The inversion of history

It is 18 years since the last Colditz drama on British television, which apparently means we need a new one. And the times being what they are, it appears that the drama will have to reflect the values of our little cultural-revolutionary period.

Like most adaptations of already well-known stories, this one will be based on a book by Ben Macintyre. He is a fine popular regurgitator of history who has previously brought to public notice such things as the hitherto untold story of a spy named Kim Philby. The television adaptation of that book, A Spy Among Friends, was well-acted, though marred by having a working-class northern woman as an MI5 officer. To make her even more saintly she was also married to a black man who had come to Britain to give his life working for the NHS.

This whole strand of the story, you may be surprised to hear, was fictional. But that is the way with these things now. You can’t just have a nice spy story about British heroes and villains. If it is set in the pre-multicultural era, everything must be retrofitted so that the past more exactly resembles the present.

Viewers of the forthcoming Colditz have even more treats in store. Last weekend Macintyre told the Hay literary festival that the adaptation of his latest book would dismantle the ‘mythology’ of Colditz. This ‘21st-century narrative’ view of events at the camp will apparently especially focus on the ‘appalling racism’ at the castle. Not the appalling racism of the German guards, mind. Rather, the appalling racism of the British officers imprisoned there. Douglas Bader, for instance.

Macintyre told his Liberal Democrat audience that Bader – perhaps this country’s most celebrated Spitfire fighter ace of the war – was ‘a monster… racist, snobbish, brutally unpleasant to anyone he considered of a lower socioeconomic order’.