyfus.  It should also make us think about situations where people are convicted and imprisoned partly due to perceptions about their religious beliefs.  Dreyfus was not necessarily a good man, but was certainly Jewish.  When it came to trying him, the military authorities took far more attention of his Jewishness than whether the evidence they had before them was credible.

A thought-provoking and nicely written read.  Just the sort of secondary source that the amateur historian needs to get their head around a subject in double-quick time.

The Sandbaggers

A whole year before Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy hit the screens Yorkshire Television gave us this gem.

Starring Roy Marsden who would later find fame as ITV's face of the cerebral sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, this was seven hours of raw in-your-face cold war action.  As far as the plots go it is pretty run of the mill stuff, lots of talk about double-dealing by the KGB and snarls of  'this could ruin the special relationship!'.  In that respect, TTSS beats it hands down.  To be fair though the BBC had excellent source material in the original novel and, one would presume, a significantly larger budget.

So,  thirty five years on, was it worth revisiting the world of The Sandbaggers?  On balance I think the answer is yes.  I have gone back to some series of this vintage and barely made it through the first episode.  Here, however, we have characters that although dated and somewhat caricatured are still interesting.  After a while you start to care about Neil Burnside (Marsden) and the way he leads his team of spooks, the titular 'Sandbaggers'.

That word 'spooks' is an interesting one. Watching this brought to mind very much the relatively recent series of that name,  I think they are closer relations than TTSS. This is darker than some of the other drama of the period - take Bergerac for example which came along a few years later.

Some of the production values are frankly shocking to view today, not least because at the time there would never have been any thought of it being watched on a vast widescreen television.  The cuts between location and studio are clunky but do not detract from the enjoyment.

Where The Sandbaggers starts to get interesting is in its ambition.  I have already mentioned that they budget seems to have been limited and that it was made by Yorkshire Television.  Neither of these things stopped the creation of an ambitiously international show.  The first series features action in London, Vienna, the Kola Peninsula, Istanbul, Gibraltar, Cyprus among other exotic spots.  It seems pretty likely that the London scenes were filmed there, but for the rest they simply used what they had around them (and a little stock footage).  

The relatively eagle-eyed will be able to spot that Yorkshire in general and Leeds in particular were utilised for all the location work.  A particularly quaint example comes as our sandbagger is chasing down a terrorist in Gibraltar with an RPG trained on a vital flight out of the airport. We cut between shots of the fiend holding his weapon and an obvious stock shot of a plane taxiing and then taking off. Panning back to what looks suspiciously like a quarry in the Dales, a horde of policeman dressed in outcasts from an amateur production of the Pirates of Penzance appear to apprehend the villain just as he was about to fire.  The stock-shot flight then jets off into the sunshine.

Meetings with a representative of 'the cousins' take place in a park.  That would usually be St James's Park in London, but this one is suspiciously hilly, could it perhaps be Roundhay instead?  Sometimes they haven't even made an effort. 'Limassol' was clearly Emmerdale with some cardboard numberplates on vaguely foreign looking cars. 

Yorkshire have form for this in some truly dire 'comedies', cansider this;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrington_of_the_F.O.

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_Free_(TV_series)

The highlight was the choice of location for 'East Berlin' in the final episode of the series though.  I won't reveal it here, but will delight anyone who lived in Leeds in the seventies or the preceding few decades.

Even without the jolt of recognition from some of the locations, this would still have been a worthwhile watch.  I have series two and three (there were no more owing to the unfortunate demise of the writer and creator) and will be watching them even more carefully.

Murder on the Home Front- ITV1

Blitz spirits,dark and murderous.

The memoirs of the late Molly Lefebure had been dramatised for radio previously and seemed ripe for a television version.  It seems that the Radio 4 dramas stretch back as far as 1998.

1998.07.04 15:00 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. It is 1941, and a chance encounter in a dancehall leads Molly to romance, murder and a new career.
1999.06.05 15:00 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted in two parts from the book by Molly Lefebure. 2: `The Case of a Lifetime'.
2000.07.08 15:00 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. 3: `The Wigwam Murder'.
2001.02.24 14:30 The Saturday Play: Murder on the Home Front By Michael Crompton, adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. 4: `The Secret Agent'.
2003.12.20 The Saturday Play: Murder On The Home Front By Michael Crompton. Adapted from the book by Molly Lefebure. 5. 'The Horsham Trunk Murder'.Based on the true story of Molly Lefebure, as described in her book, Murder On The Home Front.

(thanks to http://www.suttonelms.org.uk/mcrompton.html for that information) 

So, an intriguing prospect, one drama set in the Second World War was so popular that when ITV tried to cancel 'Foyle's War', they were forced to bring it back to public delight and decent ratings.  Post-mortem/crime scene drama is also a mainstay of the schedules through long-running shows like 'Silent Witness' in the UK and the all-conquering 'CSI' franchise in the US.

Bringing those two formats together should create a winner, the powerful pull of a costume drama with all the blood and gore of a contemporary crime drama.  What we actually got seemed a slightly uneasy mix of the two which cancelled each other out rather than adding to the impact of the programme.

Here was a very dark drama (both literally and metaphorically) with death and bombings all around and a killer with a particularly topical trait, yet it failed to enthrall.  There is a second part to come next week so I shall reserve judgement, but on the basis of the first, I can't see it running to even the number of episodes that Radio 4 produced.  This is a shame because the source material is such fertile ground. Here we have an example of ITV drama reverting to bad old ways.  This was no 'Broadchurch', or even the flawed but fun 'Whitechapel'.

On The Map - Simon Garfield

This splendid piece of work is lavishly (though sadly not colourfully) illustrated with maps of all ages, shapes and sizes.  Essentially a collection of short case studies taking us through the history of the map in all its forms over a thousand or more years, its triumph is some of the personalities behind the stories.

Garfield went to interview Patrick Moore for instance, who was sadly no longer with us by the time I got hold of the book.  A chunky hardback with a lovely cover design, this feel like a volume from a bygone age, yet it recounts the 'Apple maps' fiasco that seems only to have happened yesterday.

We are taken through the potentially disastrous tale of the Mappa  Mundi at Hereford Cathedral, learning that the decision to offload the little-seen map actually turned into a renaissance for the ancient plan.

A little later the history of the A to Z guides appears, something that was an essential part of travel to London (and indeed many other cities) for many decades before SatNav and Google Maps came on the scene.

Each of the chapters is constructed lightly and Garfield imparts knowledge so subtly that the reader could almost forget that this is a 'history book', perusing it is such a pleasure.

In summary, a lovely piece of work.  The only downside (which is nothing to do with the author I would imagine) is that the images inside the book do not live up to the spectacular cover and bold end-papers   Highly recommended.