Colditz still cricket with guns, for now
By LINDA BURGESS
However much money they spent making Colditz, they clearly hadn't done their research. Not once, as those men ambled in their little groups around the grounds of their prison, kicking their football, smoking their cigarettes - not once did the camera focus on the turn-ups of their trousers to show dirt trickling out.
Indeed, despite being filmed on location, and having a chinless member of the Nazi youth on a bike, and soldiers jumping off trucks shouting "Achtung!", a suave dissolute Yank, a crooked guard, and not one but two members of the Fox family instinctively stiffening their upper lips, Colditz showed an almost wanton disregard for genre. In one phrase: girly kissy stuff. Surely the only girly kissy stuff allowed is a girl in a flowery frock, one pert leg off ground, train snorting, hissing and huffing in background, kissing brave soldier goodbye? Then a hanky waved at train full of gallant young chaps and after that she should only ever be seen as photo-in-pocket-or-on-wall-above-bunk, till the end when there's a wedding in a village church. Haven't they read their Biggles books? Did they never have a brother who got the Lion annual each Christmas? Didn't they even watch The Great Escape for training?
Even the advertisements for this programme don't tell the whole truth. There are many of us who remember the Colditz series made by the BBC which ran for years in the early 70s. How can TV One advertise this one then as "for the first time on our screens"? Perhaps they lopped off the bit at the end which said "this century".
This century's series begins with three British servicemen on the run. We have Jack Rose (Tom Hardy) whose lips the adjective bee-stung could well have been coined for. We have Tom Willis (Laurence Fox Ð son of James, nephew of Edward) and we have Nick McGrade played by Damian Lewis. Jack and Tom get recaptured but Nick makes it back to Old Blighty with a message for Jack's sweetheart Lizzie (Sophia Myles).
I don't trust Damian Lewis, because he used to be Soames in The Forsyte Saga and he was that bloodless cad who was so mean to Irene. When he takes Jack's message to Lizzie and stands watching her across the crowded room being an angel to the bombed, desolate and homeless and he gets that goofy love at first sight look on his face, you know it's Watch out Lizzie.
Meanwhile, back at the camp, Jack is crawling through sewerage and being caught, easing bricks out of a wall with a penknife and being caught, then dressing up as a German officer and being caught, all the time desperate to get back and tell Lizzie what he didn't quite get round to telling her last time he saw her, which is that she's the girl for him. She knows that, of course, but can't help being tempted by the cad Nick, who, as a bit of a resourceful bad lot, really loves war because it's given him chances that wouldn't have come his way in times of peace. He'll try his chance at anything, will Nick, and that includes forging a letter telling Lizzie that Jack has crawled through the final sewer to Heaven.
Despite its flaws, Colditz is good because it takes your mind off other programmes like Auschwitz, which was on over several Saturdays a few weeks back and which won't leave me, however hard I try to make it. There are things that stay with you, like Rudolf Hoess, in charge of Auschwitz, who recorded in his diary that a Jewish woman going with her four children to the gas chambers had stopped to berate him for murdering such fine young people.
At least in prisoner of war camps the people being held were soldiers, and as such, better treated than those in concentration camps. You can almost pretend it was only a game. Even more so with such an unusual camp as Colditz, filled as it was with men who were serial escapers.
What else was there to do in such places other than work out elaborate plans to escape and attempt to act on them? It can't only be in dramatisations that Colditz felt like a young men's club, filled with resolute, multi-talented sporty young blokes. And isn't it great that they had the help of such old boffins as Bunny Warren, played divinely by Timothy West, kept busy throughout the war making such marvellous gadgets as maps of Bavaria on a piece of silk hidden in a tin of baked beans, and ordinary looking walnuts which opened to reveal a compass.
As long as this series continues to see war as cricket with guns, and doesn't go completely off the rails and all modern and sexy. My big fear is that in part two, Lizzie, as girl at centre of love triangle, is going to rip off her little grey cardie, and white cotton trainer bra, leap on to one or the other of her two blokes, straddle him enthusiastically, and it'll be all moaning and back-arching and sticking out nipples. If this happens Ð and it might, it might Ð then we'll know forever that WWII was last century, the books are open, it's fair game for film-makers, and it's any half-baked directors and free-ranging rule-breaking scriptwriters for the taking.
© Fairfax New Zealand Limited 2005