WSM on the BBC on the BBC, circa 1956

- OPEN SOURCE  US/1

Airing WEDNESDAY Nights on BBC AMERICA:

W. Scott Malone signed up with "Auntie Beeb" in 1978, when they were unquestionably perhaps the best news organization in the world. Working out of Washington, but directed out of the New York 'Office' and London, Malone worked for the legendary "Current Affairs programmes" PANORAMA and NEWSNIGHT, whose birth are depicted in the well-reviewed, six-part mini-series described below. They, we, used to do beautifully shot one-hour documentaries on major investigative stories, literally racing competitors like the daily New York Times to a draw or better.

Joining the newly formed PBS Frontline in 1982, Malone went on to marry his first wife and 'last'  BBC 'boss'--once deemed 'the darling of the BBC,' who was a producer/director from the even fancier "documentary features" section of the Beeb.

Perhaps not-so-ironically, she never learned to touch-type, because her Mother told her she would forever be relegated to "fetching the coffee."

  

BBC’s ‘The Hour’: A Cold War enigma, layered in ’50s style

By Hank Stuever, Published: August 16, 2011

 

Maybe the haze believed to be “Mad Men’s” excess cigarette smoke is instead exhaust fumes from a fritzy time machine. Television’s attempts to transport viewers back to the world of institutional sexism, racism, hi-fis and highballs may succeed as retromania and light social studies, but they often fail to fully sate the viewer’s fixation on 1964 or 1962 or 1956.

So many people apparently want even more of the back there, back when, back then. It’s a grief we must work through; one salve is to find mid-century teak consoles above which to place one’s flat-screen TV and then command it to seek out high-def shows set in yesteryear.

“The Hour,” an engaging yet taciturn new miniseries beginning Wednesday night on BBC America, is similar to such fare but also exceedingly, meticulously different. Set in a fictionalized depiction of BBC’s still-nascent television news operation in 1956, it is part spy thriller, part murder mystery, part love affair and part nostalgia trip. Though the six-part series does perk up a little as it plods along, it begins with a somewhat lethargic and confusing pilot episode, in which it is difficult to know what exactly “The Hour” wants to be — besides stylish. 

On the plus side, it has Dominic West (“The Wire’s” Detective Jimmy McNulty) starring as a handsome if somewhat clueless news anchor who is unwittingly caught up in a complicated, multilayered plot. 

The story: Freddie Lyon (played by Ben Whishaw) is a young BBC TV reporter who chafes at the network’s passive approach to newscasts, which are packed with official spin and feel-good footage of debutante parties and royal goings-on, all narrated in lifeless monotone. The Beeb, it seems, has an ingrained aversion to scandal, scoop and other aggressive journalistic jujitsu that we commonly associate with the modern British press.

“The Hour,” written and created by Abi Morgan, fixates on coverups, conspiracies and other averted glances that color the postwar mood as Britain readjusts to a somewhat lessened global sphere of influence. It’s all about spies, yes, but it’s also all about the waning days of the monarchy’s reach. The Suez Canal crisis of ’56 is the story of the moment, and it works as a symbolic backdrop to “The Hour’s” essential sense of national loss. 

Freddie is sent to cover yet another society fete — this time featuring Ruth Elms (Vanessa Kirby), the daughter of Lord and Lady Elms, who is engaged to an actor. In a dramatic coinkydink, when Freddie was a young working-class lad, he lived with the Elmses during the Blitz. A depressed and paranoid Ruth tries to tip Freddie off to a big story involving the recent murder of a history professor in a subway station. Soon enough, Ruth is dead, too.

This is enough to lure Freddie into investigating both deaths, which leads to the discovery that the professor had a side hobby of submitting crossword puzzles to newspapers, which, when printed, seemed to be delivering coded messages to certain readers. Yet Freddie can’t get anyone in the news department interested enough to let him pursue it. 

But enough of that. On still another track, “The Hour” is really about the creation of a BBC newsmagazine show in the vein of Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” and the love triangle among the show’s producer, anchor and star reporter. Freddie’s best friend (and unrequited love interest), Bel Rowley, is recruited to produce the new show, and she persuades her bosses to let her add Freddie to the staff. 

