Weekend TV: The Promise (original) (raw)
The Promise
Sunday, Channel 4
Last Thursday Louis Theroux approached Israel with bemused tolerance. Last night, in the first part of his formidable drama, The Promise, Peter Kosminsky came to it with the impatience of youth. In England in 2005, Erin Matthews, played by the increasingly impressive Claire Foy, is visiting her ill grandfather in hospital. Clearing out his home before even he is dead (a presumptive little land grab of their own), her mother and she discover his wartime diaries which document his part in liberating Bergen-Belsen and then peace-keeping in Palestine.
Erin weepingly reads them on a club-class flight to Israel with her chum Eliza, who, by misfortune of birth, has been conscripted into two years’ army service. Eliza (Perdita Weeks) is bored by Israel, having been brought up with enough geo-politics around her liberal parents’ dinner table. Erin is merely ignorant, there for sex with hot Israeli boys, but on a tour of the Palestinian territories, conducted by Eliza’s anti-Zionist brother Paul, she is shocked by the brutality of the Israeli border guards. Next thing she knows, Paul is a casualty of an Arab suicide bombing.
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Erin may not yet be making comparisons with Britain’s presence in Palestine in the run up to Israeli independence in 1948, but we, having actually seen her grandfather’s story rather than just read his diaries, are. Jews liberated from concentration camps wade through the waters off Palestine to be greeted by British soldiers with baseball bats and wire cages. As the young Sgt Leonard Matthews (Christian Cooke) says: “Haven’t we seen these pictures somewhere else?” But the comparison cuts both ways. The British, like today’s Israelis, are brutal and unimaginative, but hardly deserved to be known on the radio as “the Nazi British occupation forces”. In Kosminsky’s drama, the modern Israeli forces are not Nazis either. This is a reap-as-you-sow story, a psycho-analysis of a brutalised Israel.
Faulks on Fiction
Saturday, BBC Two
The novelist Sebastian Faulks self-effacingly began his bouncy new series Faulks on Fiction by announcing that characters mattered, not authors, nor plots, nor prose, and this was not a documentary that admitted qualifications. Instead it drove home a narrative for the fictional hero that hailed Robinson Crusoe as a metaphor for evolutionary adaptation, considered randy Tom Jones a moral force, praised poisonous Becky Sharp for the “purity of her ambition” and declared Lucky Jim Dixon middle England’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. Faulks finally pronounced the hero dead the moment Martin Amis’s Money revealed John Self as a post-modernist joke. If its thrust was a bit smart-undergraduate, the film had undergraduate panache too, even if, by the end, Faulks had to modify his assertion that “Holmes would be the last fictional hero to take on the world and win”. The author of the 36th James Bond novel was talking all along, you see, about “literary novels”.