Bahamas he kept in touch
with the enemy, a move for
which he should have been
“executed” for treason.
It is a measure, however, of
how entrenched reverence for
our royal family is that a) they
didn’t and b) even faced with
this overwhelming evidence,
the sycophants were still
inclined to give Edward the
benefit of the doubt. We were
told he had “no sense of the
magnitude of what he tried to
do with the Nazis”, when they
had read in black and white
that he had.
On BBC2 there was the
lively two-parter Banned!
The Mary Whitehouse
Story. It seems strange that
this possessed badger of a
rictus-grinning woman should
suddenly feel relevant again.
Who’d have thought, two
decades after her death,
we would be watching the
footage of her vigorously
hoeing her bounteous garden
— fnar — in her Daddy Pig-style
horn-rimmed specs?
Whitehouse was a prurient
Christian housewife from the
Midlands who spent most of
her later life campaigning to
stop nudity and obscenity on
TV. All anyone who hasn’t
heard of her needs to know
about her legacy is that most
people who tuned into this
documentary did solely for
their week’s ration of penises,
bushes and naked breasts.
There were images of the
Seventies model Fiona
Richmond straddling men
naked and plopping her
boobs on John Inman’s head.
There were interviews with
the lawyer Geoffrey
Robertson, who told of how
he defended a production at
the National Theatre after
Whitehouse decided it was
unacceptable that audiences
should have seen “the tip of
an actor’s penis” during a
depiction of homosexual rape.
Whitehouse was
“concerned with the way
society was going and
convinced it had gone quite
far enough,” said someone,
possibly Gyles Brandreth,
who participated in her
inquiry into porn. Well, I
thought, she should try living
today. She would have been
horrified by the constant
violent porn and abuse and
trolling and child rape.
This was the most
interesting part. It turned
out, feminists said, that she
was actually right about
things like porn and Last
Tango in Paris, but for the
wrong reasons. She didn’t
want to tear down “the
patriarchy”, one woman
complained. But what does
purity of intention matter, you
wondered, if she got the job
done? Why, really, didn’t they
like her? Was it because she
was northern and Christian?
I could have watched
several more episodes,
including a whole one on
David Sullivan, one of the
pornographers who fought
with her in the Seventies and
is now owner of West Ham.
Every time Whitehouse
challenged him he would sell
thousands more copies. He
even got a girl to change her
name by deed poll to Mary
Whitehouse and “she’d go all
around the country having
sex with people”. Did she
help him to buy his vast vulgar
mansion, the director asked
as the camera pulled back to
reveal its full warty horror.
“It probably did get me this,”
he said with a grin. cOld maps, new tragedies
There was a musical about
John Maynard Keynes at the
1919 Paris peace conference
on Radio 3 last Sunday.
There are probably readers
who think it is nothing but
musicals about economists on
Radio 3 of a weekend night
(Friedman, Chicago, and All
that Jazz, perhaps?). But even
for Radio 3’s most determined
esotericists, Robert Hudson
and Susannah Pearse’s often
ironic Hall of Mirrors was
envelope-pushing. Also wildly
pertinent. Take this sally
between Keynes (a clipped
Jamie Parker, terrific) and the
bright-eyed American Honor
Page Whary (Patsy Ferran):
JMK: You’re redrawing the
map of the world. But using
what lines?
HPW: The right lines!
JMK: There are no right lines,
Miss Whary. Whichever maps
you chaps draw, it is choosing
between future tragedies.
A century later, our go-to
guide to Europe’s imagined
and reimagined communities
is the journalist and McMafia
author Misha Glenny. He was
back haunting borderlands
for Radio 4, with the latest
dispatch of his illuminating
The Invention Of... series.
His subject was Poland, his
visit to these “bloodlands”
recorded just before
Russia’s invasion of
neighbouring Ukraine.
With an accordion
squeezing out its sorrows in
the background (possibly the
same lament as in Hall of
Mirrors), Glenny told his
producer: “The 15th country
we’ve visited, but the first that
was once eradicated: between
1795 and 1918 there was no
Poland.” This was as much
about Ukraine and other
former Soviet republics.
“Putin may claim Ukraine
as an integral part of Russia,
but for centuries it was part
of Poland,” Glenny said.
In 1385 a marriage
between a pagan grand
duke of Lithuania and an11-year-old Polish princess
forged a land union that
by the 16th century had
become the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, stretching
almost from the Baltic to
the Carpathians. A more
religiously tolerant place
than many western states,
it became a refuge to
persecuted religious
minorities such as Jews and
Calvinists. A bitter legacy,
Timothy Garton Ash
explained, when this made it
the locus for the Nazis’ final
solution. With insight from
historians such as Garton Ash,
Norman Davies and Natalia
Nowakowska, this was
richly fascinating.
Glenny was there before
the war and his commentary
sometimes had an antic,
Put Out More Flags feel. Last
weekend The Economist’s
Russia editor, Arkady
Ostrovsky, and editor-in-chief,
Zanny Minton-Beddoes,
crossed the Polish-Ukrainian
border to interview
Volodymyr Zelensky in his
situation room. Their first
impressions were shared on
The Intelligence podcast.
As interesting, to my ears, as
anything “the very authentic”
Zelensky said, were Minton-
Beddoes’s non-war
correspondent’s
observations.Crossing the border, they
passed 500-strong queues
lumbering wearily in the
opposite direction. “But it was
only at Lviv station I really felt
in a country at war,” Minton-
Beddoes reported. Recording
live, in a dimmed concourse,
at 10pm, she noted: “The
seats are all completely taken.
And there is a very distinctive
smell — a smell Arkady calls
the smell of war, of people
who have not had the chance
to wash, a smell of
exhaustion. It’s sobering.”
Via a blacked-out night
train (Ostrovsky articulated
the “surreal feel” of being “on
a Second World War movie
set”) they reached Kyiv, then
passed numerous checkpoints
and swapped cars before a
guard declared: “Welcome to
our fortress.” Later, back in
Lviv, analysing their
experience, the two spoke in
awe of how the often
“frustrating, sometimes
corrupt, chaotic anarchy”
of Ukraine had somehow
coalesced to meet this
decisive hour.
Zelensky entreated for
western intervention. The
legacy and risks of that were
explored by Alastair Campbell
and Rory Stewart in the fourth
episode of the podcast The
Rest Is Politics. Stewart
shared his “horrifying” recent
experience of revisiting
Baghdad and Mosul, Iraq,
where he had once been
part of the post-invasion
administration. Now he
passed through checkpoints
manned by Iranian-backed,
anti-American militia.
“No signs anywhere
of this trillion-dollar
war... nothing
enduring left behind,”
he lamented. “Just a
country smashed to
pieces, sadly from
almost every
direction... It’s
impossible to
believe that this is,
in oil terms, one
of the richest
countries.” One of
Keynes’s future
— but also our
modern post-
imperial world’s
— tragedies. cPATRICIA
NICOL
War in Ukraine forces us to confront the ghosts of the past
| RADIO & PODCASTS
Slavic epic
James
Norton in
McMafia3 April 2022 13