Bel is played with reserved and striking assurance by Romola Garai (from the 2009 version of “Emma”), her character working against the usual undertow of chauvinism: The prime minister’s press aide — a menacing presence around the BBC newsroom — tells her she’s wasting her maternal instincts on a career; after a network meeting, the men adjourn to a private barroom that doesn’t allow women. “What is it about you men?” Bel asks. “You always need a tiny corner where we can’t quite reach you.”

“The Hour” would be busy enough with Freddie’s mystery murders and Bel’s foray into women’s rights, but when West’s character, Hector Madden, is brought on to anchor the newsmagazine (also called “The Hour”), things start to crackle. Hector, a product of the upper crust (and married to the daughter of a rich industrialist), got the gig through connections rather than experience or skill, so it’s up to Bel to mold him into a competent anchor. This drives Freddie crazy with envy, as he sees Bel become attracted to Hector. 

“When we first met, you couldn’t even knot your tie,” Bel explains to Freddie. “You’d never tried an oyster, been to the theater, read Wolfe or Wilde. I did that. It’s what you do when you believe in someone.”

“And you believe in him?” Freddie marvels.

This particular plot thread — Freddie loves Bel who cannot help but fall for Hector, and all the while there’s a deadline to meet — tracks too close for comfort to “Broadcast News.” But all is forgiven in Episode 3, when the gang journeys out to Hector’s in-laws’ estate in the country. Here, men dress for the hunt, women dress for cocktails, a mist settles across the hills, the mystery deepens and “The Hour” finds a nostalgic sweet spot after all. Its sentimentality for British society is more authentic than its ’50s vibe.

The Hour

(75 minutes) premieres Wednesday

at 10 p.m. on BBC America.

CONTINUE READING Full Story HERE...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bbcs-the-hour-a-cold-war-enigma-layered-in-50s-style/2011/08/15/gIQAYy42JJ_story.html?hpid=z12

August 12, 2011

British Reporters, Not Ad Men, in ’50s, Not ’60s

By MARGY ROCHLIN

London -- ONE surprising notion that might strike you while watching “The Hour” — BBC America’s six-part series about a hard-hitting television news program in 1956 Britain and the men and women who work for it — is that Peggy Olson didn’t have it so bad. At least on “Mad Men,” the midcentury-period AMC drama, one gets the impression that Peggy — the peep-voiced, wide-eyed advertising copywriter struggling to establish herself in a man’s world — has a few equally ambitious girlfriends to gripe with about the boy’s club. On “The Hour,” however, the shoulder that the head producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) ends up crying on is that of Freddie (Ben Whishaw), a tenacious reporter who is also in love with her. 

When “The Hour” had its premiere here on BBC2 last month (it has its BBC America premiere Wednesday at 10 p.m.), “Mad Men” comparisons abounded despite some crucial differences. For all the shadowy after-hours nightclubs and tight sheath dresses, the show’s backdrop isn’t as shiny as the Manhattan of “Mad Men,” set less than a decade later. It’s cold, wet London two years after the end of rationing, a city still struggling to regain its footing after the bombings of World War II. 

Yet “The Hour” may remind American viewers of nothing so much as our own age. Several scenes seem to anticipate the News of the World phone hacking scandal, like when Freddie bribes a policeman to let him examine a body at the morgue, and the phones of reporters are tapped by government agents (even though it was journalists doing the listening-in at News of the World). 

The recent revelations about News of the World and the hacking of cellphones owned by, among others, a murder victim hadn’t yet surfaced by the time “The Hour” went into production. But one of its executive producers, Derek Wax, acknowledged that the current scandal had given the show a sense of immediacy. 

“It does seem very pertinent now,” Mr. Wax said last month at a Television Critics Association gathering, noting that the show touches on current issues like the collusion between politicians and journalists, and “who you have lunch with one day and how stories are leaked.” He added, “We are very much in 1956, but at times you feel that nothing’s really changed.” (A second season, if approved, would address the Notting Hill race riot of 1958.) 

