Television review – Country Life, 3 November 1994
SEAN DAY-LEWISSean Day-Lewis, former arts editor of the Daily Telegraph. Son of poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and (considerably older) half-brother of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. He died in 2022 aged 90. on the fall of communism
Fall of the Wall (BBC2)
FOR anybody under 50, the Soviet-led communist monolith of Eastern Europe was an ever-present and uneasy fact of life. Then, suddenly, the demons were gone, blown away as quickly as a nightmare dismissed by waking daylight. The nuclear holocaust was postponed beyond the foreseeable future. We could turn to smaller anxieties.
If it was a miracle, it was a manmade one, essentially a domino effect so simple that it can be explained definitively through two exceptionally well-researched and -constructed television series. First, Brian Lapping Associates and BBC2 offered the Moscow inside view with The Second Russian Revolution. Now, marking the fifth anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall, they produce the two-part Fall of the Wall (BBC2 on Sunday evenings), explaining the 1980s events in the buffer states captured by Stalin to stand between Russia and the West.
Six years ago they could still appear on television with the aura of the all-powerful. Now Mikhail Gorbachev, together with Hungarian, Czech and East German leaders of the time, sit before producers David Ash and Stephen Clarke at human size – now reasonable men who explain that they only did what came rationally.
Part one this week, A Hole in the Fence, begins with a reminder that only two years before the fall of the Wall the already vast Chancellor Kohl of West Germany had felt obliged to eat humble pie by receiving Erich Honecker, listening to the East German national anthem and performing the toast rituals common to diplomatic banquets. East Germany had a gross national product approaching that of West Germany and an ability to win more Olympic medals than any other European country. No wonder Honecker was too full of confidence to understand that Gorbachev meant what he said about a Soviet change of direction.
Really, as Ash and Clarke make plain, the beginning of the end came through the daring of brave Hungary. The nation that tried to lead the way 30 years before was now committing a new heresy by honouring the disinterred body of Imre Nagy – hung at Moscow's insistence after leading the abortive 1956 uprising. Watching the present calm charm of 1989 Hungarian premier Miklos Nemeth, it is difficult to realise his courage then. He did not merely honour Nagy. he went to Moscow to advertise the reforms which were finding so much financial favour in the West. Gorbachev genuinely smiled on him.
Nemeth was sufficiently encouraged to talk to neutral Austria about pulling down the electric fence dividing the once-united countries. The Iron Curtain was breached. Gorbachev declined to lead the action demanded by his other communist allies. East German refugees began pouring through the gap. Honecker had to go into hospital at a crucial moment, and the rest is history. And the kind of modern history, with such riches of archive footage and first-person memory, that makes for factual television of the highest order.
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