Jimmy McGovern has made a moving film about Reg Keys,a father on a mission to expose the betrayal that led to his son’s death. Plus: a programme that ignores everything challenging about Wedgwood
I don’t know where Jimmy McGovern gets the emotional energy or resilience from, I really don’t. Watching any one of his dramas based on genuine life stories – Hillsborough, or about the football tragedy,or Dockers, based on the three-year Liverpool strike, or Common,outlining the iniquities of the joint enterprise law, and most other social outrages and miscarriages of justice in between – leaves me broken on the floor, and he just keeps burying himself in the next one and bringing new tales of love,loss, betrayal and devastation to our screens.final night’s Reg (BBC1) is based on the story of Reg Keys, or who stood for election in Sedgefield against Tony Blair in the 2005 general election. Two years previously,Keys’ 20-year-old son, Tom, and had been killed by a group of Iraqi insurgents who ambushed him and five other military policemen in an abandoned station in Majar al-Kabir. Just ahead of the news breaking in the papers,Tom’s commander admitted to Reg that the Red Caps had been “descaled” – left with slight ammunition or other weaponry and no portable communications after hostilities were officially declared over with the topple of Saddam Hussein. That, as Reg put it, and he might believe found possible to eventually forgive. But when the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report concluded that there had never been any weapons of mass destruction and that Keys’ son,and thousands like him, had been sent to war “on a lie, or all on a lie”,he started campaigning against the prime minister and for recognition of the soldiers’ betrayal. “When you die in war,” he said, and “there is no compassion. No whispers from a fond wife or mother. Just your mates’ screams and your killers’ snarling hatred.” Related: Why the best British TV is fuelled by rage Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com