Television
Frozen waste
Martyn Harris
The true age of exploration ended, arguably, with the invention of the aero- plane and certainly with the helicopter, after which it became possible to visit any- where on earth in your carpet slippers. Since then exploration has become a game, with self-imposed hardships and arbitrary rules, like children who must walk home from school without treading on a crack in the pavement. In Michael Palin's Pole to Pole (BBC 1, Wednesday, 9.30 p.m.) we met a Japanese man who has motorcycled up Everest, so it is only a matter of time before someone decides to sail round the world in a frisbee, or crawl around it push- ing a pea with his nose. For Palin the rules were, I think, to stick to the 30th meridian, and to travel by land and sea where possible — but by the final leg of his journey, The Bitter End, even these had gone by the board. A sea passage from Cape Town fell through and the crew had to fly 6,000 miles to Santiago in Chile, as the nearest jumping-off point for Antarctica.
Here we saw the palace band playing `Happy Birthday To Our President', giving Palin a chance to remind us that 'Chileans have not always been so nice to their lead- ers. Eighteen years ago their own planes bombed this palace, while inside President Allende took his own life.' Having disposed of 20th-century South American history, PalM took a plane to the Patriot Hills, 600 miles from the South Pole, where he was restored to his natural environment, name- ly the lavatory. This was a kind of roofless igloo, or ig-loo, as he insisted, from which he marvelled at 'the most extraordinary view of any lavatory in the world. I am probably the only person sitting on the toi- let for the next 1,000 miles.'
I should be irritated by the fact that even a penny of my licence fee has paid for Palin to spend the most expensive penny in the history of broadcasting, but it is impossible to be cross with someone as cheerfully aware of the absurdity of his own position. `All human waste', he told us, 'has to be removed from Antarctica, so anything I pass today has to be air-freighted out to Chile,' — and here he was seized by Pythonic inspiration — 'where it is made into models and sold in the duty-free shop.'
In Python mode he popped up again in The Great Dictator (Channel 4, Without Walls, Tuesday, 9 p.m.), playing Himmler to John Cleese's suburban Hitler. The aim of this programme, so far as I could make out through the fashionable flurry of film- clips and talking heads, was to examine the persistence of Hitler's image in the arts and the popular imagination, from Leni Reifen- stahl and Berthold Brecht to Benny Hill and Monty Python.
Simon Callow turned up to show how Hitler's limp-wristed Sieg Heil supported his theory that the Fiihrer was a bit of a bender. An art critic said that Adolf was a worse painter than Churchill but a better one than Eisenhower, 'which is not to say an awful lot'. Robert Harris, author of Fatherland, believed he had 'the egotism of a great artist — the same contempt for humanity. But he also had a pitiful talent, and I think that he knew it.' Rabbi Lionel Blue, in his Revd J.C. Flannel role, said there was a little bit of Hitler in all of us.
The programme was a clever mess which raised some interesting questions but by focusing on personality alone led away from any interesting answers. Beyond a certain point in the flailing attempt of the Western powers to halt communism, Hitler, or someone like him, was probably inevitable. He may not have had a funny moustache; he may not have massacred the Jews; he may have been called Schmidt rather than Schickelgruber, but he would have been. Nazism was the work of histori- cal process rather than a uniquely wicked individual, but such an idea does not sit comfortably within the new accommoda- tion in Europe, and still less does it make good television.
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