James reviews 'The Great Fog of 1952' and 'The Dam Busters'

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the tenth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

There is a short intro podcast, which you can listen to if you like. But really it’s straightforward: you suggest upcoming Freeview programs and I review them. If no-one suggests anything, then I have a look and choose something myself.

Remember: send suggestions and comments to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or go to IReviewFreeview dot com.

In this episode, I will review:

1. The great fog of 1952 on Channel 5 and

2. The Dam Busters on 5 Action

OK, so it’s nostalgia time. Oh, whoopie, whoopie. I remember 1952 because that’s when Queenie became queen while the dam busters were absolute heroes of world war 2.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

a painting of a WWII Lancaster bomber flying over a city cloaked in black-yellow poisonous smog.

So, here we go.

The great fog of 1952 on Channel 5, Saturday April 6th 7:10pm

In 1952 I was a schoolboy living in a small country village. The summer air usually smelt of mud, flowers and someone’s washing, while in the winter it just smelt of mud, rain and soot.

Like most people, we didn’t have a TV. News came via rumour and the radio - which for me meant ‘Dan Dare, pilot of the future’ on radio Luxembourg and of course the daily papers, which I never read.

But, somehow or other, talk of the great smog in London must have reached me, for I distinctly remember thinking ‘smog’ sounded exotic and exciting. Given half a chance, I would have gone up to London and smelt it myself.

But after a few days all mention of the smog ceased, preparations for Christmas started and since then I have given it little thought.

Until this Channel 5 documentary swam into view and caught my eye.

In the past, I have panned Channel 5 documentaries as cheap copy/paste jobs, adding little to the sum of knowledge and nothing to the delight of the nation.

But ‘The great fog of 1952’ was a cut above, even though one thinks it should have been called ‘the great SMOG of 1952.’ I suppose they assumed watchers would assume ‘smog’ was a typo.

It began with sad and resigned people in the 1950s looking out of windows, stumbling through fog and coughing.

As urgent music thrums, a pleasant lecturer’s voice tells us of the non-delights to come: a great peacetime tragedy; stinking smog smothering the city; poisonous gases; devastating consequences.

Having given us all the heebie-jeebies, Dr. Xand (pronounce: ‘Zann’) van Tulleken appears, striding purposefully along in a sunlit modern London. Continuing his disconcerting narrative, he promises overwhelmed health services, many deaths and a government cover up.

With the correct dispiriting mood set, he introduces his sidekick Raksha, looking at weather maps. She points and says excitedly: ‘I recognise those!’ with her is an expert, who agrees: ‘Yes, they’re isobars!’

Now what we needed at this point was not a 1952 weather map, all wavy lines and hand-written numbers, but an animated diagram of the climate over London at that time. Y’know: arrows and swirling air and clouds gathering, mist forming, fog! I dunno: maybe a few chimneys belching out smoke. In other words a simple visual explanation of how fog and smoke got trapped over the whole city, and didn’t go away for four days.

But did we get that? No we didn’t, which was a great pity.

But still, the documentary continued, with hefty and portentous time stamps to keep us on our toes.

And the true story is absolutely compelling. At first, people just ignored it: they’d had smog before and it’d always blown away. There was even a banquet with rich people in furs and bow ties who probably - once they’d finished dessert - legged it to their country retreats as fast as they could. After all, why cough your lungs up in London when you can shoot something on your country estate?

In London it got really cold. So the 9 coal-fired power stations turned on - to mix a metaphor - the gas. Smoke poured out of vast chimneys and in millions of homes, coal fires were lit, many with Nutty Slack, a cheap, sulphurous product promoted by the coal board.

The result? Smog, a mix of fog and smoke evoked by our good Dr with some lumpy pea soup before he sends the energetic Raksha to create her own ‘pea souper’. She does this with special effects man Mike, who boils kettles, pours out cold stuff, burns coal, adds sulphur (‘Smell the rotten eggs?’) and hands Raksha a much needed respirator before turning up the heat.

Soon, the smog is so dense she can’t see her feet. She takes the respirator off for perhaps 30 seconds. Her face twists in revulsion. She coughs, looks groggy. This is not play acting. She puts the respirator back on, and we all breathe again.

