Daniel and Jack continue to be haunted by the fetid shade of David Irving as they discuss the 1991 UK television mini-series Selling Hitler (starring Jonathan Pryce, Alexei Sayle, and various once-and-future Doctor Whos)... and also the 1986 non-fiction book by Robert Harris upon which it is based... and thus also the real-life 1983 Stern Magazine fake Hitler diaries scandal which both are about. Content warning: Jack is very enthusiastic about this. The mini-series, free on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWzIjl-RsZKuDuoLINA6pvhzmAj_v9-eQ&si=2Q30UUkBb1_R7kyx A good article about the real event: https://www.dw.com/en/how-a-german-magazine-fell-for-fake-hitler-diaries/a-65399517 Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
So, I'm curious, did they do extensive forensic tests?
No, no, Freisotz said, not to bother.
Paper was too difficult to date.
But they were all handwriting experts.
Yes, yes.
They compared a sheet that we made a copy of with a copy of Hitler's letter to Göring.
You know, the one about the Russian invasion?
The one you bought from me?
Yes, exactly.
Waller thought it would make a good comparison.
And the handwriting was exactly the same.
Yes.
It would be.
It was so obvious.
The American said he had absolutely no doubt whatsoever.
Even though he couldn't understand a word of German.
LAUGHTER MUSIC Well, and welcome back to good old IDSG.
And it's probably going to be a bonus.
A bonus.
That's a new word I've invented.
A bonus.
Yes.
Yeah.
It means public bonus.
I'm a wordsmith now.
It also means to put in Latin.
Before we start, I think we kind of want to try to promote ourselves a little bit, don't we, Daniel, because we don't do that here.
We're always like, hey, more people should listen to this show and potentially give us a dollar a month.
We make it a dollar a month to make it easy to give us a dollar a month.
And then we just never advertise that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
So that's the thing.
We both have Patreons and both of us charge a dollar a month for access to everything.
And Patreon being the wonderful.
brilliant, skillful company that it is, just constantly coming up with brilliant ideas.
They've kind of done this thing in the last couple of years where you can join somebody's Patreon for free.
And of course, if you want to be the kind of person that takes Patreon very seriously and designs your Patreon to trap your members in spirals of spending and stuff like that, yeah, you can do that.
But if you're the kind of casual, lazy asshole that I am, for instance, you just do things like, oh, a dollar a month gets you everything.
And then what happens when Patreon come up with their brilliant idea is that loads of people, I mean, thank you.
Thanks for joining for free.
It's great.
But you don't get anything that I put out on my feed.
Right.
Exactly.
Because you're a free member.
And I feel like there are people who are free members of my Patreon who kind of just clicked the button to become a free member and thought, well, that's that done then.
And they're not aware of the fact, maybe, that there's good stuff coming out on my feed and yours too, like bonus episodes, like the brilliant bonus episode of IDSG that you're about to hear, that they're not hearing.
So I think we want to try to get through to people that we actually...
And even if not, it's a way of supporting us doing all the other stuff.
You know, like we kind of intentionally make the bonus stuff less essential and more just like talking about a movie or a tv miniseries or something or just talking about my summer vacation at one time you know um but uh so usually they are not they're not like issue focused they're a little bit more general and a little bit more just hey but it is a way also of uh like supporting us in doing all the other stuff and you know the more goes to that then the more of it we have the time to make the more of it we feel justified that we can make given you know the other stresses in our lives which have not been insignificant
this year let's just put it that way so advertisement done begging for button done we're done busking now it's time to to get into it and discuss probably the greatest piece of visual media that includes Jonathan Price having fantasy sequences in which he is an armed person.
I was going to remark upon this because this was only a few years after we're talking about Selling Hitler, the 1991 British television miniseries, which is based upon the journalistic history book Selling Hitler by the author Robert Harris.
who subsequently became a very successful novelist.
We've actually spoken about a Robert Harris, an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel before on on IDSG we talked about conclave.
And this television miniseries, Selling Hitler, is an adaptation of Harris's very successful non-fiction book, Selling Hitler, which is an account of the famous, infamous Stern magazine Hitler diaries, fake Hitler diaries, I should stress.
They were fake scandal from, I think it happened in 1983, if I remember right.
83, I think.
Yeah, anyway, you know the history better than I do, but, you know.
And then the book was published three or four years later, and then this television series was made based on it, which came out in the early 90s, as I say, on British television.
But it does star Jonathan Price as Gerd Heiderman, who is the central figure in the story, a German photojournalist primarily for the magazine Stern, who was sort of conned and also managed to con himself into believing that he had obtained genuine surviving Hitler diaries from World War II and subsequently caused a massive shitstorm when he managed to convince his employers of the same thing.
But the point.
to circle back, yes, Jonathan Price plays that figure.
And in this miniseries, that character, that person is persistently portrayed as having these sort of Wagnerian operatic heroic fantasies where he's in armor and wielding a sword and stuff like that.
And it's very, very reminiscent of the fantasy stroke dream sequences that the Jonathan Price character has in the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil, which is quite striking that Jonathan Price essentially did that twice.
There's no way the creators of this miniseries are not trying to go for that same Brazil vibe.
It's like, we're not Terry Gilliam.
but we can do dream sequences.
So anyway, yeah, this is five episodes of about 50 to 55 minutes each.
It's all available for free on YouTube.
There will be a link.
in the show notes below and you brought this one to me i had never like i was aware of the scandal kind of vaguely like i knew of it existing but hadn't really looked into the details of it all so i kind of read a little bit read the wikipedia page and did a little bit of googling about it and obviously i watched the the five part miniseries but you have read the the the the nonfiction book by harris i probably will plan to do that at some point my hours are filled with other things these days but so tell us a little bit about your background with this, I guess, is kind of where I'm landing.
Yeah, I reread the Harris book.
Well, no, that's a point, actually.
I thought I was rereading it because I kind of just assumed that I'd already read the Harris book.
So I got my hands on a copy and I read it for this episode.
And as I went through it, I decided that I probably hadn't ever read it before.
I just kind of assumed that I had.
The reason that I probably thought I had read it is because I had seen this television miniseries back in the day, in the early 90s when it was shown on British television.
And I've very vivid memories of watching it.
at the time.
There were two of them.
I was 15 or 16 at that point, I think.
So.
Yeah, I would have been, yes, I would have been 15.
That's right.
This was like my penultimate year at secondary school.
So yes, yes, around about 15 years old.
And that's the kind of kid I was.
I was watching TV dramas about journalism scandals and Hitler, because instead of doing anything fun, that's what I was doing when I was 15.
I was reading early blogs that were about ethical issues and philosophy.
So you and I, we were born to do this, basically.
We were.
It's terribly, terribly sad.
If I had only had access to British television, I would have seen a lot more of this growing up.
