Anniversaries to remember

I once had a television director who had a mania for celebrating anniversaries. This was not as wild or sentimental as it sounds. In those days, 30 years ago, there was no taping, no recording. Every programme was live, however dead the material and our programme was a 90-minutes cultural circus. There would be a ballet and a short play, 20 minutes with a full orchestra illustrating how Beethoven rewrote the opening movement of the Fifth Symphony.

A great little feature, I remember, of two women talking over a garden fence and being filmed in X-ray. Two minutes, I believe, was the safe limit of exposure. You saw these two skeleton heads, nattering away, one of them chewing an apple which was seen to descend pass the uvula and on into the oesophagus and, presumably, on to the lower depths.

Apart from anything that was filmed, it was impossible to time precisely 90 minutes but we had to. If the scenery fell down – which happened more than once – you, I, as the MC or host, had to go on blithely pretending that the deafening indoors crash was an outdoors thunderstorm. You never knew when the auto-cue, or teleprompter – which was, and is, used by commentators who can't think aloud – when it would go on the blink. You'd have an actor who by the time of the actual performance was sloshed or half seas over, or however you care to put it. He'd jump six pages of dialogue.

You had to allow for these likely crises and have something on tap and this is where my director's mania was a lifesaver. The moment a commercial came on, he'd dash down to the studio floor and say, 'We're running four minutes short. What do you have in mind?' He'd always have in mind some anniversary. Needless to say, we didn't always have the luck to be in trouble right on the anniversary day.

Once, during the showing of a 15-minute film, he came down, 'Deep trouble!' he said, 'What do you know about jewels?' 'Nothing!' I said. He presented me with a black box which he'd found under a layer of dust in the prop room. Inside it were glass imitations of six famous diamonds. On the inside cover was a brief, printed history of each of them. 'What,' I said, 'is this all about?' 'The Koh-i-Noor.' he said, 'Queen Victoria got it in 1850.' 'So? But it's 1985 now!' 'Oh sure, sure!' he said, 'But didn't they take over India round about now?'

Well, to make a harrowing story more harrowing, the film ended, I was shoved on camera holding the box and heard myself saying something quietly outrageous like, 'It's occurred to us that we are just about at the hundredth anniversary of the most historic of all great diamonds, the Koh-i-Noor'. The camera moved in on to my thumb and forefinger holding this treasure, this glass treasure and I was able to read, off camera, very slowly and reverently, the stuff printed on the box cover, that it went back to 1304, then possessed by a Rajah, 200 years later fell into the hands of one Babur who established the Mongol Empire, on to 1739 when the Shah of Persia invaded India and swiped the diamond. A century later it was swiped by the East India Company and, finally, in the, er... 1850s, it was presented to Queen Victoria – 191 carats. The Queen was not impressed. The gem, she said, did not have enough fire. So, with imperious and imperial gall, she had it re-cut down to 108.93 carats.

The camera moved away and showed me replacing it, leaving the audience gasping that one small head could carry all he knew and, to this day, the word 'anniversary' makes me chuckle to recall all the anniversaries we saluted or invented because we had a pressing five or six minutes to fill.

Well, this week, there is no need to fudge or fake. This is really THE week of so many anniversaries that I notice one blazing anniversary has been overlooked or, perhaps, tactfully forgotten, but not the approach of VE Day, which I ought to translate for people under 50 as Victory in Europe Day.

President Reagan might have wished that we'd forgotten this one too, for, once the White House was reminded of it, Mr Reagan sailed cheerfully into his first howler. 'Yes, indeed, it was the fortieth anniversary of the defeat of Hitler, but,' the president mused, unfortunately aloud, 'there were not many Germans alive who remembered the war and practically none who took part in it.' This did not provoke an uproar but it did produce an outcry from I suppose thousands and thousands of old soldiers in all the Allied countries who are alive and have searing memories of it.

Not to worry. Now the question was, how ought the president to commemorate the victory of our side and the deliverance from the monster whom an awful lot of us still recall? The president sent off a trusted aide to Germany where the man lost no time buying a fine German car at a whopping discount. This carefree little privileged deal raised a few highbrows among old fuddy-duddies in Washington who remember how Truman fired an aide for accepting a present of a refrigerator and how Eisenhower, firmly, if reluctantly, dismissed his chief adviser for accepting a vicuña coat.

