A BBC legend has revealed he made a documentary that was so disturbing it was banned for 20 years.
Michael Aspel is best known for hosting the cosy biographical TV series This is Your Life and Ask Aspel.
That didn’t stop the BBC, though, from asking the now 92-year-old star to host a far more harrowing TV show about the dangers of nuclear war.
The show, The War Game, was a pseudo-documentary film commissioned in 1965 to mark the 20th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
During the 47-minute-long special, viewers saw a hypothetical nuclear war between Nato and the USSR that left millions dead or injured and vast swathes of the UK an irradiated wasteland.
So harrowing was the footage that the BBC withdrew the show before it was televised, and it would not air in the UK until 1985, and the 40th anniversary of the bombings.
In a new BBC documentary titled Michael Aspel Remembers…The War Game, Michael has opened up about serving as the show’s narrator and why it wasn’t broadcast.
With that desire for realism in mind, the writer and director Peter Watkins decided that Michael, who was then a newsreader for the BBC, would make a perfect narrator.
According to Michael, the film was designed to feel and look like an official government warning.
Michael also alleges in the documentary that the government, who were shown early versions of the show, may have had a role in the documentary being taken off the air.
He claims Peter always believed it was ‘government interference’ that led to his documentary being banned.
The documentary makes clear that the government’s official line was that the BBC had the final say in the show’s broadcast, but that ‘Whitehall would be relieved if the BBC chose not to show it’.
The BBC maintains they decided to pull the documentary, with the then director general Hugh Carleton Greene saying the decision was not a political one.
Instead, he claims the footage was so ‘shocking’ that he could never forgive himself if someone saw it and then ‘threw themselves under a bus’ because of it.
However, archive footage of the late Tony Benn is shown where he admits that the home secretary Frank Soskice ‘ordered’ Benn to ban the programme as he feared it would ‘lead to panic.’
‘I was only his master’s voice and had nothing to do with it… so I had to send a directive to Carleton Greene saying ‘You must not broadcast it’… I greatly regret that I capitulated,’ the MP explained.
Huw Wheldon, the Head of Documentaries (1963-1965), meanwhile, claimed in 1983 that Harold Wilson’s Government feared the documentary might be seen as an advertisement for nuclear disarmament with a pacifist CND agenda.
Despite being banned from TV for twenty years, Huw made sure the documentary was shown at several film festivals, which ultimately led to it winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.
Michael Aspel Remembers… The War Game will air on BBC 4 on July 30 at 10pm.
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