Last year the comedian Steve Punt filled in what little time remained away from The Now Show by launching Punt PI. Here he investigated tales of the unexpected, such as the discovery of 400 artificial legs under the floorboards of a house in Dorset.
Unfortunately, it took a bit of time to get used to the idea of Punt as a serious reporter of the unexplained — the artificial legs promised much jolly Goonery, for a start. Perhaps, now that the nation realises that this is serious, the second series, which began last Saturday (Radio 4, 10.30am), will attract a more solemn audience. Sadly, Punt didn’t help himself by kicking off with a programme that considered whether, had Germany defeated Britain in 1940, Hitler would have set up his headquarters in Du Cane Court, a block of flats in Balham, in southwest London. That’s “Bal-ham, Gateway to the South”, as immortalised in the Peter Sellers mockumentary. The undercurrent of japery was intensified when Punt spoke to a long-time resident of Du Cane Court, his fellow comedian Arthur Smith. Now there’s a man who, if he had the choice, would actually live in a joke.
But no, it was all perfectly serious, if silly. What happened was that, during the Blitz, a rumour became factoid that as the four acres of Du Cane Court had been spared the general mayhem it had been deliberately missed because Hitler had special plans for it. As it turned out, of course, the Nazis were as incapable of precision bombing as the Americans were during the Gulf or Iraq wars, and it was mere happenstance that Du Cane Court had suffered nary a scratch — as did, incidentally, Senate House at the University of London, another rumoured home for Nazi HQ. As were Blenheim Palace, Windsor Castle, Oxford, Blackpool and the town of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire. It was all as weird as the concept of the Gestapo setting up its torture factories in one of the West End clubs, the location apparently decided by a close examination of the works of P. G. Wodehouse.
Before Springtime for Hitler we had another whimsical tale of times past, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or, to be precise, The Race to Dover (Wednesday, Radio 4). Presented by the BBC’s cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew, it was a centenary tribute to Louis Blériot becoming the first man to fly across the Channel. But, for all Blériot’s Edwardian eccentricities (he couldn’t swim, for a start), it was the character of his chief, and only, challenger that caught the imagination.
Hubert Latham was a rich Anglo-French playboy who learnt to fly for the sole purpose of conquering the Channel, was possibly the first man to fly while smoking a cigarette, in a conveyance that was one big fire hazard, and whose attempt to claim the £10,000 prize on offer was scuppered, possibly by sabotage, when he overslept.
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He was eventually gored to death by a wounded buffalo while on safari — but what about the rumoured bullet hole in his forehead? Enter Punt, PI?