‘And The Trouble Is Where to Begin to Spring Surprises on You. Perhaps a Place You Might Least Like to Remember/ This Is Your Life and the BBC’s Images of the Holocaust in the Twenty Years Before Holocaust

Abstract

In his contribution to this volume, Tim Cole explores a number of different responses to the BBC’s screening of the NBC miniseries Holocaust in September 1978. Building on the work of Emiliano Perra, he argues that ‘the response to Holocaust in Britain’ had more in common with ‘the muted and ephemeral reception seen in Italy’ than ‘the more extensive and far-reaching response seen in West Germany or the United States’.¹ As he summarises, ‘far from Holocaust stimulating deep engagement with the wartime past, both British audiences and the press responded more to Holocaust as TV drama’. Moreover,

Holocaust was, for some critics, not necessary in Britain, where ‘over the past 20 years there has been much including Thames TV’s “World at War” series, which has seriously documented not only the genocide directed against the Jews but the historical context of this and other agonising events’.²