I have been search­ing to no avail for a record­ing (VHS or DVD) of a one-man stage per­for­mance of Churchill by Robert Hardy in 1986 for the Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Net­work. PBS has no records older than five years. Can you help? —R.S.

The Robert Hardy per­for­mance you are look­ing for is “Churchill” in the David Susskind “Lead­ers” series, a 90-minute one-man show pro­duced by WNET and broad­cast by PBS in 1986. It was full of inaccuracies—Hardy is a superb Churchill, but his “Wilder­ness Years” per­for­mance, scripted by Sir Mar­tin Gilbert, was far more accurate. 

The pro­duc­ers sent me a VCR at the time, and video­tapes were prob­a­bly avail­able once from PBS. To find one, try search­ing Google or eBay for “susskind churchill” or sim­i­lar word com­bi­na­tions. Here is my review from Finest Hour 52, Sum­mer 1986 (not on the Churchill Cen­tre website):

It’s Not Win­ston, but It’s Human

Sir John Giel­gud, who ought to know bet­ter, leads it off, send­ing me scram­bling for a notepad: “Just after the end of World War II, Churchill was voted out of office.” (Wrong: the war was still on.) “He found him­self with­out any imme­di­ate means.” (Wrong: the advances on his war mem­oirs were enor­mous, and in August 1946 a group of gen­er­ous friends relieved him of the bur­den of Chartwell by buy­ing it for the National Trust, pro­vid­ing that he and his wife could live out their lives there).

“And so he embarked on a lec­ture tour of Amer­ica,” Giel­gud con­tin­ues. “This is what you might have seen if you were seated in the audi­ence in Los Ange­les, Chicago or Kansas City.” (Wrong and wrong again. Churchill’s final Amer­i­can lec­ture tour was in 1932. In 1946 he gave the Iron Cur­tain speech in Ful­ton, addressed the Vir­ginia Assem­bly, made three other short appear­ances and went home. Seated in an audi­ence in Los Ange­les or Chicago or Kansas City, you’d have been more likely to have seen the McGuire Sis­ters.)

The first time I watched this per­for­mance I almost got up and left. By round three the edges had blurred and the rough spots had smoothed, and I began enjoy­ing it. Admit­tedly I am too close to my sub­ject. And all those involved in “Churchill” are such nice peo­ple that I hes­i­tate to com­plain. As Lady Soames has often reminded us, how­ever, seri­ous peo­ple have a respon­si­bil­ity “to keep the mem­ory green and the record accurate.”

The prob­lem with “Churchill” is twofold: (1) It plants an inac­cu­rate image of WSC in the mind of the aver­age viewer. (2) It is laced with errors, the cor­rec­tion of which would have lost none of the drama and warm human­ity which are its most admirable features.

Churchill never “deliv­ered a series of infor­mal talks across Amer­ica” in 1946, as the pro­duc­ers state. Why say he did? Why not admit, as script writer James Humes said, that this is a com­pos­ite pic­ture, drawn from WSC’s writings?

Churchill made it a rule, when abroad, never to crit­i­cise his polit­i­cal oppo­nents at home. Why then cast him in an ill-suited role as stand-up comic, stump­ing Amer­ica to deliver one-liners about “sheep in sheep’s cloth­ing” (an unproven remark about Attlee)?

Robert Hardy deserves full marks for hold­ing his audi­ence, which responds with hearty laugh­ter. (Both he and Humes had wanted only 60 min­utes, but the spon­sors insisted on 90. One of the prob­lems of pub­lic tele­vi­sion is that it must rely on spon­sors, who have no busi­ness deter­min­ing pro­gram lengths.)

Hardy has Churchill’s man­ner­isms down per­fectly and of all Churchill por­tray­als, his is the most con­vinc­ing. But the first reac­tion of any­one mod­er­ately steeped in facts is that this Churchill is a vul­gar car­i­ca­ture, exercising—in 1946 of all years—an inor­di­nate degree of levity. Is the truth so bor­ing that it can­not prevail?

