LAST Monday was the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill being elected Rector of Edinburgh University. My old paper, the Evening News, reported that voting commenced at 9am and continued until noon but that the poll was "comparatively small" with a
turnout of just 45.3 per cent. Bloody students! Even in 1929, when young people didn't look especially young, they couldn't be relied upon to rouse themselves from their stinking pits.
I wonder what Churchill's speech was like. The News, in recalling his uni success last Monday, didn't say. But with neat coincidence that night's telly offered up ample reminder of his great oratory skills. In Into The Storm, Winston got very excited about the offer of whisky from the Spitfire pilots, only for the airmen to be scrambled to biff Jerry some more. Impressed by their youthfulness on the journey back to his wartime bunker, he thought out loud: "Never has so much been owed by so many to so few. Hmm, make a note, Jock – I might use that later."
He worked on it, dictated to a secretary while pacing the rug, hands clasped behind his back, jaw jutting, classic hunched stoop, classic bulldog. Then he yanked it from the typewriter and read it to a trepidatious nation huddled round Bakelite wirelesses. The nation drew strength, and Roosevelt liked the cut of his jib (and Franklin D got a close-up of Churchill's jib later when his towel fell off after a bath: "As you can see, Mr President, I have nothing to conceal from you.")
So how did the nation show its gratitude? By removing him from office. Into The Storm jumped between the war and the immediate aftermath, with Churchill holidaying in Bordeaux, worried about the election, irritating the wife, abusing his retainer.
Clemmy: "You're treating him like a servant."
Churchill: "But that's what he is!"
Clemmy: "It's people like him who won the war."
Churchill: "Oh I see. You're in one of your left-wing moods… "
A British-American co-production like the war itself (eventually), this was a big, squat bookend of a drama to match The Gathering Storm, in which Albert Finney portrayed Churchill's ascent to power. Here it was Brendan Gleeson without any padding. Well, he probably had a couple of goosedown pillows stuffed into the shoulders of his overcoat, but what I mean is the drama (script: Hugh Whitemore; director: Thaddeus O'Sullivan) didn't dilly-dally. And I suppose that was Churchill. Shivering on the plane to Yalta, he totted up his shuttle diplomacy to 11,000 miles. Just about the only time he paused for breath was in the tub, when he painted ("Where's the bloody burnt sienna?") and during his meetings with a lisping King George VI, who called Churchill a "fwend".
When he declared that the morality of bombing civilians was prey to changes in fashion just like women's hemlines, Churchill sounded like someone absolutely sure of his path. But amid a bravura performance of grumping and swearing ("Buggeration!"), Gleeson showed the great man's occasional self-doubt. The King wouldn't countenance a "wesignation" and urged him to "keep buggewing on". He did, and when the war was won he yearned for it to be 1940 all over again. The country, though, wanted to move on, and Churchill, too, became a victim of fashion. Stirring stuff.
John Major's greatest speeches may be a slim volume but he did once remark that "only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half". I Won University Challenge in the Wonderland season tracked down some of the 156 winners in the posh pub quiz's history and found more than a few who would support his argument, including Pamela Groves, who said that having membership of Mensa was socially disastrous, especially for a woman. In work she had had to "dumb down" and become a legal secretary.
Groves lived amid clutter and mess where the fridge magnet read: "Dull women have immaculate homes." Susannah Darby, surrounded by her extensive soft toy collection, admitted: "I don't get male attention." Peter Burt, fond of model dinosaurs, confessed: "Living on one's own can be very dangerous."
This film didn't have to work too hard to locate the eccentricities of the big-brained, thus making the thicko masses feel slightly better about themselves. But I liked them all. Their stories contained humour, poignancy, not the slightest bit of arrogance and much more of a rock'n'roll aspect than you might have imagined. Tony Gillham was enjoying the after-effects of 16 double rum and blacks while captaining Birbeck College to their 2003 victory. "I would not have been able to do it sober," he said.
Brains can be useful when trying to follow what's going on in Spooks, back for an eighth series of split-screen spying in tight tunics.
When Harry was kidnapped by dirty-bomb plotters, Ros announced: "I'm going to ignore the Home Secretary." Not in Churchill's day she wouldn't. Oh, and I swallowed the note sent by the producers requesting I didn't reveal Harry's fate. He survived and, luckily for the BBC, so did I. Doesn't the espionage world use rice paper anymore?
• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 08/11/09