Lost worlds
TELEVISION STUART 1100ll
Few things in the television business are more exciting,,1 find, than to spend a few hours (as I did today) looking at old newsfilm or going through old stills. This was material shot only a quarter of a century ago, lacking therefore in that adventitious quaintness (look at the funny way they walk!) inherent in very early film, bin constantly rewarding because of the sudden excitement of recognition. Huntziger sigping the 1940 armistice in the railway coach at Rethondes; Petain shaking hands with Hitler . at Montoire; Laval just after an attempt on his life; Doriot; Deat. To see the famous and the infamous as they lived and moved is endlessly fascinating.
And always as the stuff runs through the viewing machine there is the feeling that among these few feet of celluloid some hitherto un- recognised gem may lurk, like the piece of film showing a detachment of troops going up to the front in the First World War. A young Guards subaltern turns and looks at the camera. It is tfite future Field-Marshal Alexander. Or that still of the sea of faces in front of the Feldherrenhalle in Munich as war is declared in 1914. Among them you may find, if you look closely, the face of the young Hitler. No one knows what curious riches are hidden away in the vaults, preserved on a piece of film indexed under some unlikely heading.
If we think merely in terms of pictures, still or moving, the history of the last fifty or sixty years is better documented than any previous age. Yet their value, is relative. Many of them are concerned with non-events—little knots of statesmen simulating a bonhomie they were far from feeling—or with formal occasions from which we gather little more than that Clemenceau looked thus and Orlando thus. It is certainly of interest (on a certain level) to see the German Kaiser walking in the funeral cortege of Edward VII, as we did in the first instalment of the Mountbatten series; but this is the surface of history, as helpful to our under- 'standing of history as Madame Tussaud's. The texture has to be added by words, by interpreta- tion. There is one exception—when the pictures have a symbolical power of their own, as in the sequences showing the British fleet steam- ing north to its war stations at Rosyth, layer- gordon and Scapa Flow in the autumn of 1914: great obsolescent monsters of a dying era dis- appearing in flurries of spray and smoke.
Lord Mountbatten has, in John Terraine, got himself an expert scriptwriter and a his- torian of repute. Together they should be able to clothe the pictures chosen for them with living words. To judge by the first instalment they will attempt to do so in a rather restrained manner. This is no doubt dictated by the style and temperament of the narrator, who is very cool, and allowed himself a hint of emotion and a touch of drama only when he recounted how his father was forced to resign from the post of First Sea Lord. His mood was pointed by astonishing and unfamiliar film of jingoistic crowds sacking German shops and churches. How remote it ail was!
What came across as he talked of his parents and the world lb which he grew up was the impression of an age inhabited by men and women who had little in common with our- selves, whose concepts of what is right and fitting, whose emotions and responses were strangely different from ours. It was an elegiac piece as presumably the whole series must be elegiac, culminating in Lord Mountbatten's part in the dismemberment of Empire.
But let us hope that it will not be too gentle- manly. Lord Mountbatten has sat at the centre of power; he must know how power is exercised and how ruthless the struggle can be to keep and maintain it. It would be sad if his story of the century—he was born in 1900—
were to be merely a child's history of the twen- • tteth century. The events in which he has been involved are too grim for that. Like a great many other people I shall be watching the series with interest and expectation. The beginning, after a few false starts, promised well.
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