If I'd only had access to anything other than British television, then things might have turned out very differently for me but basically television you also could have ruined your mind with revenge of the nerds when you were a child you know it would have been fine you know god that then probably says a lot about like who you and i are as people and on this podcast is that you know i watched way too many sex comedies when i was like 13 and you watched way too much bbc when you were 13 okay um the cultural rot which one is the true cultural
rot is the question clearly it was mine but it's yours yes i was going to say there's no question there it's yours yours is the cultural rot uh you know we have culture you have cultural rot that's how this works we have what and you have culture you know yeah exactly I wanted a title for the podcast, Culture Rot.
I love it.
Anyway, Culture Rot.
Don't go laying down the German on me today, my friend.
Anyway, I do speak German.
Yeah.
as I say, I watched this at the time on television and I'm, I have very vivid memories of two scenes in particular, the scene, which I think is in the first episode where you see the character played by Alexi sale, uh, who's the, The forger, yes.
The real person's name is Conrad Kuyau or Connie Kuyau.
He went by various different names.
He's one of those people who just seems to, the real guy, this is.
He just seems to have been one of those people that just lied because it's just what he did.
He just constitutionally incapable of telling the truth when he could have told a lie.
He spent his entire life forging and stealing and lying.
Just a classic, lovable near-de-well, really.
In some ways, he's the most likable person in the movie.
Well, yeah, in some ways, in some ways, but anyway, because he's played by Alexis Sale and Alexis Sale is just kind of inherently adorable.
The real Conrad Kouyao, you...
Well, I mean, this is kind of my big thing about this, because one of the things that is left out from the way this story is told, I think...
I mean, it's not left out exactly, but it's severely understressed, I would say, in both the book and the television series, is that really this whole thing boils down to the fact that there were loads of Nazi sympathisers, people who were basically still Nazis in post-war Germany.
I mean, I would call, I would pretty unhesitatingly call Gerd heidemann the journalist that bought the so-called diaries i would pretty unhesitatingly call that guy a nazi I would call Konrad Kuyau a Nazi.
You know, the book and the series both portray these people and the circles they move in, these circles both of collectors of Nazi memorabilia and old Nazis themselves, including Göring's daughter, Edda, they portray them to some extent as people who are still, as people who are sentimental or have an attachment to the old days or people who have a fascination with the Nazis and have a fascination with Hitler.
I think it's severely understressed the extent to which a lot of these people are just ideological Nazis.
Yeah.
Just they just love Hitler and the Nazis.
But I'm kind of getting off track.
You're jumping ahead of yourself a little bit, but that's okay.
Yeah.
The point being, I watched it at the time and I have very vivid memories of two scenes in particular from my initial television viewing because i rewatched it for this and it's the first time i've seen it since 1991 the the first one is a scene which i believe is in the first episode where the alexi sale character conrad kuyau was at this party with this guy stiefel who's one of these collectors and a load of old nazis and he's singing the sort of Nazi version of You're the top by Cole Porter.
Yeah.
With lyrics that are changed to be all pro-Nazi, you know?
Right.
And telling these people a story about how that was commissioned by Goebbels during the war, et cetera, et cetera.
Very vivid memories of that and then i have very vivid memories of the very last scene in the last episode where ku yao and heiderman um are in cells next to each other in the in the prison and ku yao is laughing his head off and being sociable and friendly with the the i think that i think they're meant to be journalists actually i remembered it as prison guards that's wrong i think they're journalists i assume they were guards but i think if you're probably right they're probably journalists yeah yeah um And he's laughing about, because it's all come out at this point.
It's the end of the show.
And he's, you know, everybody knows that he forged the diaries.
And he's laughing about the story with these guys.
And they say, because one of the stories that Ku Yao spins for Heidermann in addition to the tale about these masses and masses of Hitler diaries.
He tells him that he's got the third volume of Mein Kampf.
He tells him that he's got poetry written by Hitler, novels written by Hitler, and he tells him that he's got the libretto of the opera that Hitler co-wrote with his friend Kubizek when they were in Vienna as young men, which, of course, none of this is real.
This is all just complete fakery.
But Heidermann desperately wants it and he buys with Stern's money, the magazine Stern's money, he buys masses and masses of these fake diaries, but he's always on about these other things.
And Ku Yao, of course, can't produce them.
So he's just spinning him tails.
And in the last scene, these journalists are saying, well, why didn't you sell Heidermann the opera?
And Ku Yao just says, oh, that's simple.
I can't write a word of music.
And they all crack up.
And then you cut back to Heidermann in the next cell just with his head in his hands.
You know, that has stuck, those two scenes have stuck in my head all these years.
Yeah.
That last scene, that last scene is like it puts a, the series definitely knows how to go out on a high note.
That's a great high note.
There's another element of that final scene that I really like is that one of the journalists asks him, one of the, yes, exactly.
One of the journalists asks him to do a Hitler, you know, to do the Hitler signature for him.
And he does the Hitler signature and hands it to him.
And one of the running themes of the of the movie of the series, I might say movie, but of the series, one of the things that's going on here is handwriting analysts are using fakes to authenticate the new fakes, but they don't know the originals are fakes, right?
And so, you know, as listeners will have heard in the clip that I selected for our cold open.
Yes, yes, yes.
So he does a Hitler and then hands it to him and the guy goes, oh, look at Hitler or something like that.
And it's like, how the fuck do you know what a Hitler looks like?
This is the whole point, you know?
Like, you fooled the experts by just producing so much prodigious bullshit that you can't tell what's real and what's fake anymore you know but unless you have like an unbroken chain of custody that leads directly to hitler you don't know if it's a real hitler or not anyway well there's there's there's plenty of samples of authentic hitler handwriting hitler signatures the trouble is that one of one of the things that goes wrong is that stern does kind of engage in a at some stage a half-hearted attempt to
get some authentication done and they send samples off to some experts yeah and at least one of the experts sends back a a result that says yes yes i can i can authenticate these signatures.
And they, of course, take that to be confirmation that the diaries are genuine.
And what they've done is that they have sent loads of samples to these experts.
And the experts are using, they're testing the diary handwriting against samples that come from other documents provided to Stern by Kuyau.
So they are, and this actually happened.
This actually happened.
as well.
Yeah.
And then later on, there's so much self-motivation later on as they try to justify it.
It's like, well, sure, all the rest of the archives are fake, but surely the..
diaries are real the diaries have to be real you know no that's some of the best stuff in the movie for me it's just the uh just the the way that the fake rig is is not discovered because everybody has their own motivated reason for believing this obvious charlatan you know and these people aren't like hypothetically journalists that's the thing it's like it's it's just part of this and i think you know you have the kind of heidelman's immediate like supervisors um like the editor or whatever at the at the paper who are really on him like,
you know, look, this is a bunch of, you know, you've got to do like some real reporting and stop like obsessing over this Hitler shit, man, you know?
