An escape from reality

Yet the myths about the place live on, and last night's Escape from... Colditz (Five) did little to dispel them. Military historian Saul David made it sound as remote and impenetrable as Alcatraz (the subject of an earlier programme in this series), and quoted Goering's vainglorious boast that the high-security Nazi prison was " escapeproof ".

Yet 160 inmates managed to get out during WWII, only to discover that the really hard part was trying to escape from Germany itself, into neutral territory.

The Third Reich's big mistake, it seems, was their policy of keeping persistent escapees together in a single location, a stratagem that resulted in Colditz being "full of mechanical engineers, lock pickers, and explosives experts - not the sort who'd sit around quietly waiting for the end of the war", and all eager to educate each other in their specialist skills.

Sixty years on, that's an error that our own Home Office still doesn't seem to have rectif ied, repeatedly locking up young offenders with old lags in the belief that they're curbing crime, when they're actually enrolling them on a degree course in Advanced Criminality at Recidivist College.

The programme focused chiefly on Airey Neave, the simultaneously heroic and absurd lieutenant who arrived there in 1941, and became determined to improve national morale by "hitting a home run" (the POW's phrase for a successful return to Britain).

The tritanopic prisoner's first attempt to flee failed because he'd unwittingly dyed his imitation German uniform the wrong colour, but his second attempt at flight was a successful tale of derring-do (lest we forget, his third and final flight was masterminded by the INLA, with the aid of a mercury trigger car bomb).

However, unlike the hellhole of Auschwitz (also featured in this series), Colditz emerged from this documentary as a fairly safe and genteel place in which to sit out the war, and although some prisoners even went so far as to construct a glider in the basement, it's significant that they never actually tried to escape in it.

That may have been simply because it seemed to be far too big to fit through any available door or window, but judging from its rickety appearance and untested construction, they probably found the old parachutist's maxim passing through their heads whenever they considered an escape attempt by air: "If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving is not for you."

There's no doubt that the prisoners in Colditz had spunk by the bucketful (well, you have to relax somehow in a German prisoner of war camp), but there's equally no doubt that many of their exploits long ago crossed the boundary that separates fact from semi-fiction.

Of course, nations need myths in time of war, but we've thankfully been (moreorless) at peace now for 60 years, and with Five claiming that it's anxious to shed its Nazis 'n' porn image, surely it's time to stop romanticising the grim and messy business of war.

Nowadays, the dungeons that incarcerate far too many people on this planet are the prisons of disease, poverty, and hunger, so let's instead celebrate the work of charities that are trying to set the Third World free, and salute people such as the conscientious objector I once met who has devoted his life to good work, and summed up his philosophy to me thusly: "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and he will sit in a boat all day and get smashed out of his head on strong lager."