As a child and even as a young adult there was one person who more than most helped me get through the tough times that you have growing up and also someone that inspired me to write- it is someone I suspect most people may not have heard of -Bernie Taupin. If you have ever sung along to an Elton John classic like Your Song, Daniel, Rocketman or Sacrifice then you have been singing the words that said Bernie Taupin wrote. He has been writing with Elton for over 55 years- becoming one of the most successful popular writing partnerships of all time. Bernie, although now a naturalised American was as English as roast beef having been born and brought up in rural Lincolnshire working in dead end jobs before he struck out on the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ to come to London to eventually team up with a young musician called Reginald Dwight -who we all now know as Elton Hercules John.
Bernie has been one of the few people who has consistently written song lyrics that mean more than just something for a singer to sing to, they are about things he cares about- the struggle for fulfilment, how to navigate important personal relationships, his love for what could best be called ‘Americana’ (the real wild west of America) and ultimately about what is true-he was and isn’t one to just write about what you might call ‘soppy love’ -he wants to talk about what is real and meaningful in our lives. As he once wrote about him and Elton: “No lies at all just one more tale about the Captain (Elton) and the kid (Bernie). As a kid myself I went through a teenage ritual of buying a new Elton LP (vinyl record to the younger generation!), taking the record out of its sleeves, putting it on a turntable, switching it on, and lying down in my darkened bedroom to soak in the music and Bernie’s lyrics. I was also heartened to hear that fairly recently Bernie became a Christian-always quite nice to know that a personal hero or heroine of yours believes in Jesus. His personal testimony is perhaps similar to others in that he had given up on church saying “..there was no vitality. It was drab and stuffy, overly pious and centred on a droning, unenthusiastic sermon conducted by a charisma-free priest.. the emphasis on wrath and retribution far outweighed the presence of a benevolent God”.
I suspect that may mirror a number of people’s own early experiences of church where the faith was taught in an overly zealous manner so much so that it put people off Christianity for a long time – in some cases for ever. How then did Bernie come back into the ‘fold’? It was thanks to a fine woman, his wife, Heather who has an admirable but captivating faith that had a powerful effect on him-he has talked about how “I wanted what she had, that sort of compassion and understanding, free of pious inequality and liberating in ethical diversity”. Bernie now belongs to a church which he describes as a ‘rehab for the soul’ and where there is a simplicity and joy he can relate to.
Of course, anyone who knows Elton and Bernie’s songs will know that religion has always played a big role in them with songs like Where to Now St Peter?, Religion and Cry to Heaven, and as Bernie has said “the Bible is the lyricist’s best crib sheet”. However, my personal favourite is a 1972 soul song Salvation which highlights Bernie’s desire for all of us to find Jesus -his powerful lyrics are below and if you click onto the link you can hear a great version of it:
I have to say my friends, we’re looking for a light ahead
In the distance a candle burns, Salvation keeps the hungry children fed
It’s gotta take a lot of Salvation what we need are willing hands
You must feel the sweat in your eyes, you must understand Salvation
A chance to put the devil down, without the fear of hell
Salvation spreads the Gospel round, and free you from yourself…
In September 1944, an 18 year old Polish highland woman was captured by the Nazis and with other people was held in a Gestapo cell, awaiting her fate before being sent to the death camps. With what is believed to be a broken tooth, she scrawled on her cell wall this prayer:
“Oh Mamma, do not cry, no most pure Queen of Heaven, protect me always, Hail Mary -Helena Wanda Blazusiakowna, age 18, detained since 25 September 1944”.
In 1973 Polish composer Henryk Gorecki visited the cell and amongst all the other inscriptions prisoners had made on the cell wall, he was deeply moved by Helena’s prayer. He explained that the other inscriptions were to him so loud and banal (“I’m innocent”, “Murderers” or “Free me”) whilst this young woman’s prayer was different – she was not crying or screaming out for revenge. Her only thought was about her own mother as it is she who will experience true despair.
As a result, the composer in 1976 wrote what is known as either ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ or its official title of ‘Symphony No. 3 Op. 36’. It is a symphony in three movements, but it is the 2nd movement (‘Lento e large- Tranquillissimo’ ) that is inspired by Helena’s ordeal and prayer. When it was first played, few listened, and critics dismissed the work. However, God it seemed had other ideas and in 1992 it was recorded by Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta and something quite amazing happened. A piece of work written by someone few people outside of avant-garde eastern European classical music had heard of, sung in a language most people did not understand suddenly got a huge reaction from listeners on both sides of the Atlantic.