And then when he starts to find, you know, like these diaries and he says he sells it to the owners he sells it to you know the owner of the magazine or the the money people and says we can make a lot of money off of this and that's that's you know it's it is like you know idolman is like a sensationalist i think of him i don't know you can describe you can tell me how you've read the book and you know a lot more of the history you kind of i think of him more as like a a matt taibi type who you know had some um had some good early results by going and actually doing like real reporting in iraq and
in russia and that sort of thing and getting into some horrifying things along the way that we found out a little bit later on, but was producing basically good reporting.
And then eventually, like today, it's just a sense, just pursues sensationalism and like in, you know, a kind of pro-Nazi, you know, pro-conservative, pro-right wing, pro-Trump, pro-fascist, anti-, you know, democratic establishment, you know, line.
That was kind of the person that kind of struck me as like who I would think of as a Heideman type figure.
I think that's a really, really good shout.
That hadn't struck me at all.
But yeah, I absolutely agree.
Very, very similar sort of thing happens.
There is a point at which Heideman is.
does seem to have been a proper journalist.
He's more a photographer than a writer, actually, in the book.
One of the favors that the television miniseries does Heidermann aside from hiring Jonathan fucking Price to play him, which just immediately makes him more sympathetic because it's Jonathan Price, you know.
Although he is a nasty little fuck, I would say that.
Yeah, I mean, please.
Price does a good job in the show of putting the reality of this guy across, but he's still Jonathan Price.
And the real Gerd Heiderman is not anything like in person.
He's not anything like as charming or as immediately likable as Donald.
But as I say, one of the favors that the TV series does, Heiderman, is it implies that he is actually a good writer.
He can write.
And the reality of Gerd Heiderman, according to the book anyway, Robert Harris' book, seems to have been Heiderman actually, he couldn't really write where other people needed to write stuff up for him.
He was really more of a photographer, quite apparently quite a bold and talented photographer when he was covering foreign wars and things like that.
That seems to be true, but he was not one of those people that could actually write copy for you at the end of the day.
You always had to have another guy.
He's got a friend.
at the start of the series who kind of drops out after episode one.
That's kind of the guy that had to be with him on those foreign assignments to write them up, if you know what I mean.
But yeah, Tybee's a really good comparison because Tybee, to be fair to him, did actually do some good work and some good writing at one point in his career.
But he has, what is it, the Twitter files nonsense.
He has, through self-interest and a variety of psychological mechanisms.
he's managed to convince himself of a load of bunkum that's been good for his career or at least seemed like it was going to be good for his career and in the process has put himself in in bed politically with some with some pretty sinister forces so it's a very good comparison and i and i think you can sort of stretching it a little bit, you can stretch that comparison across a lot of people like Taibbi, you know, a lot of.
Yeah, I mean, I see it as more like, you know, like it's now easier to see Taibbi as someone who is always kind of chasing this kind of sensationalist kind of anti-establishment thing of like being like against the Iraq war and using this legitimate bravery, a legitimate bravery to go into these war zones, which is also true of Heideman.
as portrayed even in even in real life if he's not writing the stories he's still going there and getting the photographs i mean it's still yeah astonishing stuff he's taking these audio recordings that's a bizarre thing that kind of drops out of the series we want to talk about that.
It's in like the first episode mostly.
But he's, you know, and I mean, just that, just, you know, when the anti-establishment is to work against the fascist, I agree with you.
When you're like, well, maybe the fascists have a point.
I'm actually more against fascism than I am against like who happens to be in power right now.
You know?
Yes.
Yeah.
But the thing you said a little while ago about his editors.
Yeah, mixing his his Nazi obsessions and he manages to get by them to the the managers and the money the money man that's absolutely right.
That does seem to have been what happened.
The two guys, the two immediate superiors in the newsroom, whose names I believe were Peter Koch and Friedrich Nannon, they were, I mean, that incident where it's depicted as Heiderman sort of going to Nannon and getting balled out, Nannon shouts at him, oh, piss off with that Nazi shit.
That's a real thing, according to the book.
actually happened the TV series is actually I would imagine so.
Yeah.
It has a, it has a, it has the air of nonfiction about it.
Like it, you know, yeah.
As someone.
Yeah.
As someone who enjoys both non-fiction and good fiction, there were times when I'm like, you could have alighted some of these details.
We could have cut this.
This could have been four episodes, as I'll say.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
It feels padded in a way that like it is more accurate, but also like, you know, we should be swinging for the fences at this point.
Like I'm halfway through episode five and I'm going like, aren't we, isn't this done yet?
You know, like, you know, we.
It's dragging us a little bit, but, you know, but that's the nature of British television, even in the early 90s, I'm afraid.
You know, although, I mean, I like it.
I like it, but then I'm from there.
So, well, and I think there's also a difference of watching it like one hour a week you know for five weeks or whatever and watching it like i've got you know so many hours to prepare for a podcast you know sort of thing um one of the key mechanisms whereby he manages to swing this idea because he he he he gets put in touch with this guy who is essentially his business is forging Nazi memorabilia and selling it to gullible marks.
In addition to running a cafe or a restaurant or something like that, that's what this guy is doing, Conrad Kuyau.
And he's got this network of collectors, you know, who want old Nazi stuff, including this guy Stiefel, who's bought loads and loads of his fakes, and this guy Prezac, who's this old Nazi sympathizer who's got loads and loads of Kyle's fakes and Heiderman through again this is true Heiderman buys Göring's derelict old yacht the Karen des Vita and does it up with money that he doesn't have he just borrows it to buy this boat and
does it up with money he doesn't have including loads of stuff that he does in fact get from edda Göring Göring's daughter who he does in fact apparently have a sexual affair with that's all true um and he starts inviting these old Nazis basically he starts socializing with these people through these connections.
He starts socializing with Karl Wolf, who's a Nazi war criminal, and General Monker, who we've talked about before.
He's in downfall.
He's one of the characters in downfall.
And he, through his connections here, he gets wind of the fact that there are Hitler diaries, because I think Ku-Yao has sold one of his previous marks, sort of a page of Hitler diaries or something like that.
What happens, again, it's portrayed in the miniseries.
this does again by the book it does seem to be true that what happened was heidemann convinces himself that if there are hitler diaries like he's heard rumors of they must have come from this crashed plane that left the bunker in berlin as part of operation seraglio which is the big sort of escape attempt of these people as the as the red army closes in on berlin hitler's in the bunker this this plane goes off and it crashes in the forest in davaria i think and
there does again harris goes into this at the start of the book does seem to be a real thing hitler puts loads of a box full of papers on this plane and then he does actually seem to have been horrified with when he learned that it crashed.
Heidemann convinces himself that because this seems to be a true story, then that must mean that these diaries he said about are true.
And he's talking to these people that are contacts of his in this old network of sympathizers and collectors and telling them about this.
This comes up at a party where Ku-yao is present.
Ku-yao hears about it.
