The strange tale of a white hump-back whale – and its pursuers.
MORE BBC LIES: John Gross reviews their pro-communist mini-series on the Cambridge spies:
Two incidents, for example, are shown playing a crucial role in pushing the quartet towards communism. In one of them, a Jewish girlfriend of Philby’s at Cambridge is subjected to Nazi-style insults. In another, college domestic workers who are on strike are beaten up by right-wing undergraduates. The most notable thing about both episodes, in the context of a supposed docudrama, is that neither of them actually happened: they were both dreamed up by the scriptwriter. And there are many other fabrications, including a KGB attempt to assassinate Franco which fails because Philby, decent and humane fellow that he is, can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
Some of the inaccuracies are trivial in themselves, though they do a good deal to color the atmosphere. Others are of considerable historical significance. The fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross, makes only a brief appearance, for example: he is shown working as a wartime code-breaker, and rejecting Blunt’s suggestion that he start passing on information to the Russians. In reality, as Oleg Gordievsky has pointed out in a trenchant analysis of the series, during the war Cairncross keptthe KGB supplied with a steady flow of decrypts, including the first news they received of work on the atomic bomb. You wonder why the scriptwriter decided to play down his importance.
No need to wonder. These people regard the Soviet Union as a glorious experiment gone awry. Why not celebrate its early, traitorous apostles?
The Dish 