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TV ONLINE EPISODE GUIDE
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Synopsis : Germany 1939. At the outbreak of war Schulz is released from Spandau jail where he has served a sentence for fraud. His aim is to sit out the war in a safe and anonymous job far from hostilities: instead he is mistakenly recruited into SS Counter Espionage, with hair-raising consequences. Notes : The series was transmitted 9:35pm to 10:25pm on BBC 2.
Cast : John Sharpnel, Fanny Carby, Derek Newark, Eric Carte, Michael Barrington, Hugh Walters, Michael Bilton, Geoffrey Lumsden, Ron Welling, John J Carney, Eamon Boyce, Robert McBain and Roy Montague. Synopsis
: May 1940. Schulz parachutes into England with two million
pounds in fivers - his mission, to spend them unobtrusively and
return to the Fatherland. But things go wrong from the moment
he enters an English pub and orders a coffee.
Cast : John Shrapnel, Terence Suffolk, Clive Merrison, Mark Wingett and Derek Martin. Synopsis
: Schulz once more falls beneath the capricious command of
Major Neuheim: but his hopes soar when fate places within his
grasp Neuheim's sexy new secretary - and a million pounds.
Cast : John Ratzenberger, John Savident, Clive Merrison, John Moffatt, Jack Soutar, Ian Patrick, Ray Hassett and Mark Wingett. Synopsis
: After two years' hard labour Schtulz is accidentally reunited
with Solly and the rest of Neuheim's forgers. But Germany is on
the brink of defeat - and Operation Bernhard about to fall into
the clutches of the advancing Americans.
Cast : Howard Goorney, Robert Cartland, Eve Bland, Tony Caunter, Billy Murray, Roger Lloyd Pack and Richard Coleman. Synopsis : The war is over, Schulz, penniless and disrupted, and forced to pawn his last belongings, rediscovers the map marking the spot in England where he was parachuted in 1940. The possibility of retrieving a part of his elusive fortune suddenly beckons him. The following text appeared in the Radio Times to promote the first episode of the series: In Deep Water - There was a plan afoot. Forged fivers were to flood the British wartime economy. Private Schulz thought it up, Major Neuheim took it up. The notes are now at the bottom of an Austrian lake. This six-part dramatisation, based on the true Second World War fiasco, is bleakly funny. The Third Reich didn't benefit, especially its representative Private Schulz. Madeleine Kingsley delves into the story and talks to two of the principal actors: It is not the water lilies of Lake Toplitz that excite local interest so much as the occasional British banknote seen floating on the surface of Austria's deep and most mysterious waters. Quite how much counterfeit currency still remains buried in these aquatic depths cannot accurately be told. But what is certain is that the five-hundred-million-pounds worth of ingeniously forged - mainly British - banknotes, hastily decanted there in 1945, were destined for the banks of a very different shore. If "Operation Bernhard" had succeeded - and some say the notes were perfect enough to deceive even Bank of England experts - then the phoney currency would have been injected into the British economy "like a dose of flu". "Operation Bernhard" must, however, go down as one of the most bizarre, oft-bungled businesses of wartime history. It originated, fittingly enough, from a former ladies' underwear salesman turned SS clerk, one Johann Rasch. It was conceived as retaliation for a storm of forged German clothing-coupons rained upon the Third Reich in 1939 and had, most ironically, to be conducted in strict secrecy, since both the German Chancery and the Gestapo (neither outfit exactly noted for its abhorrence of bombs or gas chambers) decried the exercise as a dastardly breach of the Geneva Convention. Now "Operation Bernhard" is one of those wild but true tales one delights to hear, then files away forever in the mind as a half-forgotten curiosity. Unless, that is, one happens to be a television dramatist of critical and popular acclaim, like the late Jack Pulman (award-winning adapter of The Golden Bowl, War And Peace and Crime And Punishment), in which case the professional potential of the story and its attendant SS exploits nag and chip away at the imagination until, as Barbara Young, actress and Jack Pulman's widow, says, "It became one of Jack's main objectives in life to show how very nearly our world was brought to a standstill by what he called B-feature film gangsters. The story symbolised for him the madness into which Europe was plunged in 1939, and the six-part series Private Schulz - which you might call a macabre farce - was one of the last pieces of work her completed". Like the real-life Rasch (to whom he owes his fictional birth) Private Schulz starts wartime life as a purveyor of "smalls" who has been twice imprisoned for fraud and then ejected on to the streets of the Fatherland "like an unwanted pfennig from a slot machine". "Scultz," says Michael Elphick, who plays the title role, "is one of life's survivors. He is not a Nazi, he is not even a war patriot or a `mercenary' soldier, so it is easy for the audience to sympathise with him without discomfort. He is a victim of circumstance who puts in for a sleepy niche in Postal Censorship, well away from the military action, and finds himself, instead, appointed to the post of confidential clerk to SS officer Major Neuheim in Counter-Espionage". A survivor Schulz may be, but he is also a chronic loser. Says Elphick, "Although Schulz dreams up the banknote forgery, Major Neuheim reaps the credit. Schulz falls for three lovely ladies but never manages to get off with any of them". For Elphick, the single reservation regarding Private Schulz was whether a Nazi comedy might not prove a contradiction in terms. He raised the question with actor Cyril Shaps, who is himself Jewish and plays Solly, an ex-jailbird mate of Schulz who becomes his ace counterfeiter. "Shaps," says Elphick, "felt that, though we should never lost sight of the appalling reality of that time, there was also perhaps a place for poking fun at this particular Nazi episode which has such preposterous overtones". "Certainly nothing cruel is done in the series, other than to the Nazis themselves, and much of the action takes place outside Germany - in Holland and Britain," agrees Ian Richardson, who plays Major Neuheim. "One is rightly sensitive about the Nazi uniform and insignia. The owners of the castle in Wales where we filmed would only allow the swastika to fly from their flagpole while the cameras were actually turning. In theory the piece could be played in any uniform and it would be a pity if the tailoring were allowed to get in the way of a