Saturday Oct 21, 2023
Episode 3: Radishes with Butter
This week AJ and Andy tackle the third episode of Secret Army's first series: Radishes with Butter, written by John Brason and directed by Paul Annett.
It chiefly deals with the Final Solution: the deportation of Jews from Brussels to death camps, via the story of one family - the Schliemanns - who Curtis wants Lifeline to help even though Lisa insists that they cannot get involved.
At Gestapo HQ Brandt and Kessler lock horns over Nazi coffee and some bourbon biscuits, while courtesy of Gaston and his friends we discover that bankers can be the good guys sometimes!
Elsewhere Andy has memories of the late Michael Burrell who played Schliemann and Jan Francis who has never forgotten that rooftop kiss!
First-time watcher Ryan wants to know whether he is meant to like Curtis, while Alex Willcock just outright calls him a dick. Andy and AJ are similarly unimpressed.
The episode ends with memories from Maria Leel who recalls tuning in to Secret Army from the start the first time around and then binge-watching it again when the series was first released on DVD.
All this and a description of Front Axial Projection!
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Next Time... Episode 4: Child's Play
3 days ago
Love the podcast as much as I loved the show, but I do think you are being a bit unfair to Curtis and not looking at the world through his eyes. He lives in 1942 and his mind-set is 1940s. He probably went to a minor public school and was taught to be self-confident, and to expect everything to be given to him on a plate. I think he’s meant to look naive about the situation in occupied Europe and mistake the others’ survival instincts as a lack of empathy. They, presumably, have been doing this since the fall of Belgium in 1940 and are experienced. He’s just arrived with his misplaced British sense of fair-play. Curtis hasn’t gained much trust and Albert is constantly hinting that he wants to shoot Curtis! Relationships during wartime were curiously off-kilter and intense. Marriage was often quick and short-lived, especially in the RAF at that time. When you read up on the subject, many women lost one husband and were remarried within the year. Curtis has flown at least one tour of operations with Bomber Command, whose losses were astronomical, so there’s a good chance he has the ”here today, gone tomorrow” mentality common to aircrew of the time. I think his behaviour is quite accurate for the time period and had the series been made today it would have suffered from self-censorship which would have diluted its power. Of course his attitudes aren’t right! But, I think they are accuate and that’s why I think Secret Army is one of the best drama series ever created about this period. Women were still seen as inferior and had to struggle to be taken seriously. The way Lisa is treated by the men, her colleagues and aircrew alike gives a taste of what women had to put up with and makes the achievements of the real women of the resistance all the more remarkable.