'Gallipoli: When Murdoch Went to War', BBC2

Anzac commemorations remind us again of the "nationhood forged in blood" in the Dardanelles in 1915, when Australia and New Zealand proved themselves in an impossible task: to invade a heavily defended enemy coastline with practicalities thrown together in 33 days (D-Day was planned over two years). Today Australian historians separate the symbolic and the patriotic from the historical: the story was more complex than Churchill's "soft underbelly" strategy and top-brass blundering. It owes much to news management and included a "pom-bashing element" (Max Hastings).

John Kirby's clear-eyed film, Gallipoli: When Murdoch Went to War (Saturday, BBC2 8.30pm) is as much about journalistic coverage as fighting. When Australian Keith Murdoch defended his false assertions that troops were driven up the beach at pistol-point by bullying generals, he replied it was "journalistic truth . . . higher truth".

A stay in Edwardian London had shocked Murdoch with its poverty, ceremony and - significantly - the power of the popular press to whip up feeling. Arriving late at Gallipoli when most of the fighting was over, he fell in with the champagne-quaffing journo Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who fed him with caricatures of the British command, including Sir Ian Hamilton, a liberal-minded poet and novelist whose main fault was consenting to an impossible task. The picture of effete socialites presiding over incompetence and chaos was found in a smuggled letter confiscated from Murdoch by the military. He rewrote it and press magnate Lord Northcliffe ran with it to harm the government. Add a patriotic spin, and the great Anzac image emerged.

The film fields historians, British and Antipodean, who place the Anzac feat in context. Many still think of Gallipoli as a Southern Cross battle. In fact the film's assertion that 20,000 Australians and Kiwis fought alongside 51,000 British, Indians and French is often overlooked in popular memory.

Gallipoli's begetter Churchill survived, Murdoch thrived. Each would leave an imprint, though the empire of one declined while the other's flourished - as Rupert, his son and heir, here testifies.

Photograph: Blakeway Productions

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