Hail the victory

Tonight's episode of Waking the Dead was another weekly foray into an extreme environment, this time a thinly-disguised BNP and underground white supremacist activists. Cue the usual American History X-inspired black-and-white flashbacks to neo-Nazi gatherings - bare-chested skinheads chanting in underground meetings.

It reminded me of the one thing that always puzzles me about depictions of UK fascists: why do they always chant "Sieg Heil" at these mini-Nuremberg rallies? Is it that the enjoy either the sound of the German, or the irony of using a foreign language to describe their ultra-Britishness? Or should that be Uber-Britishness?

A third possibility is that they might not know what it means, but figure it sounds threatening enough to the average English ear. Or maybe it is simply a lazy assumption on the part of scriptwriters who don't fancy checking out a White Power meeting in order to sample the tone of voice - and the result is the equivalent of a Stonewall meeting as depicted by Jim Davidson.