Jimmy McGovern has made a moving film about Reg Keys, a father on a mission to expose the betrayal that led to his son’s death. Plus: a programme that ignores everything interesting about Wedgwood
I don’t know where Jimmy McGovern gets the emotional energy or resilience from, I really don’t. Watching any one of his dramas based on real life stories – Hillsborough, about the football tragedy, or Dockers, based on the three-year Liverpool strike, or Common, outlining the iniquities of the joint enterprise law, and most other social outrages and miscarriages of justice in between – leaves me broken on the floor, and he just keeps burying himself in the next one and bringing new tales of love, loss, betrayal and devastation to our screens.
Last night’s Reg (BBC1) is based on the story of Reg Keys, who stood for election in Sedgefield against Tony Blair in the 2005 general election. Two years previously, Keys’ 20-year-old son, Tom, had been killed by a group of Iraqi insurgents who ambushed him and five other military policemen in an abandoned station in Majar al-Kabir. Just ahead of the news breaking in the papers, Tom’s commander admitted to Reg that the Red Caps had been “descaled” – left with little ammunition or other weaponry and no portable communications after hostilities were officially declared over with the fall of Saddam Hussein. That, as Reg put it, he might have found possible to eventually forgive. But when the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report concluded that there had never been any weapons of mass destruction and that Keys’ son, and thousands like him, had been sent to war “on a lie, all on a lie”, he started campaigning against the prime minister and for recognition of the soldiers’ betrayal. “When you die in war,” he said, “there is no compassion. No whispers from a loving wife or mother. Just your mates’ screams and your killers’ snarling hatred.”
There wasn’t a weak moment in the film. From Tom’s mother, Sally (Anna Maxwell Martin, as quietly stellar as always), questioning the girlfriend he had in Iraq about the last time they had sex, in a heartbreaking drive to cling on to every last moment andscrap of knowledge about her lost son. To the array of vignetted opinions on the war and Blair that greet Keys and his fellow campaigners on the doorsteps of Sedgefield. To Keys’ speech on election night itself as Blair stood behind him, forced at last to listen to the bereaved instead of soaking up the celebratory applause of Washington. The drama was spliced with real-life footage – Tim Roth as Keys in the foreground, Blair’s real reactions behind – which could have been a mistake but in fact worked beautifully, if only because you search and search Blair’s face in vain for anything deeper than discomfort.
Roth was extraordinary as a man scoured out by grief and left with only a single purpose to pursue. Implacable, purged of all need or desire for lesser considerations or emotions by his loss, he gave us a man and a performance boiled down to its very essence. There is nothing more honestly, nakedly powerful or moving. Thank you.
You know how the little Handmade on the Silk Road series was sweet, simple and lovely, showing us quietly and without embellishment ancient crafts being carried out in ancient places, perhaps even capturing something of their dying days? Well, Handmade by Royal Appointment (BBC4) is the exact opposite of that. The opening episode was a few minutes of footage of the throwers, turners, figure-makers and ornamenters behind Wedgwood’s hand-tooled panther vases, grafted on to a half-hour advert for the brand. Watch non-breathlessly as Ulrik Garde Due, president of the “living business unit” at Wedgwood’s new owners Fiskars, seeks to reposition the firm as a global lifestyle brand! Thrill to the lifetime of experience he brings to describing the gradations of colour on a vase as “a moving colour target within one item”! Sigh gently at the evocative voiceover: “The heritage it represents is undoubtedly part of this company’s DNA”! Play a game around the fire of replacing any of those nouns with any others to see if it makes any less sense!
I’d laugh if I weren’t paying for it. However, I’d love to see a programme about Josiah Wedgwood, his entrepreneurship, his techniques that have survived down the ages, and find out why the company now cannot find enough young people willing to train in the various arts required (“They stay a few weeks,” says Susan Green, a figure-maker for 45 years, “but they don’t want it”). So I think I’ll cry about the wasted opportunity, as well as the contempt for viewers, instead.
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