D-Day: The King Who Fooled Hitler, review: yet another bloated royal documentary
Netflix’s The Crown has much to answer for. Its posh cocktail of mashed-up gossip and outright fabrication triggered a royal flush of opportunistic documentaries a couple of years back. That ought to have been that, but a couple of academics have gone for another sniff in dusty archival crannies and come up with a story that, with grinding predictability, was touted as a discovery fit to drop jaws and shiver timbers.
As a title for a television programme, D-Day: The King Who Fooled Hitler (Channel 4) scores a triple decker of searchable terms: the war, the royals and the Nazis namechecked in a clickbait cluster. The story, reductively, is that George VI was deployed in a series of well-reported troop visits to hoodwink the Germans that the invasion might happen any time, any place. In short, a sort of blue-blooded Operation Mincemeat involving not a dead tramp but a live monarch.
The intelligence service’s point of contact in Buckingham Palace was Sir Alan Lascelles who, explained Dr Rory Cormac, was the king’s… Yeah we know who he is, thanks. We all saw Pip Torrens recreate Lascelles wonderfully in The Crown.
Lascelles’s daughter Caroline Erskine was on hand for her thoughts about the King and Churchill. A couple of other descendants of participating figures shared personal theories. Unfortunately, these contributions rarely add much beyond corroboration that their forebears were flesh and blood rather than grainy black-and-white faces in old photographs.
Helen McCrory, who played the scathing republican Cherie Blair in the 2006 film The Queen, lent class on voiceover duty. There was not much she could do with a script by someone on a performance-related bonus for breathlessly repeating the words “top secret”. Professor Richard Aldrich didn’t deepen one’s confidence in the story when he distinctly described Hitler’s “somnulent” reaction to D-Day – but I knew what he meant as it’s roughly how I felt about a history that could have been told in half the time, with less genuflection.
