Television
Lest we forget, here's another reminder
Published 20 November 2006
We're happy to remember past wars without addressing the one we're in
Kipling: a remembrance tale
BBC1
At this rate, Poppy Day is going to end up bigger than Christmas. Thanks to the way the dates fell, last weekend boasted not one but two two-minute silences. On Saturday, 11/11, BBCs 1 and 2 and ITV halted proceedings at 11am and did so again on Cenotaph Sunday, BBC1 tuning in at 10.30am and lingering until 12.10.
For a while now BBC1 has felt it is not enough to take us to the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night for the Festival of Remembrance, but that it has to do something a little special on Sunday, too. So, we got Kipling: a remem brance tale (12 November, 6.35pm) - a title that made it sound like "A Christmas Ghost Story" - about Rudyard Kipling and the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in September 1915.
The show had a clear idea of the moment Kipling learnt of the news. The telegraph boy came cycling down the country lanes to knock at the door of Bateman's, his idyllic Sussex home. Telegram in hand Mrs Kipling plodded upstairs to where her husband was composing the famous lines from If about keeping your head. Opening the envelope, he briefly gasped at the news from the War Office that John was missing in action. Mrs K, being American and a woman, released in contrast a vomiting shriek that echoed down the valley.
Well, for starters, If was written five years before John's death. The news was, in fact, delivered by Kipling's friend, Andrew Bonar Law, the Tory party leader. And Kipling did not receive it in silence but let out "a curse like the cry of a dying man". Dramatic licence, yes - but this "tale" was billed as a documentary drama.
Its thesis was that Kipling, far from being a racist, loved the Empire not wisely but too well. Born in Bombay, he spoke Hindi before he spoke English. He believed the Empire was helping his beloved India and that Germany might threaten both. This, not jingoism, motivated him to travel the country as a recruiting sergeant in 1914. When someone asked why he did not send his "own bloody son" to fight, he pulled strings and got John, who had been rejected because of his poor eyesight, a commission with the Irish Guards. His death destroyed not only Kipling but his public reputation.
That was the "remembrance tale" and its moral. The better centre of the programme was an enthusiastic rehabilitation of Kipling's work. Whether Griff Rhys Jones was chosen as presenter because of his previous stewardship of Bookworm or because on Restoration he is known for restoring things (and why not reputations?), his visit to Mumbai caught Kipling's delight in the city. He got a good interview, too, at Wellington Barracks where a Major-General Roberts had examined the files recording Kipling's nobbling of the colonel in chief of the Irish Guards, one Lord Roberts (a relation perhaps?). He concluded that John had been as keen to fight as his dad was that he should. He also, movingly, explained why First World War soldiers are always pictured with moustaches: they were ordered to grow them to look older.
And so back to the lesson. The programme asserted that Kipling came to believe his support of the war had been a mistake - "If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied." More than that, it assumed that it was, actually, a mistake. One day I'd like to see a "what if the Kaiser had won?" documentary. Until then, November's TV will continue to patronise the past and piggyback on another generation's grief.
The news from Iraq on Sunday of yet more British soldiers' deaths suggests we are in no position to feel superior. ITV News did well in its brief coverage of Saturday's silence to show not footage from the trenches but the faces of British soldiers recently killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Peter Fincham, BBC1's controller, truly wants to explore war, he should emulate his predecessors at times of profound national unease and clear the schedules for a two-hour debate on Blair's foreign policy.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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