HAVING successfully forged for himself a second career as a presenter of thoughtful documentaries about serious things, it is now conceivable that many people think of Michael Portillo as merely "that nice man off the telly", rather than a widely rev
iled Conservative MP. This unforeseen image change is, if nothing else, testament to TV's ability to humanise people.
Portillo documentaries can be bracketed into two distinct categories: those deadly earnest yet inadvertently hilarious programmes in which he explores hot topics such as capital punishment by undergoing gruelling physical and psychological tests, and the sensitive, more personal ones, such as when he eulogised the tragic suicide of an old school friend. Despite its rather lurid title, Michael Portillo: Digging Up the Dead fortunately fell into the latter camp.
Portillo is the son of a Spanish exile who fled to Britain following Franco's rise to power. Offering a compact history of the Spanish Civil War mixed with what felt like a particularly gloomy episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, Portillo travelled to his father's homeland to investigate a tumultuous new development in its troubled history.
When Franco died in 1975, the main political parties in Spain signed an amnesty called the Pact of Forgetting, which decreed that no-one could be prosecuted for crimes committed in defence of Franco, or for crimes of terrorism committed in resistance to the regime. As far as Spain was concerned, the Franco era never happened. However, in 2007 the government introduced a controversial law calling for official recognition of victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, resulting in the painstaking exhumation of unmarked graves that have lain ignored for decades. Mouldering in these vast "graves of oblivion" are tens of thousands of anti-fascist republicans murdered on Franco's orders.
Portillo spoke – in fluent Spanish – to families eager to find the remains of their relatives in order to belatedly grant them a dignified burial. He also met with the niece of murdered playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who would prefer his remains rested in peace. Nevertheless, she agreed to allow the exhumation of his grave if permission is granted to the families of those who lie alongside him. Given the sheer amount of corpses lying in these rural areas, as well as the difficulty of identifying the remains, I agreed with her assertion that they should instead be transformed into cemeteries.
Proving once again that he's much more sensible than he once appeared, Portillo presented a balanced, respectful overview of a country cautiously facing up to the horrors of its past in order to move on.
There was more buried history in Not Forgotten: Soldiers of Empire, in which Ian Hislop reminded us that 2.5 million soldiers from across the Empire fought for Britain in the First World War. Unfortunately, BBC1 had already reminded us in a recent documentary, The Muslim Tommies, which featured precisely the same letters from Sikh soldiers used in Hislop's programme. Still, he did at least confront the question of why subjugated citizens would eagerly sign up to defend an alien country, although his conclusion – they respected the Crown, if not those who exploited them at home – wasn't particularly satisfying. Perhaps it's just impossible to fathom in retrospect.
