IF ONLY — a rueful consideration this — we clergy were masters (as our bishops and archdeacons so long for us to be) of the techniques of finance and business, focused on setting ambitious strategies and single-mindedly pursuing growth and expansion! The feature-length The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood (BBC2, 18 October) might apply a brake to such wholly desirable aims.
It told the story of Giancarlo Parretti, his rise from foundling birth to waiter, to hotel owner, to property magnate, to buying — for $1.3 billion — MGM studios, despite having heard of neither Citizen Kane nor Gone With the Wind. Where did the money come from? Why did the French Crédit Lyonnais send him $10 million to close the deal? Of course, he insisted, there was no possible link to the Mafia, or Silvio Berlusconi. Very soon after the takeover, the house of cards collapsed; instead of assets, there was only a string of mind-boggling debts, which he fled from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to escape.
Most weirdly, Mr Parretti himself co-operated with most of the film, and came over as genial, hospitable, unable to understand how anyone could doubt his probity. Surely, the Picassos lining the walls of his Orvieto palazzo prove his genuine wealth? Except that he supposedly has an excellent forger; the Crédit Lyonnais headquarters mysteriously burned down, destroying its records; and a tailpiece fact-checker undermined almost every element of his account.
Farce and tragedy intersected on TV with Mr Parretti’s claim of being Winston Churchill’s favourite waiter. David Olusoga, in A House Through Time: Two cities at war (BBC2, Thursdays from 17 October), recounted the true story of the Italian who certainly had been. Olusoga compares and contrasts the residents of two bourgeois apartment blocks: one in London, one in Berlin, before and during the Second World War. Germany offers, of course, the most obviously chilling scenes as adjoining apartments house both Jewish families and Nazi officials laying plans to murder them.
But Thursday of last week’s most shameful episode was British treatment of Claudio Foglia. Having worked his way up to the Savoy Hotel’s top position was no shield: with all other Italian nationals, he was interned as a potential spy; the ship taking them to Canada was torpedoed; the Italians’ quarters were sealed with barbed wire, and their deaths were hideous.
In a Hollywood film, Churchill, scanning the deportation order, would recognise his waiter’s name and order his release. But this was ghastly reality, not escapist fantasy.
How heinous is the blasphemy promoted by Everyone Else Burns (Channel 4, Thursdays from 17 October)? Is God mocked as a Christian church is mercilessly pilloried — or is this lampooning of a fictional ultra-fundamentalist sect so farcical, every cliché gleefully pounced on and inflated, that taking it seriously would be the greater sin?