WWI: The Final Hours (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Doing Money (BBC One) |iPlayer
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix)
Grand Designs: House of the Year (C4) | All 4
School (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Among all the vital telly stuff this year about the centenary of the first world war, I wonder if we should spare a tiny reflection, this very morning of any morn, on the role played by a plump former teacher from Württemburg. Matthias Erzberger, variously described as “mild-mannered” and “self-serving”, was the German signatory to the armistice, in the Compiègne forest 100 years ago as of precisely… now… and, by scratching out his signature at 11 o’clock, against aching reproaches from every patriotic bone in his body, prevented, it might be strongly argued, thousands if not tens of thousands of further needless deaths.
This and much more was being explored in the drama WWI: The Final Hours, a sober, lucid, devastating exploration of the three days in a railway carriage in which the armistice was being negotiated by Erzberger, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, “a short man with a fondness for cheap cigars”, and dashing naval hero Rosslyn Wemyss. The two military men bonded, but not with Erzberger, a propagandist who had never seen combat, much less the western front, in his life. Neither the inflexible Foch nor the suave Wemyss shook hands with Erzberger (or included him in their final triumphant selfie).
The German, not incidentally, had on his way to France seen for the first time the devastation wrought among the mud of Belgium and France. Foch and Wemyss were both pushing for impossible terms and most likely knew it; Erzberger, with his country no less in ruins than most of Europe, and America now in the war, opted for an end.
He came home not to celebrations. Not to ticker-tape or berets and caps in the air. Nods of pragmatic acknowledgement and, in the streets and in the armies, bitter exhausted relief, which soon turned to hatred, as he surely must have known it would. Germany had been left with nothing, and had to pay extraordinary reparations; even Foch felt that the conditions pressed upon it, which led directly to the Treaty of Versailles, might have gone too far.
The scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow is often seen even here as an act of heroic, last-ditch sacrifice, but there was real hatred for Erzberger among the naval officers, a hatred that was only to fester. He was assassinated three years later while out for a walk in the Black Forest by members of a disbanded Marinebrigade.
More crucially, Ludendorff, co-commander with Hindenburg of the German armies, helped create the “stab in the back” myth, which argued Germans had not so much lost the war as been betrayed by Bolsheviks, Jews (and of course Erzberger): later he would take part in the Beer Hall Putsch. Anyone who doubted the strident correlation between first and second wars, and the cankerous power of simmering resentment, need only reflect on the fact that in 1940 Hitler demanded the French sign their surrender in the very same train carriage, by then preserved as a historical monument.
“Lest we forget”, we rightly say of the 1914-18 dead, and “never forget” of the Holocaust; seldom can there have been a more visceral reminder of the direct causal link between the two.
One other consequence of both wars was the EU, and a consequence of that the keen amateur racism of Brexit. Struggle as some do to grasp absolutely any advantages to Brexit, I think I’ve finally found one. It might just result in more checks that could prevent young, petrified Romanians being pistol-whipped (or drugged) across borders: specifically in this case to Belfast, there to serve in cheap pop-up brothels.
My goodness but Doing Money was an unrelenting 90-minutes that made me wriggle and sweat anew for the squalor of my gender. And not just my gender: one of the main captor/pimps in this drama was a woman, Ancuta (talented yet fearsome Cosmina Stratan), a sexless blond whose every sarcastic piece of wetly dismissive tongue-clicking I grew to truly loathe.
In this true story of modern slavery, Ana (Anca Dumitra) is snatched from her relatively happy cleaning work in posh London and trafficked to Galway, Belfast, Cork. Dumitra is exceptional, as, if this portrayal was accurate, was the real Ana: her decision to give her pimps not one smile, not one hint of vulnerability, demanded fierce courage. For not much more than a child, far from home, the temptation to seek the brief respite of a kind word must have been near overwhelming.
Everyone, almost, let her down. The best and kindest of the Belfast police; after a raid, one (a woman, in fact) offers: “Sex slaves? Come on, we didn’t exactly find them chained to radiators…” Her own mother, in Romania: the stepfather grabs the phone and yells: “We all know what you are!” She runs instead to her clients: first, sad-sack Declan (Turlough Convery), who betrays her; then to much nicer (if such can be said of a violent and tagged Belfast drug-dealer) Sean (Tom Glynn-Carney). And finds not only salvation but the chance to stand before parliament and change the law. This slavery season has been hard to watch, and in some cases too much, too often, too mournful, too clobber over the head with Message, but has given us at least a couple of searing programmes and should remind us all of the powers of coercion and of poverty. Not all slaves are chained to radiators.
Right. Let’s turn to the… light. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is as far from the mild “teenage witch” of old as it might be possible to move. It is very, very grown up. From the first, gloriously schlocky opening titles, all cartoon gore and 50s references, we’re gloatingly hugged by the presence of something dark and unafraid to scare, and yet it’s been given an unapologetically modern and feminist reworking.
Maybe aptly enough: for about the first time since 1692, men (a certain type of man admittedly, that type being the credulous moron type) are professing themselves “scared” of women. This is terrific, cat-licked with ichor and moonlight and guts and fun; also great to see Lucy Davis (Dawn from The Office) back again.
As every year, the tastefully smug entrants to Grand Designs: House of the Year had me simultaneously pitying their obsession and standing howling: “I want that house! I want, just, that room! That sock drawer!” One of the lessons of this year was neighbourliness. Four entrants had taken their neighbours along, every step: the Henley (of course) couple underwent a 14-year high court fight. And are still tensed for the genteel breaking of windows.
It’s almost too early in the six-part School, from that great team behind Hospital, to give my verdict, but here’s a prediction. The nation might as usual tear itself apart between mimsy, “child-based” teaching methods and, um, teaching children useful things, but will by the end have united in the belief that allowing the profit-motive of venture capital to infect cash-strapped universal education has turned out to be a huge and fast-rotting pig in a poke.
