Television - The Holocaust Memorial Day coverage packs pathos, but fails to convince Andrew Billen

I don't think I have ever been left feeling so ambivalent about a piece of television as I was by BBC2's proprietorial coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day on the night of Saturday 27 January. At times properly moving, the ceremony/TV show frequently veered towards the crass, too, as if the old theory about the banality of evil was being proved by the banality of television. Even the timing seemed suspect. If 27 January was the day Auschwitz was liberated, why had it taken 56 years for it to be marked? And if it is now to be an annual event, will BBC2's schedules, which on the Saturday night consisted of nothing but Holocaust material from 5.35pm onward, be so cleared every year, even if 27 January falls midweek? Will Schindler's List be an annual event?

Our commentator for the HMD, the BBC's foreign affairs editor, John Simpson (where were the Dimblebys?), at least acknowledged one well-aired difficulty, namely the question of which mind-blowing atrocities to include and which to leave out. The problem, he allowed, with the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1945 is that the Turks dispute it happened. So he was certainly pleased to show off the presence of both the Turkish and the Armenian ambassadors, as well as the curiously hooded figure of the leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Like the recipient of a prize at an awards ceremony who feared he might omit someone from his thank-you speech, Simpson promised that every genocide of the past century was present in spirit if not in name. (Stalin: that means you.)

But all tradition looks uncertain at the moment of its invention. Perhaps, in the future, we will get used to HMD being presented from what looks like a set for a party conference or the Eurovision Song Contest, and to it being orchestrated to music that would fit either. (And I do know that the words to the schmaltzy closing number, "I Believe in Love", were found in a cave in Cologne that sheltered Jews; they are still bad verse.) Perhaps the choice of venue by the BBC and Home Office, the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, will one day look time-honoured rather than just tactful, the most inoffensively ecumenical of churches playing host to every religion in the country (down to an Indian sect with a mere 25,000 British followers). I trust that the Catholics were there to apologise.

The truth is that, given the absence of pre-existing ritual, the organisers needed the aura of religiosity to rub off. And any other aura, too. Worse even than the over-produced filmed inserts, the snazzy typography and the misjudged showing of a clip from The Killing Fields was the hierarchy of celebrity that descended down stairs into our presence, a parade that started with Emma Thompson, with a hairdo that was unfortunately reminiscent of a concentration-camp crew-cut, and ended in the bathos of Sir Trevor McDonald. Here was genocide as This Is Your Life.

In fact, your mind teemed with cynicism - until, at any point, a survivor bore witness. Then you felt cheap.

Many, I am sure, would have found Channel 4's Battle for the Holocaust, which overlapped the HMD broadcast, much more offensive. This was a programme that analysed the cultural significance of the Jewish Holocaust today, fearlessly so, except for taking the precaution of interviewing Jews only. It found many reasons to question the current obsession with the Holocaust, the main one being that, consciously or subconsciously, the Holocaust is usually invoked by those with an ulterior motive for doing so. What, the programme asked, does America's taste for founding Holocaust museums say about its reluctance to endow any such monuments in contrition for the crime of slavery?

The least credible part of the programme was the charge repeated here by Norman Finkelstein, the American author of The Holocaust Industry, that Jewish reparation claims had become an "extortion racket". The most credible part was the explanation it provided for why the "industry" took off only in the Nineties. A strong case was made that, for four decades, the west's demonisation of the Russians (who actually liberated Auschwitz) necessitated a tactful marginalising of Germany's crimes. Certainly, Henry Kissinger's painfully reluctant contribution to the programme suggested that western cold warriors had their reasons for never talking about their own losses, great as they were in his case. The academic Peter Novick correctly linked the current reliving of the horror to the west's galloping cult of victimhood, in which suffering implies moral superiority.

However, listening to Saturday night's testimonies and to the Hungarian survivors who returned to Auschwitz for the documentary The Last Days, which preceded the HMD programme, I concluded that what one was hearing was really the voice of old age, not history. I happen to have interviewed Roman Halter, one of the survivors who spoke so affectingly at the commemoration ceremony. Before his grandfather died at Nazi hands, he told Roman that it was his duty to tell his story. Nevertheless, when I wrote about him last summer, a reader, greatly moved and shocked by the interview, rang to say he had been at architecture school with Roman after the war and had had no idea of his story. Perhaps it is not surprising that a tale of such enormity has taken time to be told, or that we still cannot quite find the right words or the appropriate formats.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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