‘Marvellous Raisins in a Badly-Cooked Cake’: British Reactions to the Screening of Holocaust

Abstract

This most British of analogies, ‘marvellous raisins in a badly-cooked cake’, came at the end of a mixed review of Holocaust by The Listener’s TV critic Joseph Hone when the four-part minis er ie s was screened on BBC1 in September 1978.¹ First shown on American television in April 1978, Holocaust told the story of the fictional German-Jewish Weiss family alongside that of an unemployed lawyer, Erik Dorf, who embarks on a career within the SS. The members of the Weiss and Dorf families are followed through a variety of Holocaust landscapes and the duration of the Nazi regime, with the story of the European-wide murder of Jews told through the Weiss family members’ varied experiences. Such a telling was, Hone concluded, not entirely successful. He was far from alone in criticising Holocaust, even if the analogy he drew was somewhat eccentric. Indeed, his criticisms were relatively restrained compared to those of two colleagues at The Listener. The week before, David Wheeler had dubbed Holocaust ‘history for idiots’.² The week after, it was dismissed by Jack Duncan as ‘the daftest show I have ever seen on television’.³