The Holocaust on British television : shaping collective memory since 1945

Abstract

If a fuller understanding of how the Holocaust has been assimilated by British society is to be achieved, television’s engagement with this catastrophe cannot be ignored, dismissed or derided as lowbrow ephemera.  The present study will examine the specific contribution that this highly accessible conduit has made to collective memory of the Holocaust in Britain.  It will map the key television initiatives selected from Holocaust-related programmes broadcast between 1946, when the BBC resumed transmissions after the Second World War, and 2001, when Britain’s inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) ceremony was held.

The thesis begins by providing a critique of collective memory.  It will then situate Holocaust-related television within the context of history on television in Britain and engage with debates surrounding the amenability of this medium to the recounting of history.  The first chapter will examine Richard Dimbleby’s lifetime and posthumous contribution to collective memory.  It will identify the crucial details that were omitted from his made-for radio accounts of Belsen when extracts were broadcast by the BBC in 1945.  it will also show that his contributions are part of a wider trend to efface Jewishness within the context of the liberation of Belsen.

The second chapter will elucidate the specific ways in which the television documentary The World at War: ‘Genocide’ was a groundbreaking production in terms of its contribution to British television history and collective memory.  It will show how it defied all expectations in respect of what ITV could offer.  It will show how ‘Genocide’ was the first televisual treatment that sought to explain the origins of the Holocaust and to represent the catastrophe as a single historical narrative in its own right.

The third chapter will examine Holocaust programmes and the way in which they were distributed across the British terrestrial television landscape throughout 1995.  the final chapter will examine television’s specific contribution to Britain’s first Holocaust Memory Day.

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