Vicious propaganda

The thing I really don’t get at all about The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, Thursday) is how the people involved could bring themselves to do it. I mean, I’m quite skint at the moment and in need of attention and acclaim and a better career. But I promise — no matter how much they paid me or how many column inches I might expect to generate or Baftas I might hope to win — that never in a zillion years would I do what this documentary has done to the British army.

I’m not saying it wasn’t gripping viewing. Artistically, you could scarcely fault it. Militarily, I wasn’t quite convinced by the scene where a few insurgents armed with AKs and another with an RPG cause a British army section completely to fall to pieces. Otherwise, though, the performances were strong, the squaddies’ dialogue rang true, the Basra patrol sequences were tense and exciting, the characters were well delineated and the central theme — the conflict between the demand for moral courage and the military’s demand for personal and regimental loyalty — made for intensely powerful drama.

But still, if I’d been offered the script or a part or even the director’s job, no way would I have touched it because I wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt. Every time thereafter that anything bad had happened to a British soldier in an Islamic country I would have held myself partly responsible. And justifiably so. Not in their most fervid fantasies could the thugs of the Iraqi insurgency or the butchers of the Islamist terror movement have come up with a more vicious and destructive piece of anti-Western propaganda than The Mark of Cain.