Recent TV: The Reckoning & das Boot

The Reckoning is a hard watch but a necessary one.

It shows how a TV personality Jimmy Savile was able to get away with virtually anything because of his contacts within the Police, the BBC and the charities he supported.

Steve Coogan plays Jimmy Savile superbly, but authenticity is added by interviews with the young girls that Savile abused – now, of course, elderly but unforgiving.

It was good to see another series of Das Boot modelled on the brilliant war film by Wolfgang Petersen.

It is a fascinating how contemporary German productions tackle a difficult subject. In this series we are at the end of World War Two as Germany faces defeat.

Senior naval officers are complicit in the plot to get rid of Hitler, including U-boat captain and war hero Hoffmann (Ricky Okon) whose sister Joanna is having an affaire with the unpleasant Schulz, a naval bigwig controlled by a sadistic SS officer.

Schulz and the SS officer are out to track down the conspirators led by someone yet to be identified except by his code name Fidelio.

Thus the difficulty of adulation of the U-boat successes is matched by a no-holds-barred depiction of the horrors of the Gestapo and SS.

It’s gripping stuff.

In fact there is a post-war cinema tradition of admiration for the German Wehrmacht.

Think The Desert Fox (1951) with James Mason as Rommel and The Longest Day (1962), which featured the German defence of the Normandy landings as much from their point of view as the Allies’.

Neil Rosen’s favourite war film Battle of the Bulge features a brilliant performance by Robert Shaw as Panzer commander Martin Hassler.