Tendentious drivel

It told the story of two best mates, Frankie and Peter, serving in an unidentified northern regiment in Afghanistan where Peter quickly discovers he can’t cope under fire — and as a punishment is made the unit’s ‘camp bitch’ by the sadistic Lance Corporal Buckley (Mackenzie Crook).

‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.’ So I suppose you could argue that Jimmy McGovern was merely following the fine tradition of Robert Browning when he wrote his drama about cowardice, bullying and murder among British soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan. But I wouldn’t. I think Accused (BBC1, Monday) was despicable: among the most emetic, dishonest and utterly wrongheaded dramas I’ve ever seen on television.

Buckley was a gift of a part for Crook (the psychotic nerd from The Office), with his hollow, staring eyes and skeletal frame. He got to smear his bitches in liquid excrement, gob in their food, butt them in the face with a rifle, force them to urinate on one another’s beds, even beat up a Military Policeman when he threatened to arrest him. Gosh, it must have been fun to play a character of such pure, unmitigated evil: and then to be knifed to death in a way you just know is going to have everyone watching cheering to the rafters.

But while such crude moral schemata work well enough in Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, you do hope for something a little more sophisticated from the BBC. Which is why, of course, McGovern had to dress up his squalid little revenge nasty as a poignant, meaningful and subtle tragedy with much to tell us about the nature of men, war and the military.

One way he did this was to have Buckley justify his behaviour in a long speech about how squaddies are basically the scum of the earth, and how the only way to make them risk their lives in battle is to so terrify them by making an example of some of their comrades — i.e., the camp bitch — that even death is preferable to such humiliation.

Does McGovern really believe that this is how the British army works? I appreciate there have been exceptions — the Deepcut Barracks suicides spring to mind — but this certainly doesn’t gel with anything I have heard from the many soldiers past and present I have met or read, be they first world war veterans such as Harry Patch or those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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