The Secret Army
BBC4
It is 1972, and a red-haired young woman in a small blue car drives through Belfast as a pleasant Irish ditty plays. She pulls up outside a building before making a call from a telephone box: “We’ve just put a bomb in the Queen’s University sports club. It’s set to go off in 20 minutes.” Cut to the building exploding.
Just the kind of shocking everyday event in Belfast in 1972: the mundane hand in hand with the murderous. But who was filming this woman? Not the IRA, but rather an American documentary team led by a New York academic J Bowyer Bell. As Northern Ireland would reel from one bombing, Bell and crew would be filming preparations for the next
