This being the Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, we asked the television companies for a few seasonal preview discs. There wasn’t much ‘ho, ho, ho!’ about any of them. Some were merely grim: Three Kings at War (Channel 4, Thursday), for example, chronicled how three cousins — George V, Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill — helped, through their own stupidity, to bring about the death of millions. Channel 4 also offered a three-part set — The True Voice of Rape (Monday), The True Voice of Prostitution (Tuesday) and The True Voice of Murder (Wednesday). Uncork the eggnog now!
To be fair, The True Voice series contained powerful material. The problem was that — to protect the victims — their words were voiced by actors. So the young woman who was raped by a fellow-wedding guest described the experience in detail while apparently moving round her flat. Immediately there was a glass wall between us and the ‘true’ experience.
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