Private Shultz

Continuing my odyssey through old television series, this week I have been mostly watching Private Shultz (which Ava Alexis brought me the year before last but I’ve been too busy to watch) featuring a very young Michael Elphick and Ian Richardson as about three different characters…  This series is so old that Elphick looks positively youthful and slim … The supposed story of the Germans attempts to counterfeit bank of England notes (Operation Bernhard).  The part I particularly remember is episode 6 where they hunt for the lost canister of stolen money which is now inconveniently buried beneath a public lavatory.  There’s something really moving about the desperation and sheer greed of all the characters involved.  Early on in the story there’s a lot of double dealing but it’s the literal end scramble for money that is most memorable as it somehow summarises much of the pointlessness of many people’s existence.  

Shultz may be a genius but he has no ambition beyond the acquisition of wealth and neither really do many of his criminal associates.  One can see future shadows of Allo Allo in this as they all chase after the valuable McGuffin … Greed is a universal theme in drama but it's seldom explored as well as this.  Forging money and the consequences of it open a pandora's box here where almost everyone who might be tempted is tempted and at the same time people team up to try and get the cash but never stand by one another as they are allies of convenience.  A deeper theme under the surface is the ethics of using money as a weapon.  Is it a war crime?  And if it is what are the consequences of that?  We all rely on money as a glue to hold society together - without it we're all reliant on barter and its double coincidence of wants.  The idea of forging bank notes today seems positively quaint of course with money increasingly reduced to cards, numbers on computers and apple pay phones and watches.  A wave of a wrist and thousands swish between IP connections... Gone are the days when Arthur Daley was always "holding folding"...  Money is more ethereal than ever today but still as unreliable and prone to inflation...

Quite a dark element of the plot is the use of concentration camp labour – a brilliant performance by Cyril Shaps as Iphraim "Solly" Solikoff – who fortunately escape in the end … which seems to be what actually happened in real life.  This keeps things slightly upbeat and there is final redemption for Shultz in the form of former prostitute Bertha Freya (Billie Whitelaw) who sex works at Salon Kitty where the rooms are bugged to try and extract information from the disloyal - here Shultz entrapped the adulterous Professor Bodelschwingh (David Swift) to solve all the mathematical problems....  

Salon Kitty was also a real place and really bugged and used as an industrial honeytrap by the Nazis.  Indeed, it’s fun working out which bits of history have been woven in from where… so much of all this is forgotten history now.  But I haven’t forgotten anyway…

Not just yet…

Once all this seemed a long way away but with Sir Alex Younger ex of MI6 being wheeled out to warn us we need to introduce Sweedish style concription WWIII looks closer every day...