And so when Heiderman eventually tracks down Ku-yao through these connections and talks to him over the phone, Ku-yao repeats the story back to Heiderman over the phone, which is what convinces Heiderman initially that the story is true.
That's That is the real mechanism whereby this thing starts.
Heiderman plants the story with Ku-yao that Ku-yao then repeats to him that convinces Heidermann that these diaries are legit.
And then essentially, Kuyau starts manufacturing fake Hitler diaries to order.
This isn't something he's already doing because Heidermann manages to sell the idea of acquiring them and printing them, obviously, it would be a big scoop to Stern magazine because he goes over the head of his immediate editors to the money men, the people that run the corporation that owns this ostensibly left-wing magazine.
And because he's teamed up with this other guy, I think his name was Wagner or Wagner or something like that, who's in the history department, played in the miniseries by a very, very, very young Peter Capaldi.
So you have scenes where the sort of managing director of the corporation played by Tom Baker after he played the Doctor Who is in the same scenes with this young Peter Capaldi who of course will go on to play Doctor Who.
After he sells the idea of acquiring the diaries to the Stern management, he starts going to Kuyow and saying, well, I can give you this much money, I can give you this much money for these diaries.
And Kuyow starts, as I say, he in his in his in his workroom, he starts manufacturing them.
And it is astonishing how casual he is about it.
He just goes and he buys notebooks and he spills tea on them to make them look old.
And he sticks plastic letters to the front, literally plastic letters i think imported from korea or something like that in gothic script which he thinks because this is a this is not a educated man let's put it politely he he thinks he's sticking the letters a h to the front he's actually sticking the letters f h to the front all these fake diaries they all have plastic f h on the front cover and
sort of synthetic nylon red tassels that he glues on as well.
And then he beats the books up.
It's very, very funny stuff in the TV series where Alexi Sale has these notebooks and he's slamming them against the desk and throwing them around the room to make them look old and battered.
But he's essentially manufacturing them to order.
Yeah.
And then spinning Heidemann this vast tale about he's got a brother who's a dissident East German soldier who's smuggling them out of East Germany.
Because of course this is before the fall of the Soviet Union.
This is before reunification, although the film was made afterwards.
The film is made afterwards.
Yeah.
But yeah.
Yeah.
One of the things that is not remarked upon really in the book or the, it's described, but it's not remarked upon in the book or the TV series, is the extent to which paranoia and suspicion about East Germany feeds into the willingness of people in West Germany to believe these nonsense tales that Kuhyao is spinning.
Kuhyao says, oh, you can't tell anybody my name and you can't tell anybody about these diaries like anybody, like, you know, a forensic scientist or anything like that.
don't tell anybody like that because it will put my brothers Someone else to like, you know, check.
Yeah.
I mean, he builds this.
He builds this like web of lies.
It's not even a complex web of lies.
It's just like it's built specificallyally for the things he's able to provide at the rate he's able to provide them and specifically in ways that allied Heidemann's ability or willingness to pursue it further the way a journalist should.
A journalist should do their basic due diligence on this.
And then again, that was what I was saying is that Heidemann's bosses are very much doing their due diligence here.
until like suddenly like one of the fake documents gets compared to another fake document and they get called to the carpet and shit you know by the money men but you know like again those two guys they were actually doing their jobs you know if you put these guys in charge none of this would happen um you know And the two actual journalists, the immediate superiors of Heiderman, the editors, they are the guys who get talked over by management.
They get essentially told, you've got no choice, you've got to go along with this.
And they do eventually come over and get on board with the whole project.
But the management went behind their backs with one of their own journalists, which is just that's bad form.
very unfair on them and then they are It's true that these guys were very reluctant to let Heidemann go off on this sort of old Nazi shit, as one of them said.
But these are the two guys who ultimately get turned into scapegoats when it all comes crashing down.
These are the two guys who get fired.
Whereas most of the people on the ninth floor, the money people, the corporate people, the management people, they go on, you know, they either stay in place or they go on to very cushy jobs somewhere else.
Well, you know, our job wasn't to do journalism.
Our job was to make money.
Your job was to do journalism and that you failed.
And You failed.
Yes, exactly.
You should have not listened to me, you asshole.
Yes.
No, no, it's very, I mean, it's very funny.
It's very capitalism.
It's just so.
It's very, very capitalism.
Yeah.
It really is the profit motive.
I mean, Tom Baker playing this corporate bigwig character, he is...
He's being very big and weird and eccentric.
He's being very Tom Baker.
It was a delight to see him.
Yeah, anyway, yes.
It's very, it's very fun.
But he's very explicitly playing a guy who is, you know, he's got dollar signs in his eyes basically as indeed have they all yeah um and then you have the he retires and then another guy comes in to take his place this guy gerd shulterhillen and played by john shrapnell and it's another of my favorite performances in the tv miniseries as well because he really he really gets the semi-comic tone that some of the other cast don't quite get right um but
he's he's he's really he's really got the tone right he's he's it's not an overt comedic performance performance but he's putting in lots of lots of little touches that that make this guy faintly ridiculous and there's there's some great scenes where he and heiderman are talking to each other.
And Heiderman is this guy, Gerd Schulterhillen, who's the new corporate boss, he keeps on, he's very, very faithful.
He's very, very into it, but he keeps on having these tiny niggling doubts that he raises.
And then Gerd Heiderman, the journalist, who's, of course, completely fanatically believing in the diaries.
It was so confusing for me for a minute that there are two characters named Gerd.
Well, that's the joke.
That's what I'm working around to, because this isn't in the book.
This is something the writer of the TV series came up with.
They keep on having these scenes with these two characters.
I mean, their names are correct, but the writer comes up with the idea of having these two characters having scenes where they do this dance where the boss good has these doubts and the journalist good reassures him and they go round and round in circles calling each other good so yes good no good isn't that isn't that true good yes i think it is good and it becomes very very funny indeed yes i think it does yeah no no i agree i agree yeah i'm gonna have to rewatch this that's that's for sure i only watched it once i am definitely gonna rewatch this yeah no um no
I really, I did, I did love that actor.
He is, he's, he's, he's really good here.
He does, he does kind of get the tone of the performance.
And I think, you know, one of the things that works is that it's, you know, particularly starting in episode two.
And I, I said, episode one, it's a little turgid.
I think one of the really interesting things that kind of gets dropped is this relationship between Heidemann and the young lady, the, the little statuesque blonde that he's like going on a first date with in the first episode.
And I think that's kind of what's going on.
It's like a double date or something.
they're at heideman's place and he's playing audio clips that he's recorded from like war zones and from like the rainforest and that sort of thing And, you know, one of the other young ladies like leans into, leans into her and says like, you can tell him to stop.
It's okay.
You don't have to listen to this.
She's like, no, I'm play more.
Play more.
And it's like, is she just enraptured by.
Federman?
Is she kind of falling into this same delusion?
