(Above: the scene you didn't see in the movie).
Last week it was amusing to listen to Philip Adams doing a flashback to his first program for Late Night Live way back on the 28th of January, 1991, and there was Gerard Henderson banging away about bias in the ABC.
Same as it ever was.
Twenty years of dedicated bee in bonnet.
Henderson was extremely agitated by the sundry appearances of one Dr. Robert Springborg on the ABC to offer his views on the Gulf War, and he managed to sound indignant to the point of apoplexy, outraged to the point of refined hysteria about the blatant and latent leftist tendencies within the cardigan wearers then presided over by David Hill. Brian Toohey and Sam Lipski made up the numbers but the purse-lipped, clucking and disapproving Henderson dominated the show.
Well we toddled off to check up on Dr. Robert Springborg, and discovered that this dangerously biased and wretched individual is currently a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School where - to quote that dangerous radical George H. W. Bush - the best and brightest military officers from the United States and around the world come to Monterey, California to work with world class faculty on real military and defense problems.
Meanwhile - did we mention it? - there's the apoplectic Henderson still hanging around in Sydney banging on about bias in the ABC, and with the same noxious air of righteous indignation. If you can stand it, here's a typical serve dished up in 2010 in Your ABC's growth strategy: take more of your money.
Will Henderson ever be able to forgive the ABC for appointing Michael Duffy and Paul Comrie-Thomson to front Counterpoint when so many better candidates for a conservative show might have been available? Modesty prevents us from naming names - Henderson would surely deny any opportunity to appear on the ABC and so give strength to its satanic brew - but the hunt for the right-wing Phillip Adams must proceed apace.
The fact is that Michael Duffy is not really a conservative and Phillip Adams should know this. (here).
Yes, he's a splitter!
Instead, Henderson mourns the loss of Imre Salusinszky's and Tim Blair's offering the Continuing Crisis:
The Continuing Crisis ran for only 12 weeks in 2001 at the difficult time of 9 pm on a Friday night. It had one part-time producer who happened to be an ABC leftist. The Continuing Crisis’ total time on Radio National was a mere 12 hours.
Which is by my calculation about eleven hours too long. As one of the few people on the planet who actually heard the show, I'm here to testify that it was terrible, and not because of a part time leftist producer (always with the leftist schtick), but because of the talent. Salusinszky might know a lot about Bob Dylan, but he wasn't much by way of a radio voice, and yet compared to Tim Blair he was a giant.
Blair has since found his true home as a sniping right wing gadfly blogger with the intellectual depth of a Sarah Palin, but his brief foray into radio was one of the grander moments in the whole grand Jonathan Shier experiment.
Nonetheless, the conspiratorial view of history took hold:
At the time of its existence, Phillip Adams actually campaigned against The Continuing Crisis. He went on ABC TV and called the Salusinszky/Blair program “a self-indulgent pile of tripe” and “intolerable to listen to”. Shortly after Adams’ diatribe went to air, Salusinszky and Blair were told that The Continuing Crisis would not be continued.
At least Salusinsky turned it into a Quadrant piece, My life as Phillip Adams: a memoir, no longer available at Quadrant it seems, though there's a taste of it here. As for Blair, the tone of his offerings can be guessed at by his bio note for the show:
He (Blair) has owned dozens of cars and motorcycles - none of them electric. "The government can take away my guns," reads a statement issued from Blair's Bondi Junction compound, "but just let them try to take away my leaded petrol." Police warn that not all of Mr. Blair's guns have, in fact, been taken away.
Yes, that's a typical example of congealed lead-laden Blair humour even Mad magazine would find beneath it. Off to the blogging world with him ...
The other amusing thing on Adams' nostalgia trip?
A mention of Christopher Hitchens as a dangerous radical with a fierce and deep seated fear and loathing of the United States. So fierce and deep he migrated to the country in 1981, and in 2007 became a United States citizen along with enthusiastic support for the second Iraq war ... and in between found time to turn up like a bad penny and talk to Adams about Bush's famous victory in saving Kuwait.
So it goes, and no doubt back in those days, I might have wasted a few moments listening to all this blather, just as I've now wasted even more time listening to a repeat of the blather, though it should be noted in passing that Adams spoke at a faster clip in the old days, and these days sounds like Radio Mogadon ....
If the right wing are still in search of a right wing Adams, why not just settle for a tranquilizer? Think of the peace on the pond.
Meanwhile Gerard Henderson continues to turn up with monotonous regularity to ruin Tuesday in the Herald , but I think I've almost filibustered enough to avoid considering his piece After an early stutter, George did his best to defeat Nazis in any detail.
