TV Review: The Battle for Britain's Heroes (Channel 4)

Afua Hirsch’s promised fight against imperialism disappeared under a barrage of seeing-the-other-side-of-the-argument, while in another area of social division ‘Grammar Schools: Who Will Get In?’ (BBC2) delivered some real emotional viewing

Afua invited us to look into the ‘darker’, ‘suppressed’ side of Churchill’s record, the one where he was uncovered as a rotten old racist (Channel 4)

Strange to say for such a professional controversialist, and co-star of Sky News’ gobshite fest The Pledge, the trouble with Afua Hirsch’s polemic The Battle for Britain’s Heroes was that there wasn’t that much battling going on. I wanted to see the EDL pitched against the radicals of the Rhodes Must Fall movement (that’s the handful of Oxford undergrads who want to tear down the statue of Cecil that stands, unobtrusively enough, on the edifice of Oriel College, Oxford. The EDL probably don’t know who Rhodes was, but hey).

I was tensely awaiting maybe Nigel Farage to confront the eccentrics who burst into the “patriotic” Churchill-themed Blighty Cafe in the east end of London as a protest against “imperialism and gentrification” (an unbalanced pairing of evils, I’d suggest). These, by the way, were the earnest activists who yelled at the bemused millennials tucking into their brunches that “you have nothing to lose but your chains”, shackled as they were to plates of avocado-on-sourdough toast, a meal unknown in any socialist society.

But no, no such fun.

Take her attempt on the reputation of Winston Churchill, near-universal national hero, routine winner of the greatest Britons polls and face on the fiver. Afua invited us to look into the “darker”, “suppressed” side of Churchill’s record, the one where he was uncovered as a rotten old racist, careless about, for example, the lives of Bengali peasants in the famine of 1943, or the “uncivilised tribes” of Iraq he was happy to bomb with poison gas in 1920. There are a few problems with that.

First, there’s nothing suppressed about it. I’ve heard all that stuff loads of times. In fact I could think of a few more catastrophes and excesses the old boy was responsible for, or strongly supportive of, such as the vicious Black and Tan “auxiliary” British forces in Ireland, state-sponsored terrorists; or, more disputed, ordering the shooting of Welsh miners on strike in 1911; or the stupidity, at best, of Gallipoli, 1915; or backing the dodgy Edward VIII in 1936. Wasn’t keen on votes for women, either.

Second, no one is actually denying any of that. So her sparring match with Churchill fan and all-purpose punch bag Jacob Rees-Mogg never really got going. The young fogey eventually agreed with Afua that Churchill “certainly got India wrong”, and Afua agreed with Jacob that Churchill’s long career was “nuanced”. Rees-Mogg preferred a straightforward weighing in the balance of good and bad, with the victory against Hiterlism naturally tipping everything else; Afua preferred a less utilitarian approach, just laying both sides out in evidence, equally valid.

Jacob suggested museums and books were the places to set things straight about WSC, rather than in absurdly long footnotes on plaques and statues, and Afua duly opened a pop-up “Churchill Uncovered” museum which did precisely that. If only Brexit could be resolved so amicably.

It was much the same elsewhere. Afua managed to invite one of her Twitter trolls to meet her, but they seemed to get along surprisingly well face to face – no “gammon” action there. The admiral who looks after Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, was happy to concede that the hero of Trafalgar was wrong about slavery and that those facts should be known. When Afua watched footage of the rubble left behind when the IRA blew up the Nelson Pillar in Dublin – a satellite version of the Trafalgar Square monument erected as a bit of in-your-face cultural aggression by the Brits in the colonial era – she got all weepy and sentimental about this bloke who lived off the back of black slaves, and got married on a planation. She was even disarmed about Rhodes by a clever and charming Oxford don.

It was, thus, an unsatisfactory affair, the battlefield blighted not by the blood and guts of twisted history and racial abuse, but instead by outbreaks of politesse and seeing-the-other-side-of-the-argument. The ghost of Voltaire stalked the conflict zone. Afua concluded that getting rid of controversial statues would be just too “divisive”.

Sorry, Afua, what was that again? Too “divisive”?

Is this, I asked myself, the same woman who had caught the attention of the Channel 4 commissioning editors with a column under the headline “Toppling statues: Here’s Why Nelson’s Column Should be Next”.

If I didn’t know better, I might think that was just a little morsel of clickbait published by an ailing newspaper, predictably picked up by telly folk looking to spark a social media storm and then another Afua Hirsch column to complete the kind of negative feedback loop that the British media has degenerated into these days. Except she didn’t quite manage to live up to her own billing, or hype, and so Afua fell off her own grand pedestal: a truly imperial, monumental, heroic mess, in other words.

They say that failing the 11-plus exam for grammar school is a crushing blow for a kid. True, but in Grammar Schools: Who Will Get In? you saw just how desolating it can be for a parent too – and this promising three-part documentary following the progress of some children in Bexley exposes many of the harsh realities of what’s happening in schools.

Bravely, Janita’s mum agreed to be filmed receiving the results of her daughter’s exam, and her heartbroken reaction when she was told that the pass mark was 214 points and her daughter had scored 192. “Oh my God” she whispered as if in prayer, visibly shrinking as she digested the news and its life-changing consequences. It was like watching a bereavement. And it was all, we learned, despite her spending £300 a month on extra tuition for her lovely bright girl, on her wages of £8 per hour. Whatever else, those few seconds of human pain made an eloquent case against expanding the grammars.