Or I don't know.
It strikes me as very odd.
And it just sort of like, and then like the relationship continues, but like that element of it, it just, maybe it's more prominent in the book.
I don't know what the series is trying to do there because the real story is not this relationship, although that's a telling character detail of both of them, I guess.
the real story is in the forger.
And then once episodes two starts and we're kind of seeing more, like we got all the, all the backstory is filled in by the forger by, by, by Connie.
I think things really pick up and the comedy kind of comes a little bit, a little bit better.
And it just strikes me as, you know, structurally it's a lot more interesting from that point forward.
But I don't know.
What do you think of that first episode?
And there's just kind of that stuff I'm referring to.
No, I agree.
I needed setup, I guess is kind of what the point is.
Anyway, I think the, the, the interplay between Kuyao and Heidemann, and between the actors playing them, Price and Alexei Sale is key to what really makes the series work.
There's a kind of an, there's a kind of a built-in structural problem, which is that a lot of the story isn't about those two guys being in the same room.
They do actually spend a fair bit of time together.
Scenes where they go.
There's a scene where Heidemann and his wife, the woman you were just talking about, and Kuyao and his wife are all out together.
And that's, that's true.
They did socialize together.
And Kuyao did have this shop that he filled with Nazi memorabilia, including dummies that, A lot of this is true, but there's also a lot of the story that is these men apart.
But it really, as drama and comedy, it sings when they're together.
And I understand why they're holding the Kuyau character back through most of episode one, but it does make episode one a little bit slow they do their best to make episode one interesting by having edda goering and and all that stuff but the the the the the relationship with the uh with the the woman who is heiderman's third wife but that's his fourth marriage because he married his second wife twice according to the book that's he's one of those guys right yeah He's that kind of wife guy.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
are trying to get across I think some of the genuine eccentricities of Heidemann and the wife the wife is she's she's less The thing about them actually sort of sleeping under a gigantic curtained portrait of the Fuhrer, again, that does seem to be true.
And somebody, I think it's the journalist Gita Sereni who turns up in the book.
She's not in the miniseries, but I think there's a bit where she asks Heiderman's wife, doesn't that give you nightmares?
And Mrs. Heiderman says, oh, no, we couldn't get to sleep without it, which gives you an indication of how peculiar this couple was.
I had visions of like Jordan Peterson living around like relics of Soviet communism throughout.
Yeah.
um he's just obsessed with it aesthetically you know or whatever it's uh you know that's it's bizarre in the beginning i was not sort of thinking i thought this guy you know heideman is he has this interest in like hitler and as this period as like a sort of a fascinating period of history as something that's aesthetically pleasing to him and then by the end i was like no he's he's a nazi yeah he can't he can't be this obtuse about this and not kind of be a nazi yeah i get it yeah um That's kind of the impression.
As I say, it's understressed in the book, as in the TV series, but that's the impression you get.
Yeah.
It starts being talked about in terms of how other people are described as like having come across him as being like, I've never, there's somebody who says something to the effect of, I never wanted to retch harder in my life or something like that.
Oh, yeah, I mean, that's being on that boat, you know.
I think that's Hugh Trevor Roper.
And again, that's the real thing that happened.
Trevor Roper did visit.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
He was one of my favorite characters.
Yes, played by Alan Bennett, beautifully played by Alan Bennett.
Again, it's pretty much true.
He did visit Heiderman's apartment by invitation, and he was very, very definitely creeped out by Heiderman and by Heiderman's Nazi memorabilia connection.
Which, by the way., was forgeries bought by him with Stern money.
Yes, exactly.
No, I love that the item that Heidemann gives to Trevor Roper is this love letter that Hitler, like a teenage Hitler gave to a young woman.
And he takes it and he's like, what am I supposed to do with this?
And then he takes it back to his place, his castle or whatever.
and his manor.
Sorry.
Again, I'm an American.
I'm not required to know any of this stuff.
And he has a conversation.
It's like, well, why would this be in the Hitler papers?
This would have been with the young woman, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And suddenly like he said, and that's kind of the moment for him where he's like, cause he had, he had said all this stuff is, is real.
I have confidence that it's real because there's so much of it.
That's the thing that people keep coming back to.
Why would you produce all of this material just for, and it's like, he's making it for the cost of a couple of dollars in his sink with some ski.
And it's like, at first it's first these like, Heidemann is reading to somebody on the, on the ship, on the boat.
It's like reading the diary entries.
It's like August 8th, you know, and then it's like a line here and then I just met them in, you know, went to Hamburg, et cetera.
And the guy's like, uh, this is really dry.
Right.
I mean, like, yeah.
And I was sitting there thinking, and I was sitting there thinking like, there's no way, like, I know these are forgeries cause I know the basic story here.
So this guy's gotta have like some kind of like plan of like knowing, like he has to know the real history well enough to like fake the diary entries.
Right.
And like, that's how we're going to find out that like, it's not real because all the details are wrong.
You know, like, like, and so, you know, no none of that ever comes up it's just like well why would he have the love letter of course you know why does he have the love letter probably because heideman really wanted and connie went okay i can make a love letter go ahead you know like yeah that's that's pretty much what happened i love that i love that i love that i love that i love that quirky old man.
You know, I know he's a lord.
He's a, you know, I don't like him economically, but I love him in this show.
I love him riding his rowing lawnmower and a kilt.
It's just a great image.
Yeah.
Yeah, because he was Lord Dacre by this point because he'd married into the aristocracy.
He was not.
Oh, he married into it.
So that makes me like him a little bit better.
Okay, okay.
I'm allowed to like that.
He seems to have been a very arrogant man and a bit of a social climber, Hugh Trevor Roper.
Did some genuine, you know, valuable historiography back in the day.
He's the man that wrote the best-selling famous book.
I think I think it's called The Last Day's of hitler or the the end in the bunker or something like that and it's the book that establishes pretty much accurately even by modern standards you know what actually happened at the end and put paid to all the the ideas that were going around that hitler had survived and was living in brazil or whatever and of course he was an intelligence officer during the war he interviewed captured Nazi officers and stuff like that.
But by this point, he's very, very comfortable and in his aristocratic marriage and his bestowed title and stuff like that and his sinecure at the Sunday Times, even though he hates Rupert Murdoch.
And, um, yeah, I mean, this damage is a person hates Rupert Murdoch.
Yeah.
Although, although one of the things that really struck me reading the book is, you know, Rupert Murdoch, yes, evil, absolute, pure evil, a fucking brilliant businessman.
Look, I'm sorry.
He plays an absolute, I mean, it's ruthless.
Yeah.
It's absolutely ruthless and unscrupulous in those business negotiations with.
with Stern and Newsweek and so on.
These triangular Stern are trying to get as much money for the diaries, of course.
And Murdoch just runs rings around all of them.
And it's, you know, you.
read the book and you can't help thinking, yeah, you're actually good at this, aren't you?
