That Last Episode of Ridley Road
I think in a television drama it is alright - to some extent - to suspend disbelief. For example when Vivien, who her uncle made abundantly clear in episode 1 had no training whatsoever as an agent, could take on a household of murderous fascists, climb out onto the roof and then make her escape – well it’s TV after all.
Throughout the series, I and those watching with me, were trying to understand the point of Roza, Vivien’s cousin, in this plot. We learned that Roza had come to England as a refugee from Germany before the war broke out, most probably on one of the ‘kindertransports’, that I describe at the end of Without Let or Hindrance. Then, towards the end of the final episode we see why she is important: she gives Vivien her own Nazi German passport stamped with a ‘J’, marking her out as Jewish, so that Vivien can make her escape from England.
For anyone with any knowledge of the history, this was a laugh-out-loud moment and I was glad to hear later that Jo Bloom’s original novel did not include this scene. Here’s a list of mistakes all caught up in what was no more than 30 seconds of screen-time, some are simply ‘plot holes’, others are bad history:
1) Why is Vivien having to leave Britain using false documents? The previous scene shows her telling all to the police and demanding that they do something against Colin Jordan’s thugs and their plans to bring in arms from abroad. She is not arrested and she is not on the run from the law. Even if we are to believe that she feels unsafe now in the UK and that she needed to leave in a hurry, why not simply use her British passport?
2) The Nazi passport was issued to Roza in 1939 – we are shown the date. But that isn’t a plot-hole. These passports with the ‘J’ stamped on them were issued from toward the end of 1938. WW2 began less than a year later when travel for Jews from Germany ceased altogether (discounting of course the trains that would take them to the extermination camps in the East for which no passports would be required). Certainly after 1942 with no Jews left in Germany such a document had long expired.
3) How useful can a passport issued in 1939 be in 1962? It’s not as if the Nazi government was around to renew it. And why would England accept it as a legal travel document? It would only be valid in a holocaust museum.
4) Even if we are to assume that Vivien is being chased by fascists and needs to quickly go under cover, wouldn’t she want to use a false British Passport and to try to blend in with others rather than use the one ‘passport’ that would draw attention to her – the only person in the world in 1962 travelling on a 1939 Nazi passport. Not even Nazi’s escaping to South America used Nazi documents!
5) Roza would have been a child in 1939 and so would Vivien – if she had even been born – so how does putting Vivien’s current passport photo onto that document make any sense? The document would have been for a baby not someone in their twenties.
6) Vivien proffers this passport to the BEA flight attendant who takes a look at it and… accepts it without a murmur. Why? Did British officials routinely accept expired Nazi documents as a valid means of travel out of the country?
7) There is an implication here that, to get to Israel in 1962, you had to be a holocaust survivor to be able to get in and that you’d need to prove it via the use of Nazi documentation. This is simply not true. European immigrants to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s simply used their own, valid, passports like every other country. Israel’s Law of Return, in force from its establishment in 1948, was issued so that never again would Jews suffering from persecution have nowhere to flee to. Differing from the religious definition of what makes a person Jewish, the Israeli government said that if one Jewish grandparent was enough to send a person to Auschwitz, then that was the criteria to get you into Israel – irrespective of whether you were a holocaust survivor or not. This law is still on the statute books which, interestingly, means that the actress Agnes O’Casey, who played Vivien and who, I understand, has one Jewish grandmother, is also eligible for Israeli citizenship – and she can use her own passport.
