paul2001sw-1

Piper Alpha was an oil rig in the North Sea that caught fire with disastrous consequences. A public enquiry blamed lax safety practices, tacitly allowed by a government that was far too cosy with an industry that was vital to the public finances. Perhaps unsurprisingly, whle the government accepted the report's recommendations, the company that owned the rig was never prosecuted. This series combines a reconstruction of events on the rig and at the enquiry with contemporary interviews with survivors and others affected. It's not a showy series, but it's a serious one, and ultimately makes one feel both sad and angry. And yet there is a silver lining. The programme's final conclusion is that it's not accidental there have been no similar incidents since. It remains an outrage that we had to have this one first.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is a solemn, stately adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize winning novel of the same name. In some ways, it's a novel about the savage arbitratiness of life: a man gets engaged, has an affair, spends World War Two as a prisoner of the Japanese, and returns home to find his lover dead; there are obvious echoes of McEwan's 'Atonement' in the story (and a similar absence of atonement!). It's well done although it suffers a bit from the fact that all its youmg characters are beautiful and intelligent: as a doctor, our hero helps the common soldiers, but the story reveals little about the ordinary perspective.

Amid the horrors of history, it's reassuring, perhaps, to find someone who says sorry. And intriguing: Germans who worked for the Nazis obviously had a range of complicity and guilt, and if we are to understand what happened, don't we need to hear from those who were central enough to have played an important role in the regime without being utterly morally corrupted? Of course, when a regime was as terrible as that of Hitler, there may be few if any who can give us such testimony. Albert Speer escaped execution at Nuremburg and came out of prison to build a new career as a professional apologist. But was he deceiving us, or even himself, with his partial confession? At first he convinced - there were many who wanted his story to be true - but subsequent evidence makes his claims to ignorance of the worst crimes of the regime implausible. Still, a recent documentary ('The Rise of the Nazis') seemed to be straining to tell us he was no different from Himmler or Goebbels, and I don't think that's quite right either. This film, from 1996, is inherently sympathetic to the idea of a man trying to reconcile himself with his past, while questioning Speer's ability to truly reckon with his own acts. Ultimately, there was no way to be a good German at his level of power in such a murderous government.