Of course times have changed dramatically for women. Abi Morgan, who wrote and created “The Hour,” said that while researching the project she discovered that if you were one of the few women employed by the BBC in postwar London, you were most likely a telephone-answering, tea-carrying secretary. “I think America was a bit ahead of us in that regard,” Ms. Morgan said. “There were a lot more women in the workplace in America than in Britain.” Throughout most of the series Bel is so outnumbered that when men unapologetically disparage women in front of her, nothing — no resentment, no frustration — ever registers on her pale face. 

When asked if this was an acting choice, Ms. Garai, speaking in her agent’s office in central London, said that her Bel wouldn’t have expected to be treated as an equal. “I mean, misogyny would not have been misogyny at that time. It wouldn’t have been exceptional. It would have been life.” 

To prepare for the role Ms. Garai studied up on Grace Wyndham Goldie, a British news pioneer. Ms. Goldie, a radio critic who didn’t begin her television career until her late 40s, was the producer most famously associated with the success of BBC programs like “Tonight” and “Panorama,” which broke ground by covering current affairs as they happened, thus ignoring the “14-day rule,” which dictated that the BBC not report on issues that were to be debated in Parliament within two weeks. 

“She was absolutely at the forefront of that movement, and she was totally alone,” Ms. Garai said. “She was like any woman who had to operate in that climate. She was intimidating, formidable. Definitely a woman with the emphasis on ‘man.’ ” (In “The Hour” Bel is a woman in her 20s who wears figure-hugging dresses, bright-red lipstick and smokes cigarettes as elegantly as Myrna Loy in a “Thin Man” movie.) 

Before it was broadcast, some British news outlets had positioned the series as the country’s glossy answer to “Mad Men.” But when the executive producer Jane Featherstone, president of Kudos Film and Television (“MI5,” “Life on Mars”), first commissioned Ms. Morgan to create a series about a time when the BBC stopped broadcasting government-sanctioned newsreels and focused on investigative news, Ms. Featherstone was thinking of a political thriller involving television reporters and the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. 

“In British terms that was the end of our empire, the moment that Britain really gave up its position as a global player,” Ms. Featherstone explained, adding that only 12 hours passed before Ms. Morgan returned with an outline for a series that included espionage, lots of drinking and the mysterious suicide of a beautiful socialite who Freddie insists has been murdered. When Bel falls for her lead anchor, a smooth-voiced beefcake named Hector Madden (Dominic West), viewers will instantly know that Ms. Morgan also took a page from “Broadcast News,” James L. Brooks’s 1987 romantic comedy about love, longing and unchecked journalistic ambition. What? No “Mad Men”? 

“What they share is some fashion and some lampshades,” Ms. Featherstone said, trying to hide the “Can we drop the ‘Mad Men’ comparisons?” weariness in her voice. Then she confessed to her own micro-campaign to distinguish the two by “going around slightly smugly correcting everybody: ‘It’s not the same decade! This is 1956, and those are the ’60s!’ ” She added, “In terms of pace and tone you can see they’re miles and miles apart.” 

There are those, of course, who will tune in thinking they might get their Jimmy McNulty fix, that is, the boozing, authority-defying police detective that Mr. West played on the HBO series “The Wire,” which ended in 2008 Stateside and was a huge hit in Britain. Speaking by phone, Mr. West wondered about what this segment of the viewing public would think of him as the posh Hector Madden, wearing hand-tailored suits, sporting a dapper side part in his curly hair and enunciating every British-inflected syllable. 

“ ‘Wire’ fans, they’re hoping for hard-bitten Baltimore, and they get very received-pronunciation English,” said Mr. West, who seems unable to get the word out that he was educated at Eton. “There’s always a sense of deflation in a room when I go in and they hear me speak.” 

