Smallscreen

That jerry springer is a rum cove. The former mayor of Cincinnati turned outrageous talkshow host recently revisited his serious side in the fifth series of Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1). This is the man who persuaded trailer trash to act out bizarre emotional pantomimes for US daytime television viewers. Each show's theme was encapsulated in a tabloid headline that stayed on screen throughout (the most notorious was "I Married a Horse"). It was thus difficult to adjust to a programme about Springer tracing his Jewish roots back to pre-war Germany and Poland to discover several Holocaust victims.

I just about managed the transition, only to find myself disappointed by the programme. Who Do You Think You Are? depends on surprise for its magic. This series started with Patsy Kensit, who was convinced her entire family were villains (her father was a career criminal and she was photographed being cradled by one of the Kray twins at her christening). But Kensit then discovered an earlier relative, a saintly curate, who ministered to the poor of London's east end for 30 years. Next was another mayor, Boris Johnson, who had pooh-poohed his grandmother's claims to French aristocratic roots. He was astonished to find he was related (via the wrong side of a German blanket) to many of Europe's royal families. By comparison with these ripping yarns, Springer's journey was all too inevitable.

This exemplifies how difficult it is to keep the most grotesque episode of the 20th century as fresh in our minds as it should be. Telling the same story again and again dulls our horror and exhausts our sympathy. The BBC compounded this by carelessly scheduling Esther Rantzen's Who Do You Think You Are?, containing more reflections on those lost to the Nazis, the week after Springer's episode.

But the corporation redeemed itself by transmitting, on the same day as the Rantzen, a single play, God on Trial (BBC2—pictured, right), that genuinely attempted to offer new perspectives on the Holocaust. Some tourists in modern-day Poland are shown around a former death camp, now a museum. These scenes are eerily intercut with footage of the original inmates, appearing at first like ghosts. An elderly man in the group of visitors tells a girl a story he once heard about the camp—that a group of internees, starved and awaiting the gas chamber, put God on trial. Back to 1943, and a young man who has been marked for gassing later that day venomously attacks Jehovah ("God's an evil bastard!"). Someone else, in a piece of gallows humour, says, "We should put the bastard on trial, and then maybe he'll turn himself in." Gradually, imperceptibly, this joke begins to be taken seriously. And suddenly three judges, as required for a rabbinical court, have been appointed and ask the cowed, condemned men in the hut for evidence. Via this device the film is able to mine not only several individuals' experiences of profound persecution, but also their attitudes to faith and racial identity.

The charge God faces is that, through murder and collaboration, he has broken the covenant with his chosen people, the Jews. "We're Jews, we suffer," says one devout man. "So God's breach of covenant is habitual," replies another, bitterly. The next argument in God's defence, offered by a rabbi, is that he is testing the Jews' faith. Their scriptures teach them that they are purified by the sacrifice of the best of their race. The even more bitter response is that it therefore follows that Mengele and Hitler are doing God's work and it must be wrong to take up arms against them—and "that's insane!"
Next, right on cue, the defence brings up that good old standby, free will. It is invoked to argue that the Holocaust is man's doing, not God's. "If God gives out free will, he gave our share to the fucking Nazis," counters the prosecution. "They've got all the free will… and guns and coffee and cigarettes." An atheist scientist intervenes, pouring scorn on the Jews' claim to be the chosen race. "It's all about power," he tells them. The Jews came up with a religion that said God loved them. The Christians came up with a clever, more appealing concept—that God loves everyone. And Hitler trumped them all by saying: "There's one god, and it's me."

Another rabbi, who has so far remained silent, now bursts into life, telling stories from the Torah of how God smote the Jews' enemies: "Our God is not good. He was not ever good. He was only on our side… God has now become our enemy. God has made a covenant with someone else." We've heard of self-hating Jews, but this is the God-hating Jew who wants the Almighty found guilty. Finally, though, the chief justice tells his fellow judges: "They've taken everything. Don't let them take your God. Even if he doesn't exist, keep him." Here is a group of men, hours before their deaths, who are unified by their race but divided by their religion.

The conventional wisdom is that "talking heads" drama does not work well on television. The medium is meant to require constant scene changes, movement and narrative development. The writer of God on Trial, Frank Cottrell Boyce, neatly disproved this in a powerful piece of work. How strange, then, that David Hare should choose to pen one of his bring-back-the-single-television-play laments in the Times two days before God on Trial was broadcast. One of Hare's own works, My Zinc Bed, was dramatised in the same slot as God on Trial the week before (rather less successfully), and a third one-off drama was shown by BBC2 a week later. The single play is a good deal healthier than Hare seems to realise.