What we got was interviews with a couple of American veterans one of whom has become a writer though we weren’t told that

What we got was interviews with a couple of American veterans (one of whom has become a writer, though we weren’t told that), quirky anecdotes about Herman Goering’s nail polish, and the confused central thesis repeated over and over against a remarkable, though unsourced, series of archive clips. One, in particular, showed a prisoner bursting through a first-floor balcony, being dragged back inside and, seconds later, a bullet breaking the glass. It was a poignant illustration of the point that the narrator was making about Goering and police power. Playing it back, though, you saw how the jerky movements suggested an earlier, maybe even silent, era of film-making. Was this image fact or fiction? It was a question that surrounded the whole programme.After winning an award for Pandora’s Box, Curtis has clearly decided he is an artist, eschewing the traditional dirty realism of British documentary for the higher impressionism. Such creative licence would be admirable, were this not a producer who repeatedly rebukes the Allies for playing fast and loose with the truth. At Nuremberg, we are told that the prosecutors showed a six-hour film of edited lowlights from the Third Reich One of Curtis’s witnesses describes this film as biased.

What would an unbiased film have shown – the Waffen SS giving piggy backs to gypsy children? The aggrieved tone reminded you of one of those Rough Justice scripts: “He was a small dark Austrian with a moustache who only wanted to be left in peace to take over the world, now he is being forced to take the blame for a war he didn’t commit!”The really insulting thing about The Living Dead is that Curtis assumes the victors didn’t give a second thought to the war, whereas in fact we have had 50 years of historical sleuthing and moral soul-searching. Few of the soldiers who returned home safe will have believed that evil had been routed forever. They had cut one head off the hydra, but others would sprout in the next generation. According to one of Curtis’s witnesses, the Allies were “destroying human beings for the sake of a new post-war world”. Pardon me, I was under the impression they were obliged to destroy human beings so that there would be a world left at all.Curtis would not have done well on Monkhouse’s Memory Masters (BBC1) which only recruits “ordinary people with normal memories”. You can picture the scene: “So, Adam Curtis, did we win the war?” “No, it was a dead heat between two equal evils.” The show sends contestants on a course to learn techniques that improve recall Three then compete against each other. There is none of the poignant undertow or gut tug of real remembering, this is strictly statistical: “Marcel Proust, a writer from Cambrai, you have 20 seconds to recall how many madeleines were consumed by your village between 1880 and 1885, starting now!” Admittedly, there was a certain fancy-that frisson watching Anne, Brian and Stephanie match the names of 120 Littlewoods employees to their telephone extensions, but like a bore’s party trick it soon palled.

The best – because the most human – parts of the show came when contestants confessed the word pictures they had drawn in their minds as an aide-memoire. “For Dean Anthony Wall,” explained Stephanie, “I had a picture of James Dean leaning against a wall with an ant up his leg, eating a bag of crisps.” Of course.There is no forgetting Bob Monkhouse. That nicotine complexion, the slow snake smile, those deliquescent eyes – you can imagine him on the back of a wagon yelling: “Roll up, roll up, Monkhouse’s Patent Palsy Remedy!” This is pretty much the role he has carved out for himself in TV – a huckster of tat who secretes a charm so oleaginous that even the rustiest format works without a squeak. It’s all in the voice, the way the hushed intensive- care manner suddenly brightens to a yelp of approval. But even Bob’s sly comic gifts can’t make this a show to remember.It was bad timing by BBC1 to launch the dreary Castles in the very week that Howards’ Way began its triumphant lunchtime rerun.