The CD topped the UK and US classical charts, it even reached no 6 in the mainstream music charts and was in the US Classical Music Chart for nearly 3.5 years, selling over a million copies. It is possibly the best selling contemporary classical record of all time. All because of one 18 year old’s prayer on a prison cell.
But why? I think the answer is that what Gorecki the composer produced with the soprano Dawn Upshaw is an 8 minute piece of slow music which has such emotional power that it feels it is just injected directly into the soul of whoever listens to it. It forces you to stop what you are doing and just listen, and it moved me like few pieces of music can-so much so that I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. It’s themes are Motherhood, despair, and faith. It starts with a wonderful folk drone, and it reaches a crescendo when the soprano reaches a climaxing top A b. I frequently cry when I listen to it.
But what of 18 year old Helena? God was not about to abandon her. In November 1944 she was being shipped on a train to Auschwitz when she was one of 12 people rescued by Polish partisans. She then walked over mountains and returned to her grandparents in her home town. For the rest of the war, people protected and hid her identity. In 1950 she was married and had five children. She died at the age of 73 in 1999.
You can hear the stunning music inspired by her prayer below:
Imagine if you will, a world where there are no violent crimes or pornography, women are not leered at, where people don’t keep checking their smartphones for the latest message, update or ‘like’, a place where the internet is not present, and you only use your mobile phone to actually talk to someone. A community where once a week people remember God, refrain from any deliberate activity or work, contemplate their spiritual life and spend quality time with their family.
Welcome then to the world of ‘Shtisel’. No it’s not a new swear word but a rather magnificent 3 season series on Netflix which, in my book, is probably the best show you haven’t seen but is among the most spiritually fulfilling you can find. Forget the likes of ‘Line of Duty’ (and that underwhelming ending) and instead allow yourself to be charmed by a generous, God filled, light-hearted and almost nostalgic wonder of a show.
Shtisel is an Israeli TV drama (in Hebrew but don’t worry it has English subtitles) which tells the story of four generations of a Haredi family living in Jerusalem and follows their ordinary lives as they fall in and out of love, deal with the bereavements, heartaches and choices they have to make to bring up their families and live and work by their faith. The Haredi community is an Ultra-Orthodox form of Judaism which lives strictly according to Jewish law and is opposed to most modern values and practices. I suppose the closest Christian example to it would be the Amish community in the USA and Canada who live simply and reject modern technology, although they are clearly of different faiths.
The series has become such a success because it charms through showing you a group of people where God and family are central to their lives and where they live a simpler, less materialist life. Its main character Akiva (Michael Aloni) is a twenty some guy teaching in the local Cheder (Torah school) who has a talent for drawing, but should he follow that gift outside of his community or is it his duty to get married, to bring up children as his people have for generations? Can he find the right woman and life partner to accept him as he truly is? Over its 33- 45 minute episodes we live their lives and find out that answer and more.
Part of its appeal is how it very gently lets us into what would seem to most people a fairly closeted and regimented world. A place where everyone entering a home touches the Mezuzah- a decorative door post that holds a parchment with a Jewish prayer from the Book of Deuteronomy (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”). When anyone eats or drinks anything they recite “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe who brings forth bread from the earth”, and when someone dies, close family members take part in a Shiva where for 7 days you stay at home grieving over the departed. However, its aim is not to judge or condemn how they live their lives but to simply allow us to observe and understand them and we soon get charmed by their human frailties.
What Shtisel also shows us is the pressure and conflict between what a faith requires of individuals and how the modern world outside operates. As Haredims, day to day life is strictly controlled. Women have to dress modestly -not showing shoulders or too much of their legs. Wearing trousers is forbidden and married women have to wear a head covering. Men and women are separated in Synagogues and often on public transport . Men have to wear a black suit, white shirt, Homburg hat with payot (side locks) and beards are obligatory. Films and TV are opposed as is any form of secular education. You are married through ‘matchmakers’ and those who leave the communities can be shunned.
It is a way of life frankly that our current modern, more liberal society would not be able to comprehend or, if they had a choice,- allow. In modern parlance, it would surely be ‘cancelled’ for a variety of reasons. And yet, it can still be appealing.
It can teach something important about how people can live their lives in honouring God and in a number of respects, it shows us a society that can be preferable to the one which is currently being shaped in our own lives. In the West we have a ‘24/7’ society, where we are encouraged to buy and consume more, to be selfish and have what we want (not what we need). We have become increasingly secular, and society is more and more intolerant of alternative points of view whether that is about religion, racism, gender, sexuality, or politics. We are the poorer for that.
