Jonathan Dimbleby: My Father and Belsen, review: After 80 years, the broadcaster's words still have the power to shock

Telegraph

05-05-2025

Very few news reports linger in the memory. We remember the news itself, of course, but not how it was delivered or by whom, because that barely matters. I can recall only two in vivid detail: Michael Buerk's 1984 dispatch on the Ethiopian famine, and Brian Hanrahan informing us of a successful mission by British jet fighters during the Falklands conflict: 'I counted them all out and I counted them all back.'
Richard Dimbleby's radio report on the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, as the first war correspondent to enter the camp and reveal the true depravity of the Nazi regime, remains the gold standard. It was revisited in Jonathan Dimbleby: My Father and Belsen (BBC Four), as part of a weekend of VE Day scheduling. This was a short but not slight programme, just 20 minutes long, and one imagines that the older man would have approved of its concision. It was not an indulgent piece of television, but a respectful tribute to one of the BBC's finest broadcasters.
Dimbleby's words in that April 1945 report still have the power to shock. The mother 'distraught to the point of madness,' putting her baby in the arms of a British soldier, who opened the bundle of rags to find that the child had been dead for days. The line: 'I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold fury as the men who opened the Belsen camp.'
According to his son, two things made him a master of the craft. 'One is an air of authority and gravitas in what he was saying; he used words well, which is critical in broadcasting. And he had an eye for the telling detail.' Consider this description of Belsen prisoners on that day: 'Behind the huts, two youths and two girls who had found a morsel of food were sitting together on the grass in picnic fashion, sharing it. They were not six feet from a pile of decomposing bodies.'
Remarkably, Dimbleby was only 32 at the time but, as Jonathan said, 'he had an air of authority, a measured, calm delivery that was oddly reassuring'. He did also love the excitement of war reporting, according to his son, and pinched some 'AH' monogrammed cutlery when he went into Hitler's bunker.
Where is today's Richard Dimbleby? There is no present-day equivalent, although there are several news presenters I can think of who have big enough egos to imagine themselves as his successor. Nobody has his gravitas, and these days, it's all a scramble for breaking news or viral clips.
He died in 1965 at the awfully young age of just 52, a few months after recording a Panorama in which he revisited Belsen to mark the 20th anniversary of the war's end. Jonathan said the programme was important to him because it was one of his father's final appearances while he was ill with cancer, but as a journalist, he also couldn't help marvelling at the technique on display: speaking to camera, no notes, delivered in one take. 'The professionalism,' said Jonathan. 'I look at it not only as a son but as a professional broadcaster thinking, 'Oh my goodness.''