You bastard.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Although he is fooled by the diaries, but he essentially doesn't give a shit.
No, yeah.
He's, he, all he wants is a headline.
All he wants is, you know, exactly.
I mean, yeah, there's a reason he goes on to, to, to found Fox News, you know?
It's like, yeah, of course.
Yeah.
In later years, Murdoch would sort of talk about, oh, yes, it's a, it's a great regret of mine, et cetera.
At the time, in the miniseries, he is reported accurately as saying, it's yesterday's headline and we increased our circulation and we got our money back.
So who gives a shit?
That was Murdoch's attitude.
Yeah, no, no.
Anecdotally, I had an acquaintance, somebody I knew online, on the old Talk Origins news group back in 2003, because that's how I spent my early 20s, was hanging out in evolution creation debate news groups.
This is in the early years of the Iraq War, et cetera.
And so that was very much something that was happening.
And one of the people that I knew lived in Adelaide.
No, we lived in Melbourne, but yeah.
he um so um but uh you know he was described we were fox news is a constant source of conversation you know in those parts you know and you know And he gave a line and he's like, we thought that he would go into the Western, particularly the American media market and just disappear into it, that it would just suck him in and he would never be seen again.
And then he somehow he became this towering figure who created what we know as news in America today.
And that's even more true today than it was in 2003.
Rupert Murdoch is a fascinating, fascinating individual who also has a bit part in Bombshell, which we'll be watching shortly.
Yeah, I feel like this episode is accidentally a kind of a stepping stone to what we did about David Irving to the next one or one of the next ones we're going to do, which is going to be about Bombshell and Fox News.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Guess who plays him?
Guess who plays him in Bombshell?
Oh, Kevin Spacey.
That would be perfect.
No, it's Malcolm McDowell.
Oh, God.
Yeah, that's good.
That's it.
anyway, Yes.
And he has, he's in, he's in like one scene of that, by the way.
That's, it's, it's, you know, lots.
lots of comparisons for going between this one and bombshell for me so i can't wait till you get to see bombshell it'll be it'll be it'll be looking forward to it um so yeah i mean again that the miniseries very accurately and in a lot more detail than i was expectinging shows you the farcical process of getting Trevor Oper in to look at the diaries.
And of course, he doesn't really speak German.
He doesn't really read German.
So they read translations to him.
And it is astonishing, really.
It damaged his reputation permanently.
And rightly so, because he allowed himself to be swayed by essentially a sales pitch from the Stern people, you know, and a presentation.
And the pressure from the Sunday Times and from Murdoch to give them a quick decision.
There's a scene at the very end where Trevor Roper is being interviewed by, it's actually Robert Harris, the author of the book, playing the interviewer.
Nice.
And he's being interviewed.
I don't think this is an actual interview that happened, but it allows them to put some stuff about Trevor Roper that's at the end of the book into the TV series where the interviewer repeats the limerick, which is in the book, and then asks Trevor Roper a question.
And he says, well, I took the good feedback.
faith of the Stern people as a datum.
That's an actual quote.
And what you're saying, Professor, is you trusted them.
You just believed them when they said it was real.
That's what you mean.
And I mean, Stern, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Stern is kind of known to be kind of a sensationalistic magazine at this time.
I mean, you know, it's, it's...
Stern's an interesting publication because it's got a...
There's a bit in the miniseries where Heiderman refers to his editors as the Marxists and stuff like this.
And all the right-wing old Nazis that he talks to says, no, I don't like Stern magazine.
I'm not talking to you because they think of it as this left-wing magazine.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's kind of a tabloidy news magazine.
Bit sensationalist.
Yeah.
That's all it is really.
I grew up with a subscription to Time magazine.
So I've read a lot of Time magazine, ironically around the time that this film was made.
So, you know, the other thing I wanted very much to talk about is the presence of David Irving.
Yeah.
And that was where I was going.
I think that's, I think we've kind of covered the rest of it for the most part.
See the movie or see the series.
It's good.
Now we got to talk more about David Irving.
Ironically, I think, like, I was not expecting to get, like, I usually don't get the kind of replies to a to an episode that we got when we did that David Irving episode.
People apparently really want us to talk about David Irving.
So let's talk more about David Irving.
He is kind of an interesting guy.
He's played here by brilliantly played by Roger Lloyd Pack, who gets some of Irving's actual mannerisms, that thing where he sort of leans forward in a sort of hunch over the desk and his manner of speaking, he does it very well indeed.
And again, he's another performer in this, I think, who gets the tone absolutely right.
That sort of balance between a serious realist portrayal, but just with a hint of comedy at the edges.
That's perfect, I think, for portraying Irving.
But Irving is portrayed pretty accurately in this.
They show you him addressing far-right neo-Nazi rallies and stuff like that.
In a way, ironically, it's.
both a more positive portrayal and a more negative portrayal than either of the ones that we talked about last time, ironically, because it does show you him as an active speaker on the far right neo-Nazi political circuit in that, socializing with Nazis and neo-Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, Lord Barth at Long Leat with his big collection of Nazi memorabilia.
and homnobbing with Texas businessmen and their wives.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And a 57 pink Cadillac.
surprised me as well that the miniseries dramatizes the stuff about um billy price the texan millionaire who again was a a big you know hitler fanatic collector and did in fact write that book or co-write it with that old guy prezac about hitler's art um which hilariously according to the book you know that when it was published it's full of kuyao forgeries which by
it has to be, you know, the broadest possible.
I mean, this guy is practically like slathering a barbecue with, you know, with raw meat and eating it, you know, straight from a fork, you know.
I think it's delightful, but, you know, it's, yeah.
great fun i don't say the dainty british man you know like the you know the upper crust you know like
but they sort of invent scenes where he's socializing with Irving and Lord Bath and so on so that he can be tangentially involved in the action because they just want to dramatize his existence really because he is referred to as tangentially connected in the book.
So they kind of invent scenes where he's personally present when in fact he isn't.
Yeah.
But I'm sure he went on the yacht at some point.
Oh, I expect so.
Yes, I expect so.
But he's presented as socializing with Irving and it's part of that Irving subplot where.
where Irving hears about the existence of the diaries and he kind of plays kind of a detective role.
He starts hunting, you know, sniffing around and hunting them out.
And he's, he sends advance warning to the Sunday times months before the Sunday times hear from Stern that they've got Hitler diaries to sell.
He is.
There's just one more thing.
Just one more thing.
I'm going to sue Deborah Lipstadt.
Yeah.
We're going to hell, but it's fine.
Anyway, continue, guys.
He is presented as immediately spotting the forgeries.
Yes.
But this is the hilarious bit where he points, Prisak shows him a letter that's supposedly from Goering or whatever, and he says to him, this is on Goering's, this is Goering's stationery, Goering's letterhead.
The word Reichsmarschall is misspelled.
