Sinatra and the Mob

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  Simon Hoggart

  Sinatra and the Mob

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

And more, much more than this, he popularised ‘My Way’, which some of us will never forgive. The song is a karaoke anthem for people who’ve spent their lives being ordered around by others — as proved to be the case with Sinatra. There was a sad coda; after the Kennedy family had used his Mob connections to get JFK elected, they cut him dead. Then the Beatles and the Vietnam War combined to finish off his career. I can’t say I felt particularly sorry, then or now.

Something else we knew was that both Stalin and Hitler were very bad men, and stupid, too. Warlords (Channel 4, Sunday) is a series about the four great leaders of the second world war, and how they spent their time trying to fool each other with psychological trickery. Or, rather, plain common or garden trickery. So we saw the old familiar newsreels: the Battle of Britain, Operation Barbarossa, Hitler doing a little jig in his mountain eyrie. Most of the revelations were of this order: Hitler thought the Red Army would not fight, Stalin believed that Hitler would not invade. But David Morrisey’s voice-over was firm, urgent and never over the top.

Next month, the Adolf Hitler Vegetarian Cookbook. ‘As the Wehrmacht marched into Poland [cue stock footage] Hitler was eating a nut cutlet in Berchtesgarten. By the time his armies had seized Paris [more stock footage] he had moved on to a lentil and roast pepper bake. When news of the D-Day landings [yet more footage] reached Berlin, Goebbels recorded in his diary: “The Fuhrer and Eva Braun shared a dish of cauliflower cheese.”’

There is a sub-genre of television which you might call nerd TV. The master practitioner is Jon Ronson. You need to look like a lonely schoolboy, not good-looking enough to have a girlfriend, and you must have an awful haircut. Glasses help. You need an affable, slightly breathless, na