There were too many half-baked and under-researched themes in this programme for it to say anything worthwhile, and too little climbing to redeem it. And the little climbing they elected to show totally failed to demonstrate the difficulty and the sheer length of the route.
One of its worst and continual errors was to confuse German/Austrian culture with Nazi culture, falsely suggesting that the Nazis practically invented mountaineering, when all they in fact did was exploit its popularity. And is encouraging mountaineers to risk death for national glory and propaganda purposes any worse than doing it to entertain TV viewers anyway ?
A lot of time was wasted in a reconstruction of how a journalist found oout about Harrer's Nazi past. What wasn't clarified was that this discovery was made several years ago, instead implying that the programme-makers had unturned something new. Typical of the subtle distortions of the truth they worked in throughout, and time which would have been much better spent in extending the climbing sequences.
I watched this expecting to see a good climbing documentary, and instead got a shabby history programme. Very disappointing.
Posted: 10/09/2001 at 16:50