Well, surely that could be a wonder.
This is the number two person in all of Nazi Germany.
His letterhead does not have a spelling mistake.
He sees it as an obvious forgery.
And Irving, in a scene which I absolutely believe the real Irving would do this, he just looks at him and says, the trouble with you, Prisak, is that you're quite remarkably stupid.
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Which is true, he is.
He's right, he's right, because he's the biggest Nazi in the movie.
He's the biggest Nazi in the series.
He actually knows his shit, which no one else apparently does.
But he's a liar and a Nazi.
This whole thing, the book and the TV series, are kind of artefacts of...
So it's after the events of the series, you know, but before the series is produced.
And it's not really until Lipstad's book that Irving is really like exposed for real, that, you know, and really not until the trial, but really not until the trial.
I mean, the trial was like, you know, as we said, you know, one of the worst things that could have happened to Irving because suddenly like he lost all respect because suddenly, you know, going through his work with that much detail.
it's going to reveal where he was a liar, where he was a forger all those times.
Yes.
Yeah.
He brings the wrong kind of attention upon himself.
One of the things that the miniseries kind of underplays, which the book makes very clear, is that Irving is primarily motivated by financial necessity and all this.
He sees these rumours going around about the Hitler diaries, and then he thinks, oh, I can make some money out of that.
He's very, very specifically trying to make money to appease his bank manager because he's in the process of getting divorced and he's got a big overdraft and stuff.
And Irving is very definitely, I think he must have given Robert Harris.
the sections of his own diaries about these period because harris is quoting from his diaries and this this book was written in the you know 84 85 something like that he must have collaborated with harris um and his diary entries are very clear.
He's like, oh, I'm going to make this much money from talking to this paper and so on and so forth.
And as I say, this is sort of an artifact of that period before he was really understood to be the full-on neo-Nazi Holocaust denier that it later becomes clear that he is.
So he's still semi-respectable, although you have a scene where newspaper people are talking about, you know, not wanting to have anything to do with him because of the contents of his book.
So it's it's coming, you know, but at this point he's still not fully revealed, I think.
And he is the person.
He pulls the same trick in the Lipstadt thing.
He pulls the trick where he turns up at one of her lectures and he gets someone to film him into, you know, heckling her from the from the audience.
Very, very classic David Irving.
Yeah, very classy.
David, yes.
He does the same thing at the Stern press conference where they go public with the diaries.
He turns up and he heckles the, you know, Trevor Roper and the Stern editors and managers from the audience saying, I'm the historian David Irving and these, these diaries are fake, et cetera, et cetera.
Because they don't have any fancy degrees, they won't even let me talk.
But I saw through these fakes immediately and they didn't.
Yeah, no.
I mean, it's a great classy point.
Like God, you know, David Irving, working class hero.
No, not at all.
But you know, like it really is a sense of like, okay, the one, you know, when David Irving is somehow like the hero of your movie, you know, you're like a.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
One of the, the miniseries downplays the farcical nature of that news conference.
Apparently it got so out of control that there was actually a fist fight in the audience, which the miniseries does not depict.
And another thing that the miniseries does not depict is that Irving then changes his mind when he realizes, and I think, it's pretty clear that he realizes that he can use the Hitler diaries to support his own thesis.
Yeah, that's the thing.
The moderns diaries., they do nothing more than support Irving's version of history.
So the idea that Irving is the one to debunk them, you know, to immediately see through them.
This is exactly what happened.
Trevor Roper initially okay's the diaries, despite the fact that they say things that he thinks of, according to his understanding of history, and it's the correct understanding, more or less, are nonsense.
The diaries have Hitler.
conspiring with Rudolf Hess in the, you know, the famous night flight.
Yes.
And in the diaries, that's Hitler and Hess trying to make peace with the British.
Whereas, of course, as Trevor Roper says, we know from, you know, Albert Speer was listening as Hitler absolutely had a meltdown when he heard about it happening.
He did not plan this with Hess.
He was furious.
But in the diaries, it's Hitler and Hess cooking this up together because they want to make peace.
Hitler is depicted as admiring Chamberlain, wanting peace.
Hitler in the diaries, and it's all, this is all Kuyau just writing this from a couple of textbooks that he has.
He's depicted as being surprised by Crystal Nacht, disapproving of Crystal Nacht.
He's depicted as knowing nothing about the Holocaust.
There's even a bit in the diaries, the Van Zay conference is mentioned.
And the fake Hitler in the diaries talks about we've got to work out something for the Jews.
They've got to be given nice land in the East and stuff like this.
It's essentially these diaries are a form of Holocaust denial.
Absolutely.
That's what we're talking about here.
We're talking about Nazi sympathizers manufacturing Holocaust denial material.
Yes.
And this is part of why all these people want to believe in it.
This is part of why.
Because there's a paying market for it as well.
Again, it's like, you know, Nazism, capitalism, Nazism, capitalism, you know, one hand washes the other.
It's not just that people in the world of the early 80s are interested in the Nazis and Hitler.
It's also specifically that loads of these business people and right-wing collectors and so on, they're entranced by the idea of Hitler being vindicated, you know, or recuperated.
The diaries are going to prove that Hitler didn't know anything about the bad stuff.
He was this peace-loving statesman that didn't want to exterminate the Jews.
That's part of why they wanted this to be true.
It's part of why they convinced themselves that it's true.
And when Irving realizes this, Irving does a 180 and he says, actually, I think they're genuine.
which isn't in the miniseries, frustratingly, because famously, after it became very clear after forensic tests, very, very belated forensic tests prove that diaries are.
fake almost immediately after the press conference Irving says, oh, I was the first one to declare them fakes, to which somebody replies, and also the last one to declare them real.
Yes.
No, I love, you know, David Irving, you know, Columbo, and the lowly lab tech workers, the people actually looking at the ink and paper.
These are the unsung heroes of the film.
Finally, at the very last minute, finally, somebody with a lab coat and a microscope and, you know, who knows what they're doing and hasn't got a financial stake in it, gets their hands on these things and just says, these are obviously.
And it's like immediately that happens.
Everybody looks at them and goes, oh, yeah, obviously they're obviously fake.
Look at them.
They look stupid.
Because they do.
They look fucking stupid.
Yes.
Yes.
But there's this mirage around them because everybody fools themselves in various ways.
I I kind of I kind of wish that the like there's a broader, more satirical kind of like the naked gun style version of this, you know, like the the ZAZ, you know, the airplane style, you know, where, you know, the fakes are literally like written on like pink paper with little hearts and stuff, you know.
So, oh, clearly 1941 vintage paper, you know.
It's got like Hello Kitty in the corner or something, you know.
You know, obviously, yes, yes.
It's been written a German icon, Hello Kitty.
And we know, we know that Hitler loved Hello Kitty because of these other documents you sold me two years ago.
Yes.