But millions in London had to make do with a scarf wrapped around the nose and mouth.

And it just got worse and infiltrated indoors, coating the surfaces with a black, oily residue and turning white collars grey. And of course, as always, the poor - with their badly maintained windows and ill-fitting doors - suffered the most.

To our 2024 eyes, it seems incredible that people sat indoors, in the smog, and smoked cigarettes and pipes. Britain, then, had the highest proportion of cigarette smokers in Europe.

And they started dying, coughing up a black slimy substance into their greying handkerchiefs.

The colder it got and the longer it went on, the more nutty slack was burned. The city ground to a halt. Emergency ambulances were sent out with two drivers, one walking in front, guiding the other to avoid abandoned cars and - with difficulty - reading street signs.

And buses utilised passengers to perform the same duty, but with flares! But when even they did this they were still required to pay the fare.

Raksha is sent back to Mike, the special effects guy, to see what happens when sulphur is burnt in a misty, wet atmosphere. I expect even a schoolboy chemist could tell you the result: sulphuric acid, that’s what. 800 tons of it was dumped on London, turning the smog yellow and further inflaming throats and lungs.

Graphs showing pollution and deaths climbed almost vertically.

And then, almost like a miracle, on day 5, a wind got up and the smog went. People could see one another. Traffic knew where it was going. Ships went out of the port 4 abreast.

But Londoners kept dying.

Under pressure, the government commissioned a report, which it promptly sabotaged, to make the mortality figures seem better. 4,000 deaths were attributed to the smog, but an additional 8,000 in the following months was put down to a flue epidemic.

But there was no epidemic. It was people with smog poisoned and damaged respiratory systems breathing their last.

So in total, the smog killed 12,000.

Governments then, like governments now, are not above an appalling distortion of the facts if it serves their purpose.

Eventually, the smog did spawn the clean air acts, so it’s an ill wind etc etc.

And so, to finish I’ll just say anyone who thinks pollution control or indeed London’s ULEZ is nonsense, should watch this and reflect. Being able to breathe seems like a pretty basic human right to me.

Now, let’s go back 9 years from 1952 to a more warming, war time tale from 1943:

The Dam Busters on 5 Action, Sunday April 7th 12:50pm

They don’t make films like this anymore. Produced in 1955, it’s a more thoughtful than most black and white celebration of British grit, determination, ingenuity and courage all set to stirring, uplifting patriotic music.

Yep: it’s the story of the bouncing bomb. Never heard of it? I’m not that surprised. World war 2 is fast fading from contemporary history and even faster from living memory. I was alive in that war, but too young to remember. To my grandchildren, it’s as long ago as the Victorians, or ancient Rome. I might mention the Beatles, and they say ‘who?’

But in the 1950s, the bouncing bomb was an embedded part of the national psyche, a strand in the warp and weave of shared history, along with Spitfires, rationing, good old Winnie and Mars bars.

‘The Dam Busters’ tells a good story, and tells it well. It’s one of three films based on the works of Paul Brickhill, an Australian author who fought in world war 2, then wrote books about it. The other two are ‘Reach for the Sky’ about legless air ace Douglas Bader, and ‘the Great Escape,’ about Steve McQueen on a motorbike.

It will come as no surprise ‘the great escape’ was produced in Hollywood.

Back to the bouncing bomb.

The film begins with - of course - stirring music and a man firing marbles at a washing tub full of water. This is Barnes Wallis, an English engineer. As played by Micheal Regrave, he’s a mixture of nerd and human, gently obsessive to the point of pigheadedness.

He’s had an idea for a dam destroying bomb. Dropped from a low-flying aircraft, it would bounce over torpedo nets and other obstructions, coast up to the dam, sink down and blow up. Being against the dam and cushioned by water, the destructive effect would be huge.

The first half of the film follows Wallis plodding around, swamped in bureaucracy, nudging his way slowly up the food chain, getting access to better facilities and equipment. He starts with firing marbles in his back garden, then he’s given access to a test tank, where he catapults golf-balls, and finally half-sized dummy bombs dropped from a plane.

