Charlie Catchpole's TV Column: This was C4's slimiest hour..

WHAT did you do in the class war, daddy? Well son, I helped to make a television documentary belittling the pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain as a bunch of rich, privileged, public school toffs.

I expect Ross Wilson, producer and director of The Few: A Secret History Special (Tuesday C4), is proud of this nasty, mean-spirited, programme.

This sneering, sniping, sneaky attack used the 60th anniversary of their Finest Hour to try to do what the Luftwaffe couldn't - destroy The Few.

He should be thoroughly ashamed.

In true Secret History style, it began by inventing a myth, and then debunked it.

After a clip from some old black and white movie, with plummy-voiced chaps braying things like "Hello, Bunny! Good show! Quite a picnic, sir!" narrator Denis Lawson said: "The Battle of Britain has become the stuff of legend.

"Dashing young pilots with upper-class accents scrambled in their Spitfires to take on the might of the Luftwaffe in the skies above southern England...

"But the myth-making that followed the battle has obscured the truth of who The Few really were..."

The myth-making? The movie-making, more like.

No one in their right mind believes that all Battle of Britain pilots were chinless wonders with handle-bar moustaches, who treated fighting Jerry as an extension of fox-hunting - "Jolly good sport, what?"

That was the image created in propaganda films like Spitfire Parade towards the end of the war, and reinforced in the Fifties with Reach For The Sky, with Kenneth More playing Douglas Bader.

Actors spoke posh, because that was the way actors spoke in those days.

Received Pronunciation, it's called.

It wouldn't have fitted Secret History's sneering agenda to show a clip from a more recent film, The Battle Of Britain, in which Ian McShane played a very far from plummy-voiced pilot, would it?

That film also emphasised something which Secret History gave the impression had been covered up for years - that a huge proportion of pilots in the summer of 1940 were Poles and Czechs or came from the old Commonwealth - New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans and Rhodesians.

The thrust of the programme was that the RAF's commissioned Pilot Officers (rich, public school playboys, etc) fought a constant war against the non-commissioned Sgt Pilots (poor, grammar school, salt of the

earth, etc). Pilot Officers would object to Sgt Pilots leading them into battle, even though they had more experience.

And Sgt Pilots had to put up with inferior living quarters.

In one squadron, where they shared a Nissan hut, commissioned and non-commissioned pilots slept on different sides of a dividing curtain.

There was even a disgraceful suggestion, hedged round with weasle words like "usually" "often" and "tended to", that non-commissioned pilots were deliberately given the most dangerous positions in battle, which made them more vulnerable to Luftwaffe attacks.

Apparently, there are around 300 surviving Battle of Britain pilots, of all classes.

Secret History sought the views of about half a dozen of them.

What I wanted to scream at the screen, every time some bearded historian popped up to moan about rich toffs thinking they had some God-given right to lord it over working class lads, was that this wasn't unique to the RAF.

This was the way things were in society generally in the Thirties.

Horrible when seen from today's viewpoint, but true.

You might as well get worked up about Lord Nelson never inviting sailors from below decks to dine at the Captain's table on HMS Victory.

Much was made of inadequate training, and misguided battle tactics.

But pilots had to get into action in a hurry, and tactical mistakes are made in battles.

It happens.

Oh, and another thing.

We won. We British won.

I think that may have been mentioned.

Briefly, somewhere towards the end.