However, Mr Reagan remarked, correctly, that there was nothing odd about his aide's behaviour. It happens all the time. So it does. Especially during a régime which has forgotten, if it ever knew, that it is the duty of a government official, not merely to avoid wrongdoing, but to avoid the appearance of it. Anyway, the car deal was not the main purpose of the aide's mission. He was to look around, as some assistant gruesomely put it, for a suitable concentration camp. At some point, the president told his trusted aide that he did not much fancy visiting a concentration camp. As one American official put it, 'The president, you know, is a cheerful politician. He does not like to grovel in a grizzly scene like Dachau.'

Well, unfortunately, there are hundreds of thousands of survivors from such grizzly places who cannot be cheerful when they recall how their sons, mothers, daughters, fathers, husbands, sisters, wives were incinerated there.

The president's decision not to visit a death camp really did produce a stab of pain in these survivors and bewilderment, at least, among those Americans and Europeans of whatever faith who believe that even a cheerful president must perform some cheerless duties. Before the uproar and before the president's White House staff could even see it coming, the White House man in Germany had accepted the suggestion of Chancellor Kohl that the president visit a German military cemetery. It was looked over by about 50 American and German officials and it seemed just right.

Bitburg. It was near a United States air base and the president could move easily inside the compound and so avoid the need for wide-ranging security precautions. Moreover, Bitburg has more than two thousand graves of German soldiers from the First and Second World Wars. There seems to have been an assumption before the official tour that American soldiers were buried there, too. There are, in fact, none, but there are about 50 dead men who had been officers in Hitler's racial elite, the dreadful SS men who, as a group, were more responsible than anybody for the Holocaust.

Apparently, and unbelievably, neither the touring Germans nor the Americans noticed their graves, but the American television crews did when they were allowed to film there and the second presidential gaffe was given its most pitiless exposure in the panning shots of these officers' gravestones, what, even a strong Reagan supporter called 'an ensuing roar of outrage', both in this country and abroad, must have been the lowest point of morale in the president's week. Or, indeed, in his second administration. For, if he were going to visit this cemetery and not go to a concentration camp, he was appearing to forgive the Nazis and forget the Jews.

Well, as we all know, the admission of this blunder eventually penetrated the White House and the president recanted. He will visit a death camp. As I talk, he's not yet decided to forego his visit to Bitburg. He's being urged instead to pay tribute at the grave of Konrad Adenauer, the towering anti-Nazi figure who endured the worst of Germany's twentieth-century history and did much to guarantee the best. By the time you hear these words, the president will, no doubt, have changed his mind.

There's another, sombre anniversary this week which may not mean much to Europeans, though it will give pause to Australians and New Zealanders and any other of America's Pacific allies. In this country, it has produced a vast amount of television coverage, from Washington to Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh City which once bore the name – to Americans, the doomed name – of Saigon.

30 April is the date. Ten years ago, the Communists marched into Saigon and the United States had to admit, and face, the first military defeat in its history. The memories of that war, the analysis of it, the soul-searching and the recriminations never seem to end.

The wound flared up again this week when the president sent a memorandum. It was top secret for about 24 hours to two committees of Congress appealing for money by way of humanitarian aid to the guerrilla forces, the Contras, opposing the leftist government of Nicaragua. The memorandum makes a point of ruling out the direct application of US military force, but adds it must realistically be recognised as an eventual option.

We can't know how much the revelation of that menacing phrase will mean until next week the House votes to give that money or withhold it.

Forty years ago next Thursday is surely an anniversary that no one of the so-called free nations of the world will want to ignore. On 25 April 1945, 50 nations gathered in San Francisco and, to a blaze of klieg lights and a thunder of applause in the opera house, gave birth to the United Nations.

I telephoned the oldest and the top living survivor of the UN secretariat, the original, still there as Assistant Secretary-General – a man who's done 40 years of noble work in a forlorn cause. I asked him what plans the UN had to celebrate in San Francisco or anywhere, to cheer, to raise a glass? '

Are you off to San Francisco?' I asked facetiously. 'No, why?' 'But, the anniversary, 25 April!' 'I don't understand,' he said, 'what happened on 25 April?'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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