Here in Britain there is one viewer excited that Mr. West has dropped his disheveled cop routine and inhabited the character of an anchorman who rivals James Bond when it comes to careful grooming. “My wife was just in heaven,” Mr. West said. “I always say: ‘There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m at the mercy of whatever job I’m doing.’ And she said: ‘Finally. You get a decent haircut.’ ”

CONTINUE READING Full Story HERE...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/arts/television/romola-garai-and-dominic-west-in-the-hour-on-bbc-america.html?src=rechp

[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]

W. Scott Malone: WE BETTER HANDLE THE TRUTH

- OPEN SOURCE  US/1

The History of US/British ‘Interrogation Techniques’ and the Torture Debate

Reprinted from BlackNET Intelligence Channel

In May 2004, just after the Abu Gharib prison photo scandal publicly erupted, national security columnist W. Scott Malone recalled, in rather graphic terms, that the public trail of US and British “interrogation techniques” from previous years were hardly “secret.” Given the renewed debate over the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced” interrogation measures like waterboarding, which some believe is torture, and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s position that the technique is in fact torture, HSToday.us is reprinting Malone’s historically constructive report from four years ago.

---

By William Scott Malone

At best, they are either liars or cowards, in the opinion of their captors. Otherwise, they would have been killed by US or coalition forces in the desert fighting for their beloved Iraq. Instead, they stand accused as terrorists sitting in Abu Ghraib’s terrorist isolation cellblocks 1A and 1B. Being forced to lie naked on cold, hard concrete floors pales in comparison to Nicholas Berg’s rather drawn out, excruciatingly painful and “humiliating” on camera beheading. 

But the real liars and cowards are the politicians, TV pontificators, and Pentagon officials who can’t seem to handle the truth. Perhaps unwittingly on purpose, US taxpayers, via their politicians and bureaucrats, with ample “ignorance” from their media interrogatories, have not only ignored such practices in the past, but have long funded and even encouraged such so-called “abuse.” 

The most appalling irony of the still unfolding abuse story, and a public relations “abuse” all by itself, was the US Army’s cheapskate use of Saddam’s notorious torture center, the Abu Ghraib prison, as a “secret” US interrogation center. And senior US officials then attempting to lay the blame for the entire operation at the feet of enlisted Guard personnel was beyond the pale. It was this second point that was mostly lost in the original CBS “60 Minutes II” program, and, at least at first, in virtually every other media version as well. 

How anyone in their right mind could have believed it would remain secret for long is another lost lesson of history, as rather bluntly pointed out by retired Marine Lt. Colonel and Middle East operator Bill Cowan - the Iraqis know what happened to them. “These people at some point will be let out," Cowan told CBS [back] in 2004. "Their families are gonna know. Their friends are gonna know." 

Not to mention at least one conscience-struck US photographer-participant.

Those events have starkly reminded me of a long ago investigation I did for a BBC documentary which aired back in 1988. Re-watching it last week, it occurred to me that such allegations of prisoner abuse against both US and British forces have been around for fifty-plus years. The film itself was a somewhat personal journey of its producer, Richard Taylor, who had served during the Korean War as a British MP then attached to a an interrogation unit. “It was run by a genial American major, and staffed mainly by Koreans and Chinese,” Taylor recalled in his narration. “Sometimes, prisoners of war were tortured. My tent backed on to the unit’s compound, and the screams I heard there still echo in my mind.” 

My precise contribution to Taylor’s film, later titled “The Unleashing of Evil,” was to locate and interview a retired US Green Beret about the US military’s training of various “interrogation techniques.” Luke Thompson had been a highly-decorated Special Forces sergeant who had served five tours in Vietnam and conducted other secret operations around the world before his retirement in 1978. 

“Basic interrogation is taught straight forward at the military intelligence school in Arizona,” Thompson recalled for me on camera. “Regular Army soldiers going through an interrogation course. That’s the conventional method. This is accepted by the Geneva Convention – “the good guy stuff’.” 

Using some rather frightening terms for today’s ears, Thompson went on to describe “the unconventional method:” 

“You use controlled terror. And controlled terror is where you control a man’s emotions. You allow him to see the light of day. You don’t allow him to see how he’s going to make it. He has to have hope that’s he’s not going to die. Everything else is agreeable. You can do anything else to him as you want, except to let him know that death is inevitable. 

