Hello! Welcome to another edition of the exclusive
audio commentary podcast hosted by David Hughes.
For this episode, I’m joined by Damien Lewis, author of the non-fiction book The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the first third of which is now a major motion picture directed by Guy Ritchie.
I read – no, devoured the book before I saw the film, but
if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered how many ‘based on a true story’ captions came up before the film started, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it – the story was just too deliciously outrageous to be true. But it is. Surely no human could possibly be as larger-than-life as Anders Lassen? Surely Operation Pitchfork, the truth about which was only declassified in 2016, couldn’t possibly have happened? It was like something out of James Bond, except Churchill was behind it, with both M and Ian Fleming in the room.
It took me a minute to vibe with the Commando comic/boys’ own adventure tone of the film, but once I’d tuned in to its wavelength, I had what can only be described as an outrageously good time with the film, and I’m sure, if you’re listening, you did too. Thanks to Damien’s page-burner – a page-turner where you turn the pages so fast they risk igniting – I already knew the background of the story, but I still wanted to dig deeper, and although time constraints meant Damien couldn’t go the full two-hour film commentary, much less what would have been a reductive and redundant scene-by-scene
breakdown, he did give us 90 minutes of gold, smuggled out not of Fernando Po or even Lisbon – that’ll make sense when you listen to the commentary – but from his study in Dorset, where he’s working on a new book, based – if you can believe this – on an even more unbelievable yet true story from the Second World War.
Enormous thanks to Damien, of course, but also Sophie Ransom and Poppy Delingpole for helping to set it up.
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Thanks for listening!
A Synchronicity production, conceived and presented by David Hughes. Produced by Sam Ibrahim. Music by Olli Oja.
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