So, Shtisel is a welcome relief to show us another way of doing things. Although its characters’ lives are far from perfect with a variety of imbalances and inequalities in their own world, they do have some things that our modern society is desperately lacking and which we could be the better for.
So, this Sunday (28 March) Talking Pictures TV will show the very last episode of the outstanding Enemy At The Door that has been our companion on the last 26 Sunday nights. Its final episode appropriately titled Escape was the last episode of Series 2- which was also the last ever made. That is a great pity as the show which explored the occupation of the Channel Islands by Germany in WWII took in the years from June 1940 to April 1943 and was of a consistently high standard, and later series would have surely looked at further deprivation that the likes of Guernsey suffered as well of course at the joyous liberation to come.
However, Enemy At The Door is easily the best portrayal of the only part of British territory that had been occupied by a foreign invander since 1066. Although filmed in Jersey the series focussed on Guernsey and what life was like under the Nazis and its strength has been to give perspectives from both sides of the occupation.
It originally ran from 1978 to 1980 and was made at a time when wartime dramas about people living under the German occupation were very much in vogue. One of the first was ITV’s Manhunt (1970), followed by BBC’s Colditz (1972-1974) which set a very high bar in terms of the quality of its production, and then came Secret Army (1977-79). If Enemy At The Door is similar to any other series then it is Secret Army which looked at how Belgian people and especially its resistance dealt with life under Nazi rule and was hugely successful.
The creator of Enemy At The Door is a familiar name to Talking Pictures TV’s viewers -Michael Chapman- who had previously produced Public Eye, Van der Valk and later on served as Executive Producer for over 1,100 episodes of The Bill as well as writing a number of episodes of Rooms, and you can see his careful and observant touches in the two series themselves.
At the core of Enemy At The Door is the relationship between the commander of the German occupying force Major-Doktor Richter (Public Eye’s Alfred Burke) and Dr Martel who in effect is a kind of notional head of the Guernsey community (the ever reliable Bernard Horsfall). The series shows how Richter is the ‘good German’ who is not a Nazi Party faithful but a soldier who is trying to oversee the occupation with as much ‘harmony’ as possible. For his part, Dr Martel is trying to get the best possible conditions for his community to live under but at the same try avoid collaborating with the invaders.
The real villain though is Hauptmann Reinecke (Simon Cadell) who most definitely is a Nazi Party faithful and whilst Richter seeks to give Channel Islanders the benefit of the doubt on incidences, Reinecke wants strict discipline, enforcement and SS interrogation to be the order of the day, leading to multiple clashes during the series. Here, Simon Cadell shows that he was a very fine actor – and was so much more than simply Jeffrey Fairbrother in Hi-de-Hi!
Most of the Enemy At The Door’s stories focus around two Channel Island families that of Dr Martel’s and of Helen Porteous -especially her son Peter (Richard Heffer). There is tension around the two families as the latter and Clare Martel (Emily Richard) are strong Resisters and are critical of Dr Martel’s closeness with their invaders. This reaches a climax during the end of Series 1 episode Judgement of Solomon, that leads to both Dr Martel and Peter Porteous being arrested for spying and being sent to prison in France-leading to a nervous breakdown for Clare.
In fact, we see little more of Clare as she is supposedly being rehabilitated by a group of nuns. Emily Richard who played her with so much verve and passion later went on to have a major role in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) as well as being part of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and was last heard of as running London historical tours.
Through its 26 episodes covering 3 years of the occupation, we see a variety of subjects covered on what people on the islands had to submit to. They included the shooting of islanders trying to escape, a librarian sent to jail for refusing to ban books the Germans disagreed with, the rape of a local girl by a soldier, black market activities and racism. In the stand out episodes The Jerrybag & The Right Blood, we see the impact of a local girl falling in love with a German soldier and the dilemma of trying to bring up their baby in those circumstances-and the tragic consequences that follow.
A major reason for Enemy At The Door’s success has been its use of a range of outstanding British character actors which reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of acting talent- John Malcolm (Together), Pam St Clement & Michael Cashman (EastEnders), Ray Smith (Public Eye & Rooms), Antony Head (Buffy The Vampire Slayer), Alun Armstrong, John Nettles, Joss Ackland, David Hayman, Martin Jarvis-the list goes on.
We shall miss Enemy At The Door but it has been an accurate and poignant memorial of those difficult days which hopefully will have educated as well as entertaining many.
The good news of course is that in its place is the equally wonderful The Champions (1968-1969)- another winner Talking Pictures!
