I spent Sunday in the BBC TV studio in Arromanches through six hours of live coverage of the D-Day commemoration. It would never do to tell them this, but I would have done it for nothing. It is 30 years since I took part in a big outside broadcast. The cliché is true: it brings out the best in the Beeb. No one else can do anything like it. Even when vulgarity has overtaken some other bits of the Corporation, the Events department has inherited from the Richard Dimbleby era an instinctive sense of national responsibility and an infinite capacity for taking pains. I was moved by how jolly and committed the huge crew was, even the riggers dolled up in jackets and ties. The new chairman gave me a cigar — two cigars. Indeed, he distributed Cuban stogies with a generosity which I never extended to anybody who worked for me. I started life as a researcher for the Corporation and have always felt much affection for it, save during the era of the appalling Birt. If you are charitable enough to exclude my own contribution, the D-Day commemoration highlighted the case for public service television as no written submission could do. I would say that even without Gradey’s cigars.
Nothing makes me feel older than a sense that where once make-up for television appearances seemed a tiresome affectation, now I am heartily grateful for it.
Although President Putin turned up on Sunday, Russian veterans of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ have not been celebrating the D-Day anniversary. In 1944, like Stalin himself, they regarded the Anglo-American contribution to the European land campaign as too little, too late. ‘We never felt any weakening of German pressure because of what the Western Allies were doing,’ said artillery officer Major Yury Ryakhovsky when I interviewed him a couple of years ago for a book on the last phase of the war.
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