An analysis of more BBC lies in their new series on the Cambridge spies. These men turn dozens of Eastern Europeans in to the Russians for execution after WWII, and now get glorified. As Andrew Sullivan puts it, "These people, (the BBC) regard the Soviet Union as a glorious experiment gone awry. Why not celebrate its early, traitorous apostles?"
The elusive truth
by John Gross - NEW CRITERION
Fresh from its triumphs in Iraq, BBC television has turned its attention to Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. The series which it has been devoting to them, Cambridge Spies, is no small affair, either. Four episodes, each an hour long; a budget of some £6 million; superior casting; buckets of advance publicity, the whole thing was plainly intended to be a jewel in the Corporation?s crown.
The early nineteenth-century prime minister Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked, after he had been persuaded to see a play by Ben Jonson, "I knew it was going to be dull, but I never thought it would be so damnably dull." Anyone familiar with the current state of the BBC would have been naive not to foresee that Cambridge Spies was going to hold up a distorting mirror to its subject, but just how damnably distorting it was going to be would have been hard to guess.
For a start, the series gave no idea of the nature of the regime which Philby and the others chose to serve. No mention of purges or persecutions, nothing about the millions murdered and the millions more enslaved. This in turn meant that viewers didn?t have to consider the question of how much the Cambridge quartet themselves could (and should) have known about what was going on in the Soviet Union?though there was a clear implication that they couldn?t reasonably have been expected to know more than they did at the time.
They were innocents, in fact. They were also idealists, who were animated above all by their detestation of fascism. "To fight fascism," somebody says at one point, "you have to be a communist," and they are words which might serve as a motto for the entire series. So much for everyone else who opposed fascism. So much, in particular, for the British social and political establishment, whose members are portrayed almost exclusively as boobies or brutes?many of them already more than halfway to fascism themselves.
"We didn't know," "We had no other choice if we wanted to stop Hitler," these are ancient ploys, which have been used countless times in attempts to justify signing up with Stalin. But if the basic strategy which the series adopted was all too familiar, it could lay claim to undoubted novelty in points of detail.
Two incidents, for example, are shown playing a crucial role in pushing the quartet towards communism. In one of them, a Jewish girlfriend of Philby's at Cambridge is subjected to Nazi-style insults. In another, college domestic workers who are on strike are beaten up by right-wing undergraduates. The most notable thing about both episodes, in the context of a supposed docudrama, is that neither of them actually happened: they were both dreamed up by the scriptwriter. And there are many other fabrications, including a KGB attempt to assassinate Franco which fails because Philby, decent and humane fellow that he is, can?t bring himself to pull the trigger.
Some of the inaccuracies are trivial in themselves, though they do a good deal to color the atmosphere. Others are of considerable historical significance. The fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross, makes only a brief appearance, for example: he is shown working as a wartime code-breaker, and rejecting Blunt's suggestion that he start passing on information to the Russians. In reality, as Oleg Gordievsky has pointed out in a trenchant analysis of the series, during the war Cairncross kept the KGB supplied with a steady flow of decrypts, including the first news they received of work on the atomic bomb. You wonder why the scriptwriter decided to play down his importance. Possibly it was for no more serious reason than that he lacked the Brideshead glamour which the series makes so much of in his four colleagues.
American viewers will no doubt have a chance to see Cambridge Spies in due course (and when they do they will find that most of its references to Americans are hostile and scornful). Meanwhile, it has come in for some sharp criticism in the British press, and the response of the BBC and others involved in making it has been almost as revealing as the series itself.
The BBC controller of drama commissioning was quick to leap to the program's defense. She spoke of it highlighting the spies, "humanity, their fallibility mixed with their convictions," and insisted that any other approach would be hopelessly bland:
We don't forget to be witty and cheeky and a little bit controversial, which we like. Otherwise we are going to have a drama which says, "What-ho, these chaps are traitors and we hate them." It's much more complicated than that. What-ho indeed. One wouldn't give much for the career prospects of a BBC official who adopted as flippant a tone discussing a program on, shall we say, the history of apartheid.