 
“In controlled terrorism you don’t mangle a man - that’s brutality. Of course, some brutality may be necessary, but when you’re trying to control a man’s mind through terrorism, you have to keep the mind asking questions. 

“For instance, if you had a little girl or a son or whatever, and I wanted to terrorize you - holy terror - I would not bring that child in and brutalize them in front of you. You take the kid outside, if it’s brutalized - the screams and so forth and so on - and you let it continue. All of this is done outside of the man’s [sight], and then you bring the mangled body inside and let the man see it,” Thompson said with watery eyes while pointing his index finger to his forehead. “He will wonder how it happened, what happened. And there will always be that question.” 

When asked where he learned about such procedures, Thompson again didn’t mince his words: “In Special Forces you had this in intelligence training. It’s what you might have to do, or might have done against you.” When asked if such instructions were written down, Thompson said, “I can’t recall a manual. I can never recall seeing it written down.” So it was all passed down by word of mouth? “Yes, in fact, any notes taken on this subject never left the classroom.” 

“We’ve trained some of the Special Forces [of other countries] in some of the techniques, but you really don’t have to teach people terror. They define their own terror by their ethnic background. In Vietnam, the Vietnamese done the torture and all that stuff, although it was known by the Americans - we knew it. The torture was performed by the Vietnamese - we had clean hands - we had deniability.” 

And presumably no digital photos. 

As pointed out in the film by both foreign victims and one US-trained foreign practitioner, the various American “instructors” always preferred the psychological over the physical when it came to interrogation techniques. “There’s no reason to [physically] torture someone,” concurred Thompson, “because chances are you’re not going to get what you want. They’re going to give you what they think you want to sustain themselves. They’d give you the Gettysburg Address if they thought that’d make you feel better.” 

Asked off camera about the legendary tactic employed in Vietnam of taking two suspects up in a helicopter and throwing one of them off, Thompson told me it was true. He also made the same point - the guy who was thrown off was technically tortured, while the guy still on the aircraft was psychologically abused - and much more reliable as a consequence. 

And our British coalition partners in Iraq are, obviously, not quite innocent babes in such endeavors either. The Green Berets have long and routinely trained with their British counterparts, the famed SAS, or Special Air Services. “As far as I’m concerned,” Thompson pointed out, “they knew everything I knew, and probably more. And knew it as well as I did or better.” 

The BBC’s Taylor also interviewed retired Major Fred Hulrud of the British Royal Army, who had served in Ireland, amongst other outposts, with the Special Military Intelligence Unit. Hulrud’s description of a process called “deep interrogation” he taught as the officer in charge of “prisoner handling” at Britain’s secret Winter Survivor School will ring familiar and haunting to readers of 2008. 

“They were stripped naked, with hoods put over their heads,” he recalled to Taylor while ambling through the British countryside. “And then put inside [a special cold cell] and frozen for awhile to lower their body temperature. They were then taken to an intermediary point between all the modules which was an exercise yard. There they were made to do physical exercises. Most of them could be persuaded to do this to keep warm in fact, because they were having minor convulsions - shivering. 

“Some of them who couldn’t be convinced that it was a good idea actually had to be held by four or five people who made them physically do the exercises. And the idea of this of course was to wear down their body heat, their body core heat, and to make them disoriented.” 

The British trainee "prisoners" were then subjected to what Hulrud called the five techniques: “Hooding, Wall Standing, White Noise, and Food and Sleep Deprivation.” These were then combined with “violent verbal abuse” and sexual humiliation: “We ridiculed them. They were made to bend over, they were searched--they had anal searches. The woman who was usually present ridiculed their private parts. And they were generally humiliated. 

“They were then taken back in for exercise again. And then they were taken in for interrogation.” 

Irishman Paddy Joe McLean told Taylor of his 1971 experience during a hooded deep interrogation: “That piercing sound [of white noise] would drive you mad. With wall standing, the body has four points of contact - the points of your fingers against the wall, and the points of your toes with your legs wide apart. The result of it is that the small of your back carries the whole weight, and that’s where fatigue settles in. I can’t remember how long we were kept in the position, but I know as far as I was concerned, I was kept there until I fell. Could stand no longer.” 