But you get the feeling that if that, you know, if one of the diaries had actually turned up on pink scented Hello Kitty paper, Heiderman would have gone to Kuyao and says, people are telling me this stuff wasn't in existence until, you know, Kuyao would have said, oh, no, it's fine.
You know, another guy told me that that Hello Kitty dates from 1902.
And Heiderman would have said, Heiderman would have said, oh, that's all right then.
And gone back to his corporate bosses and said, no, it's fine.
expert assures me that that was you know and they would have gone oh all right then good fine fine continue continue having literally millions upon millions of marks just out of the fucking safe to go and buy this shit with yes exactly exactly which he is stealing by the way that's another key issue no no heideman is stealing loads and loads and loads of money off the top of the money that stern gives him to buy the diaries with from kuyao he's stealing more of it than he's giving to kuyao right from the beginning and
you have the the scene in the miniseries which again based on an actual thing that happened in the book one of his editors i think it's nanan he goes to his apartment and sees that he's living in luxury surrounded by you know expensive art and so on and so and he goes back to the offices and he says yeah he's robbing us blind heiderman's robbingbbing us blind.
And nobody, he takes his concerns to management and management are so hypnotized by their belief in Heidemann and their vision of all the, you know, the dollar signs in the eyes that they just said, no, no, we must trust Heidemann.
We must believe in Heidemann, keep giving him money.
And it's just, I think the irony for me that the miniseries doesn't quite key into as much as it could is of all these German people.
around the issue of Hitler just deciding to completely abdicate their critical thinking and put their blind trust and their blind faith in this one charismatic, odd but charismatic individual who is telling them what they want to hear but leading them on the road to ruin you know it's like it's happening again it's happening again in miniature yes yeah this one is good i mean i i kind of i kind of came at this i liked it more having talked to you about it i'm going to revisit i think i'm going to read the book first so it might be a while before i get around
to seeing it again but the book is very entertaining and it's yeah and and uh you'll i think you you'll probably be surprised by how closely the miniseries follows the book and how much of how much stuff from the book they crowbar in they find ways to dramatize stuff that isn't really it isn't really part of you know events that take place they find ways because they just want to put this good stuff from the book into the, onto, onto the screen.
Yeah, I like this.
As people can probably tell, I really like this.
Yeah, I think I kind of came at it with a little bit more of a, not a jaundice.
I just came at it.
I came at it with a little bit of the wrong attitude, maybe.
But I really like the stuff that's good is really, really good.
I think there's a lot of dry bits.
I think it's overpeopled.
I think it's got like structural problems just to watch, you know, but I think, I think, you know, approaching it as, especially since each, each episode is split into three parts, like into part one, into part two, into part three, almost, I'd want to watch it like 20 minutes at a time over the course of like, yeah, you could do that a month or something like that.
And just sort of, just sort of get it in that way.
Because I think it would, you know, it would, it does, it does just like, I just forget like, again, the last episode, I forget who all these characters are at this point, you know, I'm just like, there's so many people in this movie, you know, it's like one old white guy and another old white guy yelling at each other over, you know, whose fault this is.
And I'm like, just get me to the end, please.
You know, I'm ready.
are the the breaks between parts those are the ad breaks okay yeah that makes me that makes me nostalgic for the days where an hour's television would have two ad breaks in it That has never been the case in the US.
It's always every seven or eight minutes.
Nowadays, I listen to these.
these right-wing podcasts, like I listen to Elisha Schaeffer's podcast and some of the other ones.
Tucker Carlson, I think, does this, where they don't even like, Tim Poole definitely does it, but they don't even like have like natural ad breaks where it's like, and then we're going to cut to ads.
And then they cut to an ad.
They just insert them every like, so like every 10 minutes, they just insert like a little 30 second ad for something.
And so you're in the middle of this like raucous, racist conversation.
And then like, and then the Jews do it, then it cuts to, you know, and when I need, when I need a little more, a little more, what, you know, like, you know, and it's always like this little 30 second ad read for like the traveling to traveling to Spain and getting a special blind or something.
or something it's like what are the ones that i keep and so it's just like so obnoxious yeah i think we discussed in a previous episode that i just don't watch ads anymore because i just uh i've just turned all my streaming services to where i just pay for it so i never have to see a freaking ad um but of course they're they're finding ways around it you know they're finding ways around youtube premium for people like us so yeah yeah it's it's just you know i'm watching something like this on youtube it's a surprise to me that every five minutes jonathan price doesn't turn to the camera and start telling me why i should subscribe to ground news have you
the uh peruvian beer ads uh in star war i have not okay no i have not No, I haven't.
They edited it in.
No, no, I know what you mean.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
I know what you mean.
I haven't seen it.
No, okay, okay.
Just for the audience, they edited it in like the ads.
So when Luke reaches for the lightsaber, there's a little insert shot of like he's actually reaching for the beer and then lifting the beer and then it turns into the lightsaber.
I mean, it's like, it's very, like, it's very bizarre.
You know, we're going to start seeing that more and more in our advertising.
You know, I don't really mind when the ad revenue goes to the creator, but when it's just like red of YouTube slop, that's like, I pay you for, I pay for YouTube.
Don't give me that shit anymore, you know?
Yeah.
I'm fine.
Yo, Cody and Katie, you can get the bag.
get it you know drink drink the drink the green shit it's fine you know i'm not gonna buy it but you can you can drink it and drum us at it and if it sells if it pays your bills i'm happy to see that just don't don't give it to youtube that's fine this is very much beside the point but hopefully leave it in if it's funny it's fine all right end of a bonus episode yeah premium bonus if you like this and i hope you did a give us a thumbs up tell us how much you like it share with a friend and so i don't have to drink the green slot please give me a dollar a month i mean you know
it makes a it really does so thank you for listening as always and if you can give one give two you can give five i mean i'm not going to complain.
It'll be fine.
And give me enough.
Give me five.
Give Jack one.
I think that's a good.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Give me enough Patreon.
I'll fake up some diaries for you.
Jack's going to start sharing like secret Mike Enoch diaries.
These were secreted out of his old home in New York.
I was in contact with his ex-wife.
She's forbotten to share any details about this through the NDA that they both signed, because they both clearly signed an NDA.
And then he's going to surreptitiously get them to me.
And then I'm not going to ask any questions about, you know, like, why did she reach out to to you and not me, for instance, given that I've been named on the fucking podcast?
Yeah.
It's going to have little Hello Kitty stickers all over it, you know?
I don't know if that's the best business model, you know, because Hitler sells.
I don't think anybody would give me shit for my Kinoch secret diaries.
Yeah, no.
I agreed.
I agreed.
David Irving's secret diaries.
He had the real diaries and he had the secret ones, you know.
They weren't even in trial.
Even the lawyers didn't get these.
Can you imagine if there was another 40 million words that David Irving wrote secretly?
Oh, God.
These are the ones in case I ever got caught, in case I ever got sued.
