Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Andrew Marr disappoints trivia fans

I am watching the second part of Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain. Within a few minutes he has shown Anthony Eden and his wife departing for a cruise aboard the RMS Rangitata after he had resigned as prime minister over Suez and a clip from the film of Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey.

All very interesting.

BUT...
  • He did not mention that the steward who looked after the Edens aboard the Rangitata was John Prescott;
  • The clip from A Taste of Honey did not feature the young Hazel Blears.
This has to go down as a terrible missed opportunity.

4 comments:

Liberal Polemic said...

His trivia was rather worse than that. He made two factual inaccuracies, too:

1) The Suez lie was not cooked up in Downing Street, as he claimed, but in France.

2) Eden did not see Nasser as a new Hitler, but as a new Mussolini.

The rest of the programme was a biased attack on Conservative government. Not that I feel any great need to defend the Tories, but it stands out in such contrast to the positive gloss he painted last week over the Atlee government.

Andrew Marr's series is what the BBC does best: promote socialism behind a veneer of neutrality.

David said...

Surely, no-one can have missed the pointed parallels with the Blair government. This was an attack on our current government through the mirror of history.

Small point: Sir Alec D-H was standing behind Eden as he left.

Liberal Polemic said...

Yes. It was a two-pronged attack!

Jonathan Calder said...

Michael White has a good review on the Guardian site.