Taylor’s documentary met with good reviews in the UK, but with complete indifference back in America. It was not met in either country by denial. The point, however, is that this information was then, and still is today, publicly available to any citizen or government official who wishes to know about it. 

Such interrogation “techniques” are also frequently, if rather quietly, discussed in special operations circles. From Vietnam to Lebanon, recalled one veteran Marine officer back in 2004. “Of course it was done. It just wasn’t widely discussed, shall we say.” 

Or as another long-time Special Forces operator told me, the techniques are not all that horrifying when considering the alternatives. Compared to what happened at Abu Ghraib, “I’ve done worse things to American troops in training,” he pointed out, “And that included the now infamous process of “water-boarding.’ ” 

The Abu Ghraib photos obviously looked "staged," and, as claimed by at least two of the accused MPs, they in fact were. Pfc. Lynndie England told a Denver TV station that she was ordered to pose for the photos as a part of an intelligence “pysop,” or psychological operation. Perhaps equally obvious, if not more important, the photos themselves were also evidence of a “systematic” operation, as Army Reserve Col. Robert Knapp told his local newspaper in San Luis Obispo, CA, back in 2004. Knapp, a psychiatrist and the medical director at Atascadero State Hospital, spent 10 months in Iraq on active duty. For most of his deployment Knapp treated soldiers for stress. 

"These were not rogue soldiers that needed treatment," Knapp said of the MP guards. "This looked authorized, encouraged or even ordered." Although abusing prisoners can frequently be a symptom of war stress, Knapp told the newspaper, “such abuse is usually done once by one person.” 

Knapp also doubted soldiers would have documented it with cameras if they thought their superiors were unaware. "Prisoner abuse happens," he said. "It's human nature. But (stress-related) abuse doesn't have the character of being systematic." 

Perhaps the phrase “one man’s torturer is another man’s interrogator” should become the updated version of the 20th Century aphorism that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Many military officers are now horrified at how their troops might be treated when captured by enemy forces. But our prisoners during the first Persian Gulf War were not treated by their Iraqi captors with Marquis of Queensbury rules, nor were US Marines in Beirut, or the DELTA Operators and Rangers in Mogadishu. 

As the debate rages, we are again reminded, (and as our leaders tell us continually), that we are in a war to the death, and a new kind of war at that. And, as the above history demonstrates, neither we nor our British cousins have always played by strictly Geneva Rules.

No doubt we as a people simply just don’t care to be reminded of it. 

Yet as various senior officials and media commentators have taken pains to point out: It is the very strength of the American political system that is being put on display with the coming speedy trials for various, all be they so far low-level, malefactors. But systemic foot-dragging and/or cover-ups almost always result in the precise opposite of their intended effect. 

As Richard Nixon learned the hard way, it is better to face the truth than to hide from it. Yet his forced resignation over the criminal euphemism known as Watergate may have even contributed directly to the later ending of the Cold War by proving rather conclusively that America was not the Fascist monolith as portrayed in Soviet propaganda. But it was also a lesson lost on several of Nixon’s successors. The criminal charges that almost brought down President Ronald Reagan in the Iranian arms-for-hostage scandal were also directly related to obstruction of justice after the fact, as were all the cases of the convicted Nixon administration criminals. It was also the very basis of the historic impeachment and Senate trial of President Bill Clinton. 

History has clearly demonstrated, time and again, that we, as a nation, can in fact handle the truth. 

Scott Malone is a multiple Emmy and Peabody award-winning investigative journalist who was the then editor of NavySEALs.com and its counter-terrorism newsletter, BlackNET Intelligence Channel, wherein this article was first published. 

http://www.hstoday.us/blogs/opinion-and-politics/single-article/the-history-of-usbritish-interrogation-techniques-and-the-torture-debate/6cd140a686e926c8e019eab893c78634.html