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TV review: Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Rule Britain and Great White Silence
Why the toffs are back in charge is a big question; it's a shame Andrew Neil didn't have the answers

John Crace
@JohnJCrace
Thu 27 Jan 2011 07.59 GMT First published on Thu 27 Jan 2011 07.59 GMT

Posh and Posher Andrew Neil tv review john crace
 What happened to social mobility?

We're continually being told "we're all in this together" but politicians are notoriously edgy when their own social mobility comes under scrutiny. So with three-quarters of the coalition cabinet now millionaires and most of the top jobs in all parties sewn up by public school or Oxbridge graduates, Andrew Neil's Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Rule Britain (BBC2) was a timely examination of why, after a succession of state school-educated prime ministers from Harold Wilson to John Major, we have returned to a 1950s political elite.

In many ways the question was more interesting than the answers, which followed the predictable line of a cultivated sense of entitlement, social networking and a financial cushion that enables the ambitious to work for next to nothing as special parliamentary advisers in the hope of getting parachuted into a safe seat at a later date.

It didn't help that Neil kept moving his own goalposts so it was hard to follow the argument. He started by talking about public schools in general, then rapidly narrowed it to just two – Westminster and Eton – without worrying why those from other public schools miss out. He then shifted to Oxbridge and while there is an overlap and a similarly pernicious sense of closed shop, it's not the same thing.

He was on much stronger ground when he got on to education in general. Like many high achievers of his generation, Neil was a grammar school boy and he made a straight correlation between the arrival of comprehensive secondary education and the rebirth of the English political elite. Despite this he couldn't bring himself to call for the reinstatement of a two-tier system, as the price of consigning 80% of teenagers to the limited expectations of a secondary modern was not one worth paying. So we were rather back where we started.

Most telling were the absences. The message must have gone out that the topic was toxic and no one important should talk to Neil under any circumstances. So he was left talking to past-their-sell-by-date Tory grandees, the sidelined David Davis, and Peter Mandelson, who will talk to any camera that's pointed at him. The highlight was the Tory backbencher and wealthy Somerset landowner Jacob Rees-Mogg. Here was a clown who could win the next election for Labour singlehandedly with his plummy declaration: "I am a man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei." Alan Johnson's cameo appearance as the lone trade unionist took on a ghost-like poignancy after his resignation last week sounded another death knell for social equality.

At least some ghosts came back to life. Last year Herbert Ponting's film of Scott's last trip to the Antarctic got an HD tart-up and in Great White Silence (Discovery) we were treated to magical images of both ice and men. It was like going through a wormhole to be back among an expedition whose collective memory has long since been as frozen as their bodies. All that spoiled it was James Cracknell. The former rower may have been to the Antarctic, but he is no polar historian and his ability to misinterpret almost everything he saw during his film commentary was breathtaking.

As the ponies and the motor sleds were unloaded from the Terra Nova, Cracknell hailed Scott's modern approach to polar transport. He didn't mention that the ponies were spectacularly useless as they sank into the snow, nor that the sleds continually broke down in the cold and were abandoned. He accepted Scott's decision to abandon the dogs on the Beardmore Glacier, saying they couldn't pull uphill, and he made a virtue of manhauling, while failing to acknowledge that Amundsen's dogs pulled the Norwegians all the way up on to the Antarctic ice-cap far more quickly.

He praised Scott's decision to leave the final make-up of the polar party to the last minute, when most recognise that his spur-of-the-moment decision to take an extra man to the pole when he only had provisions for four was a fatal error. He hailed Scott's devotion to science in collecting geological samples, when Scott's own diaries reveal this was mainly a piece of face-saving after coming second, and the extra weight may have contributed to his team's death.

It was a wonderful piece of rehabilitation for Scott, but as history it was desperately flawed. You'd have been better off watching the film as Ponting originally intended. With no sound.

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