Yes, while the middle east is in uproar, and any number of issues confronting the world, Henderson turns his gimlet eye on a movie that's been in release in the antipodes since Boxing Day. And what do you know, that deviant devious Christopher Hitchens is in the firing line once again.
In the usual way, Henderson doesn't provide a link to the Hitchens' piece in Slate, so here it is under the header Churchill Didn't Say That The King's Speech is riddled with gross falsifications of history, and here's Isaac Chotiner, in Royal Mess 'The King's Speech is an ugly distortion of history, another piece which arouses Henderson's ire.
It seems the show quite won the monarchist Henderson's heart, and so he won't hear a word said against it or the Royal Family. So what those complaints about the Royal family allowing Chamberlain on to the Buckingham Palace balcony with them?
Oh that's alright then, never you mind dear, just carry on regardless.
As for Edward's ongoing fascination with the Nazi way, Henderson's only solution is to attack the leftists in a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction assessment of who was the most appeasing of the appeasers, when in fact appeasement had been a way of life for most politicians before the war, whatever their ideology or their ostensible political line. And who can blame them? Who could imagine wanting to bung on another do after the horrors of the first world war?
Of course it turns out that the leftists were singularly alone and responsible for everything, in the usual way:
Hitchens has a background on the left. He knows better than most that when Britain and the Commonwealth nations went to war with Germany in 1939 the only real opposition came not from one-time conservative appeasers.
Yes, yes, and we go on the merry go round of right v left, but the point actually being made is that the movie airbrushes out Edward's profound inclination towards Nazi ideology. There's not even a squeak that George might have had the odd flirtatious moment before falling into line with duty to country, and as for naughty Prince Charles Edwards, sssh, whatever you do don't mention the Nazi in the family (The Nazi relative that the Royals disowned).
So Henderson resorts to that fatuous standby defence in the case of a movie mangling the facts:
... as the film acknowledges, (it) is merely based on a true story. The abdication was not about foreign policy. Nor, indeed, any kind of policy.
Uh huh. No policy at all. Meanwhile, Henderson is busy tidying up the monarchist image:
Edward VIII's allegiances were very clear. They were not to his family or his people or to Hitler. They were to him alone. If Edward had wanted to implant fascism in Britain he would have remained at Buckingham Palace. Edward and Mrs Simpson had a soft spot for nazism but this had no impact on British foreign policy.
No impact on foreign policy? Edward and Wallace Simpson went on to become a continuing headache for Churchill, and the depths of their Nazi links remains a matter for ongoing speculation, whether or not you believe that Wallace Simpson had an affair with Joachim von Ribbentrop when he was ambassador to Britain in 1936, and whether or not you wonder why the movie overlooked Edward's close family ties to Germany (right down to his considering the language his 'muttersprache').
No, for that kind of insight, you'll have to look outside Henderson's ongoing airbrushing of history (along with bonus anti-socialist, anti-communist sentiment) so that the Royals can stand as brave contributors to the war effort, as opposed to a house riven and torn. For starters why not head off to New clues to Edward VIII's 'Nazi links', though be warned that story shelters in the socialist BBC, and there's a review of the Channel 5 documentary Britain's Nazi King Revealed, here, but be warned it's in a socialist publication ...
In the end, The King's Speech gilds the lily and celebrates the royal family and monarchy as an institution, and does it in a gently humorous and charming way, with an eye to the main chance, and not disturbing the punters, and has reaped box office rewards as a result. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, said John Ford in Liberty Valence, and so they did.
The show can get by because it isn't a documentary, but where's the benefit in Henderson discounting all those tales of Edward's treasonous, if bubble headed, inept and ineffective naughtiness? Why take to Hitchens and Chotiner for pointing out the obvious, which is to say that the emperor frequently wears no clothes ...
If nothing else, it's surely an indictment of George V that he managed to produce a narcissist (Henderson's word) for an elder son, and a shy boy with a bad stutter as a younger son ...
But that's a job for a psychotherapist, who might also have a field day exploring the deeper implications of Gerard Henderson's ongoing obsessions ...
So instead as a counter-balance to Henderson's Polonius' adept advice to the court, always in support of the monarchy, let's end with a dash of Hitchens:
In a few months, the British royal family will be yet again rebranded and relaunched in the panoply of a wedding. Terms like "national unity" and "people's monarchy" will be freely flung around. Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little German dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in "Britain's finest hour." In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar.
Oh and we have a sequel already lined up and ready to roll. It's the Strange story of the king and hypnotist doctor ... with Geoffrey Rush playing the shrink.
Roll on the republic.
(Below: another scene we might fit into the sequel).
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