Television - Andrew Billen on the Nazis' pursuit of the grail and our own pursuit of pleasure
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily every aftering
Than here in Camelot
The pen is mightier than the sword, but so is the shovel. Michael Wood's Secret History Special: Hitler's search for the holy grail (Channel 4, Thursday, 8.30pm) revealed that long before Britain dug for victory, the Nazis were digging, too. At archaeological sites from Iceland to Venezuela, they were in search of evidence that the Germans were truly the master race, descendants of Atlantis and the knights of the round table. It turned out that the German Workers Party that had inspired the young Adolf Hitler into politics was merely an offshoot of the local Atlantis Society - a revelation akin to hearing that Stalin started out as a member of the Flat Earth Society.
In their quest, the Nazi academics travelled the world over: the Antarctic, Tibet, Iran and Peru. Normally when you hear something like that from Michael Wood's lips, you suspect our denimed historian of notching up the air miles himself. This time, however, Wood stayed in the winter fastness of Germany and barely took his overcoat off. His programme opened and closed at Landsberg Castle, Bavaria, the prison in which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while overlooking the yard in which Wolfram Sievers, the head of the SS-Ahnenerbe (Heinrich Himmler's Ancestral Heritage Society), would eventually be hanged. For once, Wood did not look as if he was enjoying himself at all - as well he might not, given that the documentary placed his own profession in the dock.
The Ahnenerbe, he rightly insisted, recruited not crackpots but the finest academics of their generation, many of whom continued with distinguished careers after the war. One of the programme's chilliest moments came when we realised that Bruno, the larkish scientist we saw making Tibetans giggle as he measured their skulls in the 1930s, was also the expert called into Auschwitz to make face masks of Jewish interns. As the numbers of Jewish dead grew, so did museum collections of Jewish skulls. Yet Colin Renfrew, a Cambridge University archaeologist, admitted it was only in the past five years that his profession had owned up that it has almost nothing to add to questions of "ethnicity".
From this distance, the Aryan myth looked as nutty as fruit cake, invoking the holy grail as a pre-Christian power source, positing the crash-landing of three previous moons and dreaming up a blue-eyed race of Indo-Europeans who prospered between moons three and four. Himmler believed himself to be a reincarnation of King Heinrich I, the Hammer of the Slavs, and thought Hitler was Buddha's spiritual descendant. But craziest of all was Wewelsburg, a stage-struck castle that the Nazis built into their Camelot. Guests arrived on horseback, wearing Ivanhoe outfits adorned with swastikas, and danced around a maypole decorated with Nazi insignia. Florentine Rost van Tonningen, an immaculate old bird who had married an SS officer, explained: "Today the world considers us criminals, but there is no purer, more intense and intellectually higher body than the SS." Didn't we just adore her present tense?
Susanna White's series Seeking Pleasure (BBC2, Wednesday, 9.30pm) is about how we British define ourselves not through history, our work or our family but through the holy grail of our leisure time. It is so sharply observed, it will cut itself one of these weeks. Wednesday's episode, lethally directed by Lorraine Charker, concentrated on the ultimate leisure pursuit, the art of happily ever aftering. In the case of Tom and Margery from Bradford, their congenial spot was a retirement community in Harrogate. "There is a terrific cross-section of people here, very enjoyable," said Sybil, the terrifying house manager who greeted them with a Welcome Basket. "They are all very happy, as I shall expect you to be." Sybil talked out of a highly constipated region of herself. "There are bells in the lenje," she said, meaning there were bowls in the lounge. There were, too, although only Tom and Margery were agile enough to play them.
We were invited to draw a contrast with three more dynamic sets of retirees. David and Muriel were buying a yacht for a "leisurely circumnavigation". Ron and Chris were off to a Spanish villa. Terry and Anita had bought a Ferrari for themselves, or rather for Terry (Anita would have preferred a swimming-pool, a play room for the grand- children and a motor home - all of them).
The camera noticed that Tom and Margery's furniture van was from Low Cost Removals. Their new flat at the Adelphi was a £61,960 one-bed "Swan" ("with the larger lounge"). Ron and Chris's villa set them back £175,000. David and Muriel's yacht literally cost them everything they had - we saw them valuing their home like bailiffs. The programme stuck its nose into these details and then turned it up again when it saw what the money was buying. Congratulations to White and Charker for tempting such delightfully comic performances out of their victims, but what did Oscar Wilde call people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing? Documentary makers?
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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