Damn fine TV show from our chaps

Press, 7 June 1982, Page 10

Damn fine TV show from our chaps

Joan Curry is an unabashed fan of those stiff-upper-lip British film heroes whose Second World War exploits make more reassuring television viewing than the news from the Falkland Islands.

The moment Group Captain John Mills steps out of the Lancaster on to the tarmac and says “Jolly good show, chaps!"you know exactly where you are. The chaps also know where they are; they are in good hands. In fact, you know where you are the moment you see that John Mills heads the cast of the Sunday afternoon movie on television. You can be sure that what is about to follow will be a cosy, uncomplicated, predictable film about a group of chaps, bristling with stiff upper lips, involved in a piece of wartime drama. The story will be unfolded in gentlemanly style, with a touch of humour. The parts will be played by a selection of actors who stayed in work for years by moving from film to film playing interchangeable roles. Others may prefer the creaky old cowboy films with Randolph Scott grunting stony-faced over the prairie, or the intense, twilchy dramas starring Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis; John Wayne yipping his way across the West from saloon to saloon, or even Sam

Goldwyn’s glitteringly awful musical extravaganzas. But John Mills and his band of jolly good chaps fit snugly into my winter Sundays in whatever combination they choose. They will be laconic in clipped accents. They will be plucky and win through in the end. They will change into clean underwear before ■going into battle. And they will treat war as though it were being fought on the playing fields of Eton, Winchester, Marlborough, and Rugby. They will be teddibly, teddibly British.

What could be more British than the opening scene, perhaps at the Admiralty, wi th Cecil Parker, Trevor Howard, Leo Genn, and that owlish young man with glasses. They are all looking seriously at the map on the wall and James Robertson Justice, with the pointer, is explaining that the Jerries have been using “Tirpitz” to conduct a series of unsporting raids on our shipping here, here and here, and that they are operating from a strongly guarded base, here. He looks around at the company.

“And that, gentlemen, is what we’ve got to stop. We have go to get 'Tirpitz'.” Right. We have the task. And, of course, we have the man to carry it out. John Mills is in the Navy for this one and he can pick his own team. They line up looking proud, sturdy, dependable and — British. “We’ve served together before, haven’t we Hutchins?" Commander John Mills is evidently the type to remember names and faces. “How’s the wife?” “Fine thank you, sir." “Boy or girl?” "Boy, sir!” The Commander has shown that he cares for his men. We are warmly aware that he is the type to inspire devotion. Hutchins is enslaved. The Commander will not stand any nonsense, however, not even from colonials:

“What’s that you're wearing, Gregson?” ' T "A pullover, sir."

"Worn in the Antipodes, perhaps, but not in the British Navy. While you are under my command you will be properly dressed at all times."

Apart from the scruffy colonial and the worshipful Hutchins, the team will consist of a cheeky chap, played by Richard Attenborough before he became portly; a cockney wit played by Bryan Forbes before he became a writer and director; a sillyass officer who is really a clever silly-ass officer, played by David Tomlinson; a supercilious champ from Eton and Balliol who turns out to be a real brick (that’s Denholm Elliot); the tough senior n.c.o. with the heart of gold.

There will also be Gordon Jackson before he took up

butiering upstairs and downstairs. The team will be completed with a few actors whose faces are familiar but whose names we have forgotten. Now then, the boffins have come up with a bold, ingenious device. It might be a bomb that bounces over water, or a midget submarine or a new navigational system. The team is ready to be told about its task, which is going to be tricky, damned tricky. The men gather round Commander Mills who gives them one of his pep talks: “When I say attack. I mean attack. We’re going to blow such a hole in ‘Tirpitz’ that she’ll never move again!" Bravery and pathos But not all the team members are happy. Michael Medwin has the jitters about the midget submarine and manages to blurt out his trouble. The Commander is both wise and gentle: "I tested that chariot myself, you know, and I was scared stiff too!” Medwin (after a long awestuck pause and struggling to control his feelings): “Thank you sir!" (Michael Medwin appeared in “Minder" recently, perhaps a little thicker round the middle and a little thinner on top. It is reassuring to know that he survived the war.)

On the way to blow up “Tirpitz” something goes wrong. This gives Commander Mills on the bridge a chance to say “Take over, No. 1!” as he lunges for the scene of the trouble. In the throbbing, bleeping engine room the men are tense and sweating while the Chief Engineer looks grim but dourly, Scottishly capable. "Think you can fix it, Chief?" asks the Commander. Of course he can, but not without getting grease on his forehead and a smear down the side of his nose.

They blow up “Tirpitz” in the end, but someone must die in the attempt. We are not enraged or sickened or assaulted by the dying in these films.'Rather, we are permitted a moment of pathos. We can shed tears of pity but never of anger. We can feel sad but never ashamed. We can cry for a man but never, for mankind.

Men die bravely and cleanly, often with a friend close by to help the sentiment along. One scene illustrates this point. A soldier who has just won a bet on who reached the target first, cradles the body of his dying friend. “Hang on, mate, I want steak, eggs and chips out of you. remember?” His friend looks up and struggles to speak; “Can you manage-a double whack?” he murmurs, and dies.

The prospect of death is never far away in films about war, but in these comfortable British films of wartime drama it is possible to ignore the facts of death for most of the time.

Even when we are dropping bombs on Dresden or busting the dam at Moehne, the targets are only munitions factories or missile launching sites or lines of supply. Nobody talks about there being people down there .as well.

The only people involved are our chaps, risking death every time they go out on ops. And when it comes to daredevils in the air, look no further than .Flight Lieutenant Kenneth More. Whenever a wise old Air Vice Marshall, played by wise old Wilfred Hyde-White, needs a tricky job done, he puts his trust in the young hot-head More, w’ho calls his aeroplane old girl, everybody else old boy, and wears his cap at an improperly jaunty angle. Sometimes our chaps get shot down or torpedoed or caught behind the enemy lines. Then they are sent to a prison camp where everyone is very jaunty indeed because they have to keep their peckers up. No-one seems to be worried about having enough to eat or keeping warm, so they can spend all their time being resourceful, plotting escapes and outwitting the goons.

There are no horrors, no reprisals and everyone, even the goons, take their tone from the gentlemanly Senior British Officer who is the only one wearing a uniform which is not only complete but neatly pressed as well. All the prisoners want to make it back to Blighty so they can have another crack at Jerry.

There are conventions about making it back to Blighty.

Tension is built around the Wellingtons and Lancasters limping home after a raid, ships struggling for safe harbour.

The patient, steadfast, nameless girls hover in the ops room as they wait for Bravo Charlie Victor to appear over the horizon. They stand on the tarmac, waiting. The French ones are called Odette; they are in the Resistance and they smuggle Captain Dirk Bogarde through the German lines.

It all turns out right in the end. The closing shots of the film show Colonel John Mills looking proud and brave and British, and the music sounds as though Elgar wrote at least some of it. The Jerries have been routed again. Forty years on, we who suspect that war was never really like this, and will never be like this in the future, can still lean back in our comfortable chairs and say. with John Mills, .“Fine show chaps, damn fine show!”