Churchill would not have joked about his being seen as dunce and wastrel by his father. He would never have claimed that Vic­to­rian Britain “ruled all India,” which it never did; or called his Army assign­ment there “a life sentence…east of nowhere.” He would not have said that the Lloyd George Coali­tion lost the 1922 elec­tion because of his work over the Mid­dle East and Ire­land. (“In spite of” would be more accu­rate.) He would not have called Jock Colville “Jack,” or made the unat­trib­uted remark about Mont­gomery (“in vic­tory insuf­fer­able”). He would not have pro­nounced the scene of his 1915 polit­i­cal down­fall as “Gall-i-po’-li.” Most par­tic­u­larly, he would not have said he resigned as Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer because of the “Tory appeasers”; such a thing never hap­pened. Churchill resigned as Chan­cel­lor, before not after the Depres­sion, because the Con­ser­v­a­tives lost the Spring 1929 election—long before Hitler came to power and appease­ment became a policy.

I will not bore you with my two pages of inac­cu­ra­cies, but here are some of the more crucial: At Malakand, Win­ston says, “the whole com­pany was ambushed—except me.” In the Sudan, he says he wrote for the Morn­ing Tele­graph (a weird merger of Morn­ing Post and Daily Tele­graph)—about dervishes nick­named “whirling” because of the way they twirled their sabres. In Par­lia­ment he says, “I made my oath to Queen Vic­to­ria and took my seat in Octo­ber 1900.” (He made his oath to King Edward VII and took his seat on 14 Feb­ru­ary 1901.) He says he pro­posed to Clemen­tine “in a gazebo” and that he heard the news broad­cast about Pearl Har­bor in Down­ing Street. (It was the Tem­ple of Diana and Che­quers, respec­tively.) His famous aside, “Whatever hap­pens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on,” was deliv­ered in the Cab­i­net Room at Down­ing Street, not in a speech to the House of Com­mons. After Pearl Har­bor he says he sailed for New York—what he did was sail to the Chesa­peake, and fly into Wash­ing­ton from Hamp­ton Roads. Why couldn’t all this have been looked up?

Some of Churchill’s words are actu­ally from other peo­ple: “Always give the train a sport­ing chance to get away” was said by Clemen­tine Churchill. “That dear and excel­lent woman” (Mrs. Ever­est) was from a line by Gib­bon, whom WSC quoted. “When all save Eng­lish­men despaired of England’s life” was said at Churchill’s hon­orary U.S. cit­i­zen­ship cer­e­mony in 1963 by Pres­i­dent Kennedy. Churchill’s pri­vate sec­re­tary said  of the alleged crack about the only tra­di­tions of the Royal Navy (“rum, sodomy and flog­ging”) that WSC liked it, but­de­nied say­ing it. The phrase actu­ally dates back two centuries.

Many of the quotes that are Churchill’s are mis­placed. “Shot at with­out result” was said about Cuba, not Malakand. “Bone­less won­der” (sin­gu­lar) was a blast at Ram­say Mac­Don­ald, not the Tory appeasers. Other quotes are vaguely famil­iar but hope­lessly mud­dled: “They asked what my pro­gram would be—I told them Victory”… “Give us your faith and your trust” (for “trust” read “bless­ing”). And some are far wide of the mark: “a bull who car­ries his own china shop with him,” if said at all, was said about Dulles in the 1950s, not the State Depart­ment in the 1940s. When King George VI sum­moned Churchill on 10 May 1940 he said, “I want to ask you to form a Gov­ern­ment,” not “take over the Government”—there is a difference.

On the mer­its the script is dis­ap­point­ing. But with all its flaws and inac­cu­ra­cies, the per­for­mance brings out the great­est char­ac­ter­is­tic of Win­ston Churchill: that essen­tial human­ity which made him so dif­fer­ent from other world lead­ers past and present. James Humes noted another qual­ity: “What is impor­tant for us to know today is that Churchill told his audi­ences not what they wanted to hear but what he wanted them to hear.” And Sir John Giel­gud, mak­ing up for his intro­duc­tion, closes the show with words to remem­ber: “Churchill was as ordi­nary as any of us—and as extra­or­di­nary as any of us can hope to be.”

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