Rich Hall's Red Menace

Rich Hall, the perennial grumbly and gravel-voiced comedian who has been about fifty-odd for what seems like a billion years, is supremely adept at opening sarcastic windows for BBC4 viewers to gaze wryly at modern American culture through. He's done quite a few of these documentaries now and they are always at the very least supremely fascinating - his gaze is a particularly idiosyncratic one and when looking at something as serious as postwar US-Soviet tensions it's deeply refreshing to see it so bafflingly stared at.

What's nice here is the strangely reassuring human foolishness of both sides which is plucked at - details I'd never really heard or properly considered like the many occasions where human error alone nearly pushed both countries over the brink - how bombs more powerful than those that annihilated Hiroshima accidentally dropped from a plane onto a rural community in South Carolina and how the churches in the area benefitted from the fallout (or lack thereof).

Hall's patented world-weary Southern drawl is as strangely familiar to me as the sound of the six o'clock pips on the news every night - and I hope he continues to open these windows for us silly Brits for many more decades to come.

I've not watched a Rich Hall BBC4 documentary for a while, but have always enjoyed them, mostly for him and his style. In this film that was the case again, although the subject was pretty well framed and presented. It does have reach in what it is about though, and it manages to look at the Cold War in a way that takes us through the cultural aspects of it, but also in a way that explains why he asks early on: "Given the nature of basic human ineptitude, one question stands out - how did we not blow each other up?".

This is shown in discussions over events that are fortuitous at best, where disaster was averted by dumb luck, and where those in charge of the situations were not always making the best calls. He does this mostly by direct narration, whether over him talking or over archive footage. It is well edited together and engaging. As a historical documentary, it does need you to know more than it will tell you - but to be fair it sets out its stall as being within the bigger history, so it is not 'failing' in that way. Hall himself is good, although less funny than he has been in previous films or things I've seen him in - but he is very natural in this documentarian role.

Worth a look for its tone and approach to history.