Those of you who tuned out the Olympics don’t know what you missed. But one thing you shouldn’t miss is Tom Brokaw’s excellent hour-long report which led-off Friday night’s prime time NBC coverage. (I can’t find a link anywhere to the video; perhaps someone can post a comment.) It is the sort of thing hardly found on NBC anymore, or any major network for that matter. The lessons from 1939 to 1941 still resonate:
“What England went through in 1940 and ’41 will endure forever as a lesson in courage, national resolve and the power of enlightened leadership,” Brokaw told TV Guide Magazine. “Against great odds, the UK kept Hitler from using this island nation as a launching pad for expanding his evil empire. We owe this country and that time a great debt.”
Brokaw, with the aid of producers Brian Brown and Joe Gesue, spent two years shooting Their Finest Hour across London, Dover, Coventry, Portsmouth, Bladon and Cambridge, where they interviewed victims of Germany’s sustained bombing attacks. The producers also unearthed some haunting color footage of Europe during the war that hasn’t been seen in years. Several of the interviews in the film were also conducted down in Winston Churchill’s London war rooms, which have been preserved to this day. The site is a monument to a time when, as Brokaw puts it, England was all that was left between liberty and tyranny.
There are interviews with an RAF Spitfire pilot as well as a survivor of Coventry that simply must be seen. The hollowed out shell of the Coventry Cathedral still stands as a British testament to how demonic Hitler was. Pay attention also to how faith glued Churchill and Roosevelt together in common cause against the evil of Nazism.
That Mia Farrow groaned the report was a “lecture on WWII” should make you want to see it even more.
A small personal aside – an organization which did not have their finest hour was U.S. Sailing. Not a single American sailing medal was won by a nation with thousands of miles of coastline, hundreds of sailing clubs, hundreds of racing clubs, and fleets across the land. Heck, we even won medals in fencing. Something is rotten in Annapolis. I personally volunteer for the Laser competition in Rio in 2016. The results couldn’t be much worse.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle from Chuck Chalberg: NBC and Tom Brokaw’s Olympic Tribute to the Battle of Britain
The Brokaw piece was stirring, but also depressing. Has a nation ever sold out its best virtues so completely, so quickly?
– own father was a hero of that battle and war. I want to dig him up so he can slap her.
It was very good! Frankly, I expected the revisionist worst and only tuned in to criticize.
I accept your accolades for this program as there are no other fine television moments to which to compare it. Now back to their regular conservative-bashing programming…
BTW, I wouldn’t watch NBC on a dare.
I know exactly how you feel, Carmelita. Normally NBC is simply a network not on my viewing schedule. But for the two weeks of the Olympics, I never changed the channel. If the TV was on, it was showing Olympic coverage — live, tape-delayed, or rebroadcast.
And now that the Olympic Games are over, NBC disappears again, a channel not to be viewed until 2014 and the Winter Olympics. Though I wonder about the politics of holding those games in Sochi, not fifty miles from the Russian border with Georgia, a nation which felt the full force of an unprovoked attack by the Russians just a couple years ago. So will Brokaw do a story about the brave Georgian people? Probably not.
I, too, watched in amazement as Brokaw did an EXCELLENT job of bringing out the subject with great clarity and even-handedness. It was surprising that the British decided to preserve the underground war rooms. I did not expect that.
One of my younger nieces (late 20′s) was mumbling about how odd it was for the British to celebrate freedom in the closing ceremonies, given that Britain was a major “colonial oppressor”. I challenged her to name a thriving democracy that can NOT trace its roots back to English law.
We owe them mightily, and to have Brokaw’s piece highlight it so well was a welcome surprise.
Laser competition in Brazil vs England…I think I see how this is going.
I did not watch the Olympics – read a few items – not because I dislike NBC, but because of the gross spectacle of excess. Here we have a former great empire still trying to show the world that it carries weight in the world of today by spending, latest estimate, $14 billions of its people’s money on this exercise in wasteful spending. Money never to be recouped despite the glamorous predictions of the organizers. The British everyman will bear the costs, or we will through our foreign aid.
What nations put on such exercises of pompous excess:
Nations like China which is on the rise, or thinks it is;
Nations like the United States which want to instruct the world on its world status as a great power, and still has some modicum of power left; or,
Nations on the way out which give a ‘last hurrah’ for what was and never will be again.
But people do love pomp, spectacle and excess – the bigger the better, the louder the better, the more colorful the better. But substance. Pshaw!
If they were gonna spend an hour on non-Olympics, better they did a history of the Norman Invasion, The Magna Carta, and/or The Glorious Revolution.
I saw a few minutes of this, grunted “huh”, left the room, came back thirty minutes later and they were still doin’ it. It seemed OK, but it made about as much sense to include as sporting coverage as the closing ceremonies.
Was surprised to find it as part of the Olympic telecast. I cast about looking to record it whilst wife-unit indulged her appetite for Olympicness.
As far as his ‘greatest generation’ goes, they and their parents did bring us FDR, over and over and over…with deleterious results to this day.
Anyone have a link to it so i can see it again??
Please, a link to see it for the first time. Many comments by friends on the quality of the program.