Against all Dyke’s odds and sods

: having now seen the second episode, I too would like to praise BBC2’s series on Dunkirk (‘Against All Odds’, screened yesterday, today and tomorrow).

When so many today, in the BBC and elsewhere, like to tell the fashionable PC lie, these programmes seem to have been made by someone who prefers to tell the truth. ‘Faction’ documentaries – dramatised history – are too often a particularly happy hunting ground for those who would rather express their prejudices than the facts, but the two episodes I’ve seen so far give the impression of an effort simply to convey a flavour of what happened.

That’s all we ask: that people care more about what is true than any agenda, and simply make the effort. It’s also what the men who were there deserve. It’s good that they are receiving it. It’s less good that they are again winning against the odds. There exists a PC revisionist history of Dunkirk, as of everything else. It’s a distortion, but no more so than much BBC material we have dissected on this blog in the past. It would have been no great surprise to see it appearing in the dramatised episodes.

I shall be pleased if this is a harbinger of better things. Whether or no, it is good in itself.