rattling good yarn. My starting point was the fact that Neuheim is a basically stupid man who believes himself quite brilliant, a man capable of the most dreadful blunders who is always threatening to put Schulz in prison or have him shot, even though Schulz is the real brains behind the operation. It's typical of Neuheim that he whacks his stick on an exploding canister of banknotes, because such is his arrogance that he simply couldn't believe a high-ranking German officer could possibly be vulnerable. You laugh at him with disdaine as much as amusement. At no time do I turn Neuheim into a hero". For Richardson, the main problem of the production was finding the right "style" of playing. "That style," he explains, "was obviously going to be balanced on a razor's edge to avoid the cliché of Nazi bullying on the one hand and pure goose-step on the other. We took out all the obvious overworked Nazi clichés. There are no thick guttural accents - all the Germans speak proper English. SS officer Bernhard Naujocks, on whom the Neuheim character is based, actually wore a black eye-patch and his face was heavily scarred, but it is one of those theatrical truths that real life is sometimes too wild to be credible in drama. I simply had a military haircut and applied the brilliantine". Since he was already familiar with the style of the series and because, he says modestly, he has a "small reputation" for character work, Richardson was asked to take on, besides the part of Neuheim, two further parts in episodes three and six of Private Shultz. "I think, I certainly hope," he says, "I am completely unrecognisable. As the English agent, Melfort, I speak with a terribly C Aubrey Smith cricket accent, and as Stan, a villainous thug whom Shultz recruits to help him, my tones are flat, lower-class Scots. Yet all three characters I play have one thing in common: each in his own way spells Nemesis for poor Shultz". Neither Richardson nor Elphick knew Jack Pulman, yet both actors feel he has brought off with rare black humour a difficult, perhaps even controversial dramatic coup. Pulman was well known for delivering the impossible: Henry James' The Golden Bowl he rendered into family entertainment and he transformed Robert Graves' I, Claudius - a novel resoundingly empty of dialogue - into a television masterpiece, where the imperial characters lived not just as two-dimensional togas but, as Pulman said, "as a sort of Roman mafia, running a family business". It therefore seems only right and proper that it should be Pulman, himself Jewish and raised, as he once said, on the rise and fall of Talmudic rhetoric, who has reworked the Nazi theme to make us smile after the years of crying. Who else? (Radio Times, May 2, 1981 - Article by Madeleine Kingsley).
The series was created by Jack Pulman, produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and directed by Robert Chetwyn. |
 Michael Elphick starring as Private Schulz. The curious case of the counterfeit cash proved to be the comic lifeblood for Private Schulz, a six-part comedy-drama series penned by the renowned Jack Pulman and transmitted shortly after his death in May 1981. The famously bungled endeavours of German forces to flood Britain with counterfeit currency in a campaign to destabilise the British economy during wartime was of a historical circumstance always open to a darkly comic treatment, and under Pulman's experienced handling the series proved to be one of the more notable entries into BBC Television's early-1980s schedules. The story itself concerned the release from Spandau prison of Gerhard Schulz (played by Michael Elphick), a former purveyor of "smalls" who has been in and out of prison on a relative revolving door for various fraudulent activities. Determined to serve out the Second World War from as far behind the lines as possible, he undertakes a desk job at the Postal Censorship department so as to remain clear of the hostilities and push a pen throughout the conflict. However, the simple life he so readily pursues is soon interrupted when he is mistakenly recruited by SS Counter Espionage to serve under Major Neuheim (Ian Richardson), a man with an eye on the main chance and always prepared to serve the German cause, provided that the cause serves him to equal or additional measure. SS Counter Espionage, charged with providing the Third Reich with new and more interesting ideas and concepts on how to win the war by frustrating their enemies, proved precisely the right place for Schulz to exercise his talents: a bold plan to drop forged five-pound notes from the sky across Britain. A thoroughly mad scheme which would only appeal to equally insane visionaries, Neuheim almost immediately claimed ownership of the idea and set Schulz to work on the detail. He employed the services of counterpart Solly (Cyril Shaps), a master forger who would ensure the success of the plan, whilst he himself wiled away his days at Salon Kitty in the company of Bertha Freyer (Billie Whitelaw), where he keep an eye trained on other people's conversations (usually from the bedroom) so as to further his own ends. Later, Schulz undertook covert operations inside the United Kingdom, armed with the forged currency and determined to make his brainchild succeed, yet ill-at-ease with British protocol (ordering a coffee in a Public House was always going to prove to be his undoing), and upon his return to Germany he once again locked horns with Neuheim, who was quite happy to blame Schulz for the failure of the plan in equal measure to his dogged pursuit of glory at its creation. The story spanned the period from the summer of 1939 to the end of the war, with Schulz emerging as a penniless man of little or no social standing, but on the trail of a fair proportion of the forged currency he buried after parachuting into the United Kingdom in 1940. A delightfully black tale which underlined BBC Television's pedigree in terms of delivering comic fare from the most seemingly bleak of situations and circumstances, the series also offered notable supporting performances from the likes of Ken Campbell, Vernon Dobtcheff, Gawn Grainger, Walter Sparrow and Caroline Blakiston. The series enjoyed high production values courtesy of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and director Robert Chetwyn, matched by a memorable score from Carl Davis, and the inclusion of newsreel footage at the start of each episode, pinpointing the precise point at which the war had reached so as to provide a social significance, as it were, to the proceedings of the series itself, was also a nice touch. This macabre farce was globally exported but has never been commercially released in any format. Text © Matthew Lee, 2005. |