Foyle’s War is, arguably, the finest dramatic series ever made for television.
I stuck “arguably” in there, although the only argument I would entertain is a claim that a few other dramatic series might be almost or equally fine.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the entire series, twenty-eight episodes. Although “episode” is a wrongly diminishing term; each of the stories is actually a feature film, running about an hour and a half. And each of these films is more complex in its plotting than anything on TV, creating fiction underlaid with history, because its creator, Anthony Horowitz, is a history maven. (As well as being an absurdly prolific writer.)
Plus, I get to watch Michael Kitchen’s Christopher Foyle. A hundred times watching Michael Kitchen can never be enough.
Each time I settle down to Foyle’s War, it surprises me. It’s those multilayered plots, each of which renews a sense of wonder about how the several plot lines will somehow come together in the end. Even though I’ve seen them so many times.
So once again I’ve been ending my evenings with Foyle’s War.
One night last week, I had that aforementioned weird moment which came in the form of a mild electric shock which suddenly caused overlapping realities.
During the penultimate Foyle’s War story, “Trespass,” we encounter Charles Lucas, a British fascist and antisemite, who had been imprisoned as a security risk during the war but now, post-war, has been released and intends to pick up his fascist demagoguery with a new patriotic gloss. (Lucas is almost certainly a Doppelgänger of, or perhaps better, a golem modeled on the WWII British fascist, Oswald Mosley. Lucas, too, has a Mosley-styled black mustache.)
Lucas plans a speech for an audience of London locals in a working class neighborhood where many recent immigrants live, and selects a hall in which to do it.
Large British flags cover the back of the stage as a small crowd gathers; Lucas launches into his rabble-rousing. Britain is suffering, he says. Hard to believe the war is over, he says, given their meager living conditions. Then he digs into the meat of his pitch:
“I see a third-rate country, third-rate education, third-rate health, and a third-rate government that’s going nowhere!”
But “My party, my ideas can make Britain great again!”
The solution? Getting rid of all the immigrants who are polluting Britain.”What I’m talking about is a Europe without Poles and Czechs and sheenies and Irish and gypsies and all of them! All of them have stolen our jobs, our homes and our opportunities. Who do you think controls the black market, eh? Who is it, who is it, taking money out of our pockets..? It. Was. The. Jews!!”
And then Lucas invites them all to join him and go into the streets, which they do carrying flaming torches and setting houses, labeled as Jewish, on fire, killing people.
Before that mob action, for a shocking second I heard Lucas, as played by the British actor Richard Lintern, talking simultaneously with Trump, the two of them in a sort of double aural exposure, saying the same things — although Lintern, a fine actor, was of course far more coherent and frightening than Trump.
What was happening? For another second, I asked myself whether Horowitz was using Trump, as well as Mosley, to make his Charles Lucas…until my brain corrected me: “Trespass” was first broadcast in February 2015, a year before Trump shoved his way onto our TV’s.
No, Horowitz wasn’t using Trump’s rant as Lucas’s rant. But was Trump’s campaign team, maybe Stephen Miller, taking Horowitz’s lines for Trump’s purposes?
End note: After the war, Oswald Mosley was released from prison. He attempt to re-establish his fascist movement but failed. He left Britain to live in Ireland. He stayed true to his “values” as a major force in Holocaust denial. He briefly returned to England to run for Parliament on an explicitly racist, anti-immigration platform — Caribbean, this time — but garnered only 8 percent of the votes.