Then the actors weighed in. Samuel West, who plays Blunt, denied that Blunt had done any harm, and compared the spies' communism to protests against the war in Iraq, they were both "patriotic responses." Toby Stephens, who plays Philby, reflected that "there is something very appealing about being a lone wolf, out there doing daring deeds, just you and a pistol." The actor who plays Maclean made no bones about his admiration for the spies: "they were heroic." The actor who plays Burgess had clearly fallen a little bit in love with his character: "He's such fun, he's winging it always. Who doesn?t want to live like that?"
Well, we all know that actors say the darndest things. But we also live in an age in which their political pronouncements get listened to. And it is worth adding that in any serious poll to nominate the most promising young British actor, West and Stephens would be among the top contenders.
The author of the series, Peter Moffat, was more cautious. He admitted that he had taken liberties, but insisted that his version of events was "rooted in reality." At the same time he maintained that he was writing drama, not history, which gave him the right to alter the facts, as though his alterations were purely for dramatic effect, and didn?t have any political significance.
But the last word must be left with the BBC itself. Trying to wind up the controversy, a spokesman for the Corporation offered the thought that, given the nature of the people involved in the story and what they were doing, ?the truth is elusive.? How can people say such things with a straight face? But they can. I was reminded of a remark Oliver Stone is reported to have made after he had spent thirty hours filming an interview with Fidel Castro last year, and failed to ask him about human rights abuses or political oppression: ?With Mr. Castro it is hard to say what is evasive and what is not. And his elusiveness is always charming.?
It is depressing to reflect that for large numbers of people who have been watching Cambridge Spies, especially the younger ones, the series is likely to be pretty well their only source of information on the subject. We can also brace ourselves for more programs in the same vein. For in terms of the BBC as it is at present, the series is anything but an aberration. It ties in all too well with prevailing beliefs and attitudes.
In domestic politics, the Corporation?s bias is now shameless. On the Middle East, it is virtually conducting its own foreign policy. This is in spite of the fact that it is a public body, funded by public money. (Its principal source of income is the license fee which everyone in Britain who owns a television set has to pay.) And along with the abandonment of any pretence of objectivity?except when lofty policy pronouncements are being made?there has been a cultural decline which grows steadily worse.
Pockets of excellence remain. Some of the traditions which made the BBC one of the great achievements of twentieth-century Britain survive. Until recently even its most disaffected critic would have stopped short of recommending privatization: there was too much to lose. And perhaps there still is?but the prospect no longer seems unthinkable.
Meanwhile other British institutions are under pressure to keep pace with changing times. Some collude with their fate, or even welcome it; a few fight back. Universities, for instance, are finding it hard to resist Government demands that they take more students from poor areas, even if those students don?t come up to what would normally be the required standard: the financial penalties for refusing to do so are too great. But the leading music colleges, faced with similar demands and penalties, are standing firm. They are also trying to fight off semi-official pressure to be less ?elitist? and more ?inclusive??which in practice means cutting down on classical music and introducing pop and rock.
One institution which provides a particularly useful index of changing public values is the National Portrait Gallery. Founded by the Victorians as a kind of national Valhalla, until little more than twenty years ago it still didn?t display portraits of living people. But we have changed all that. Today it is bright, brisk, and up-to-date; and in some respects, at least, it is undoubtedly more inclusive.
As a quick experiment, I recently took a look at the postcards on sale in the Gallery shop. There are some 300 different ones, among them portraits of contemporary footballers, fashion models, and comedians. Pop stars, as you might expect, are particularly well represented?the Rolling Stones, the Spice Girls, the Pet Shop Boys, Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Suzy Quatro ? But what is more interesting is who aren?t to be found. Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gibbon, Coleridge, Thackeray, Hardy, Kipling, D. H. Lawrence?these are just a few of the omissions. And though I have taken my examples from literature, things aren?t much rosier elsewhere. Elton John may be included, but there is no Purcell or Elgar. You look in vain for Gladstone (shall we say) or John Maynard Keynes or Henry Moore, but you can console yourself with Michael Caine (two separate cards) and Tracy Emin.
You won?t, on the other hand, find Kim Philby or Anthony Blunt or Guy Burgess or Donald Maclean. But who knows? Perhaps it is only a matter of time.
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