Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Henry Goodman, Jeremy Swift, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Fenella Woolgar, Hamilton Berstock.
It was not until Channel 4 had the sense of duty that had been denied Sidney Bernstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Crossman, and a whole platoon of film makers that made their way to various concentration camps as liberation from the Nazi terror that had engulfed Europe, then perhaps only a select few would have ever been privy to the immense documentary collaboration that became known at the time as German Concentration Camps Factual Survey , but which perhaps had even greater impact when released in the chilling 2015 release as Night Will Fall.
The auspicious meeting between the famous director, the future founder of Granada Television, and the man who would become Member of Parliament for Coventry East is one that could have been lost to time, access to the eyes of the masses blocked and all because of post war alliances shifting, and a swathe of ignorance by those in power as to how to address the issue of how to report on the atrocities without making it seem as though it was a targeted race attack.
The insanity of such questions in high office are still with us today in the same context, just that the people being slaughtered across certain parts of the world have changed appearance and religious beliefs.
The Film by Martin Jameson is a dramatic audio construction of the meeting that was concerned with just how important it was to recognise the horrors that were caught on camera, on film, in Belsen, and other places of unimaginable revulsion and suffering, and for Sidney Bernstein it is a matter of the gravest importance, the upmost urgency that he releases the footage as soon as possible; for questions are being asked on the validity of the findings then…and it is one that has been dangerously repeated ever since.
The three main characters, portrayed by Henry Goodman, Jeremy Swift, and Geoffrey Streatfeild, are to observed in such a way that in the writing of Martin Jameson come over as exact as possible; this is not for entertainment, it is a validity of anguish, of the damage done to the name of humanity, and in each moment the conversation turns to how best to present the facts with no embellishment but with a certain style that will show the horror for what it was…a demonstrative example of how low a human can sink when given authority to kill.
The Film is piercing, the listener is given the command of understanding just what was at stake in the world to be, and hopefully, despairingly unlikely, of making sure such atrocities never happened again. A fantastic piece of drama framed with sheer persuasiveness by Martin Jameson.
Ian D. Hall