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Frankie Howerd used to talk about Robin Day and his cruel glasses. The glint of Peter Taylor’s specs have lately become of interest to his directors, who tend to zoom in on them and his furrowed forehead as he ponders his past. Although he has worn them for as far back as I can remember, they are there, I would guess, to suggest age and wisdom. As a “green young reporter” in the 1960s, he told us last night on Age of Terror (BBC Two), he had hardly heard the word terrorism. Yet terrorism, particularly Irish terrorism, would become his specialist subject.
The first of this four-part series was a completely gripping and completely balanced account of the hijacking in 1976 of an Air France liner en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. The aircraft ended up in Entebbe airport in Uganda, leaving its Jewish passengers at the mercy of the four hijackers - two of them from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans from something called Revolutionary Cells - and, God help them, Idi Amin.
After some government-level vacillation, the Israeli Defence Forces launched a night raid that saved 100 hostages. Partly the success was due to their hitting upon an inspired solution to the problem of transporting soldiers quietly from the airport to the terminal. They ordered a black Mercedes of the type Amin himself travelled in, to which the typical Ugandan response was a salute. When Mossad instead delivered a white one, they thought laterally, and painted it.
Most of us know the story roughly, if only through movies such as Raid on Entebbe, but many details have faded. That made for suspense as the story unfolded mainly in the words of the hostages but aided by news footage and some discreet re-enactments. I did not remember that the one Israel soldier killed was the leader of the assault, Yoni Netanyahu, a man with such iron nerves that he slept all through the flight over even as his comrades puked out of nerves and air turbulence. His older brother, Binyamin, went on to become Israeli Prime Minister in the 1990s. Nor did I recall the disgusting detail that after the operation, Amin ordered the murder of Nora Bloch, a 75-year-old taken from the plane with a choking fit in order to recover in hospital.

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk