The second series of The Corrupted has started. The first series, last year, was amazing — an immersive, 450 minute saga of criminality in the East End in the 1950’s: I think it’s the longest serious drama series Radio 4 has done for decades (I’m not counting soapy plays like the wonderful Brief Lives, or the episodic genre pieces like Baldi and the sublime Pilgrim). I wasn’t going to bother bringing it to your notice, because I didn’t realise that the first series was available, but, apparently, GF Newman posted it all to youtube soon after it was broadcast (and nobody else has noticed judging by the numbers). Series 2 covers the 1960’s. It is riveting. First series here; second here.
I highly recommend that everyone read Eszter’s moving, almost unbearable post, in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, about her father’s experience as a three-year-old in the camps. The day, which marks the liberation of Auschwitz, makes me think of that scene in Shoah where Lanzmann is moving through a Polish village, as his guide, a local, points out the different homes where Jewish families once lived. If memory serves (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it), the guide recites the names of the families and then, with some prodding from Lanzmann, gives the names of the Polish families who live there now. Or maybe it’s the reverse: the guide recites the names of the Polish families, and Lanzmann prods him about the Jews who used to live there. Regardless, you get this terrible feeling of dread as you think about the generations of Jews who once lived in these homes, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not, but often uneasily. You think about their gentile neighbors who for centuries longed to see them gone. And then they were.