Tweedledum at Fifty

 

It was Colditz's best episode: could it be the best episode of any series?

In all the pantheon of television, spanning over eight decades, can there possibly be a ‘best ever episode of everything?’ If there is, then it must be a matter of personal choice and, inevitably, selection. No one can have seen every episode of every series ever produced. For me, though, there has long since been a clear candidate, an outstanding example of hour-long drama that beats pretty well anything else I can put up against it. It’s an episode of the BBC’s Colditz, and it turns fifty this week. After half a century, it is still staggeringly impressive.

Tweedledum was episode ten in an initial series of fifteen, and was first broadcast at 9.25pm on Thursday, 21 December 1972. It tells the story of an RAF officer’s attempt to escape from the infamous POW camp by achieving repatriation. In order to do so, he decides to feign insanity. John Brason’s script was based on genuine (and successful) attempts to do the same thing by actual POWs in the real Oflag IVC, better known as Colditz. The story relates how Wing Commander George Marsh (Michael Bryant) uses his student experience working in an asylum as the raw material for an audacious and dangerous escape attempt. With only the British medic (Geoffrey Palmer) and a select few fellow inmates in on the secret, Marsh duly sets out to present himself as a paranoid schizophrenic, knowing that once he embarks on his deception, he will have to live the role twenty four hours a day, convincing not only his German captors, but his fellow prisoners.

Suspecting that Marsh may be faking, Security Officer Ullman (Hans Meyer) details one of his men with personal experience of insanity to keep close watch on Marsh as his mental state unravels.

The episode also finds room to depict another genuine escape attempt, by a French officer who audaciously ‘leap-frogged’ over the wire in the exercise compound, scoring a ‘home run’ (a feat achieved in real life by Captain Pierre Mairesse-Lebrun). But it’s Marsh’s feigned insanity that is the heart of the story, and Bryant’s BAFTA-nominated performance in the role that make this such an outstanding episode. Tweedledum is arguably the finest piece of acting Bryant ever gave on screen; he ends up convincing not only the Germans and his fellow officers, but the audience. I’d stick my neck out and say that if there has ever been a better piece of acting anywhere in the history of television, then I’ve yet to see it.

As the German officer detailed to keep watch on Marsh, Bernard Kay is almost equally impressive: his character, Hartwig, has a brother in an asylum, and at first he is convinced Marsh is faking. His conversion from scepticism to total empathy provides a moving contrast to Bryant’s study in psychosis. Kay, whose own father died in an asylum, must have felt a special resonance with the storyline.

Despite having only a handful of lines of dialogue, Bryant walks away with the show, stealing it wholesale from the series’ nominal stars Robert Wagner and David McCallum. As McCallum’s character Simon observes, Marsh saves ‘the best for last’: for when he is finally accepted for repatriation, he stages an emotional last stand, refusing to leave the castle which he now insists is his home. This is perhaps the strongest scene in the entire 50 minutes.

A recurring musical motif crops up throughout the episode, as Marsh persistently plays a 78rpm record of JS Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, an elaborate, intricate piece of harpsichord virtuosity that memorably symbolises his inner turmoil. It also serves to illustrate the manic, obsessive quality of Marsh’s ‘illness’ as he repeatedly plays the record over and over, to the annoyance of his fellow inmates.

I came a few weeks late to the Colditz series – having been recommended to it by a school friend with an abiding interest in World War II – and Tweedledum was amongst the first episodes I saw on that original broadcast. It was also one of just six episodes from Colditz’ first series to be given a repeat broadcast, six months later. Curiously, whilst the entire second series was repeated in 1975, it was not until the 1990s that the first series would be repeated in full, on UK Gold. In 2010, the series finally made it onto DVD. During that first run, Colditz quickly became a must-see, and I even went so far as to read Pat Reid’s original books, republished to tie in with the broadcasts. They were, in fact, the first ‘grown up’ paperbacks I ever owned.

Tweedledum would eventually come to stand apart from the rest of Colditz: in 1981, it was chosen for a one-off repeat broadcast in a midweek slot that was given over to random repeats of unrelated hour long dramas (other examples included Softly Softly: Task Force and The Man from UNCLE), and it came up for an unprecedented fourth broadcast during a retrospective season of archive television in 1986. I’d managed to record the 1981 screening, and for many years, Tweedledum was the only example of Colditz I had available to watch. Accordingly, I have probably now seen it more than ten times, yet for all those repeats, it never loses its power.

Michael Bryant would become a favourite actor of mine, albeit a face rarely seen on the small screen, and perhaps more at home in the theatre. He can be glimpsed in the latter context in an uncredited appearance in the film The Deadly Affair, a 1967 adaptation of John Le Carre’s Call For the Dead. But after Tweedledum, my personal favourite Bryant performance was in the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas of 1974, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, which cast him as a curious academic delving unwisely into the tale of a reputed alchemist. Just this year, viewers had a rare chance to see Bryant starring in the BBC adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, a series that had been unbroadcast since the mid-70s. In the central role of troubled existentialist lecturer Mathieu, Bryant is coolly impressive; but Wing Commander Marsh remains a career best performance, for me at any rate.

I wonder how much of today’s desperate-to-impress, big budget series will similarly stand the test of time? There aren’t many other episodes of television that I’ve lived with for half a century, and none in all that time that has had the lasting impact of this single example. On that basis, I rest my case. For me, there is no better episode of a television series, and there probably never will be.