A recurring feature of the film, one suspects more to import suspense rather than give the truth, was how often they are at the point of giving up when a final little tweak, or a change of attitude by someone in authority, allows the project to move forward.

After all, a serene progression from one stage to the next is possibly not the most compelling of narratives.

Once the golf balls start behaving, Churchill gets interested, and so enters the other main character of the film: wing commander Guy Gibson, handsomely played by Richard Todd as a straightforward hero.

Which, it seems, he was - more or less - in real life.

Gibson assembles a special squadron and begins practicing low-level flying.

But the half size bomb tests are not going well. However tough the construction, they break up on impact with the water. What is obviously war time footage of the real thing is shown.

An enduring image is of Wallis, his trousers rolled up, feet bare and white, stumbling over the dunes towards the receding tide, searching for fragments from the latest failure. Gibson calls: ‘can we give you a hand?’ Wallis turns. ‘No thank you. I feel for them with my toes. Sometimes I find a barnacle.’

Yet again the project is about to be binned, but Wallis asks Gibson if they can drop it at 60 ft, instead of the previous 150.

It’s very, very low and dangerous. The wingspan of the bomber is only 40 ft longer. The slightest mistake, and they’re in the water. ‘Sure,’ says Gibson: we’ll have a go!’

And it works. The bomb bounces just like the golf balls. And the project is given full approval.

Wallis fades more and more into the background as Gibson takes centre stage and the film becomes more conventional, with bombers flying low and landscapes whizzing past.

The raid itself is done exceptionally well, with a long build up of pilots getting ready, idling the afternoon away dozing or playing chess maybe writing letters. Then Gibson walks through and they fall in behind him and head for the planes. The music: the dam buster’s march, slowly builds in the background as engines start up, propellers cough into life and the giant aircraft lumber ponderously over the grass, gaining speed until, finally, almost gracefully, they take to the air and, with the bombs slung beneath them, bulging like black potent eggs, they head to Germany.

Wallis and the airforce bigwigs gather in the control room. They have nothing to do but wait.

The planes fly through anti-aircraft fire and attack the main dam, the Möhne. (pronounce: ‘Merna’)

The first bomb is dropped perfectly, skips along, vanishes for a few tense seconds before exploding with a vast tower of unconvincing special effects water.

But the dam remains intact. On hearing this, Wallis comments: ‘I was hoping one would do it.’

In fact, it takes 3 more bombs before it is breached and water pours into the industrial heartland of Germany. Factories are flooded and trains swept from their tracks.

They move on to the Eder (pronounce: ‘Ada’), and this takes two bombs.

We are not shown the unsuccessful attack on the third dam: Sorpe (pronounce: ‘Sorpa’).

The planes head for home to a triumphal return. Swelling music! jubilant crowds! Britain can do it! Three cheers! Hurrah!

But - unusually - and to its credit, the film does not end with these scenes of celebration and national joy.

For beneath all this hysteria, there is an undertow of sadness: 19 planes set out, crewed by 133 men. 8 planes failed to return: 53 aircrew lost their lives.

And the last scene strengthens this downbeat mood.

Meeting quietly in the sunshine is Barnes Wallis, the engineer who invented the bomb, and Guy Gibson, the pilot that delivered it. Wallis regrets the loss of life, then suggests they have a drink. Gibson replies with ‘no. I have letters to write.’ He doesn’t need to say: ‘to the next of kin.’

He walks slowly away, and the film ends.

Having just read this review - huh! I’ve reviewed my review! I’m surprised at the tone. Normally, I try - with a turn of phrase or an unexpected juxtaposition - to inject humour into my writing. This is deliberate, for humour delights - and sells!

And ‘the dam busters’, a black and white film of long ago heroics, with saluting and stiff upper lips, could well be viewed as a candidate for levity.

But I find I cannot do this. I am unable to mock the heroes of my childhood. The real heros, that is: the people that actually existed.

I’ve no problem with the fictional: take the Lone Ranger. Silver bullets? Is he shooting at Vampires?

(Laughs) I will not bang on about this. The child within me lives on.

And that somewhat nostalgic note concludes the reviews in this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me through the website Ireviewfreeview.com or email contact@ireviewfreeview.com.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.