Orde Wingate - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

  • In 1976 the BBC produced a three-part drama called Orde Wingate, based on his life, in which he was played by Barry Foster. The programme was made on a limited budget with reduced or stylized settings. It did not attempt to tell the complete story of his life, but presented key episodes in a non-linear way, mainly his time in Palestine but including Burma. Foster reprised his role as Wingate in a 1982 TV movie A Woman Called Golda.
  • A fictionalised version of Wingate called "P.P. Malcolm" appears in Leon Uris's novel Exodus, while he also appears in another Leon Uris novel, The Haj. Additionally, in James Michener's The Source, a reference is made to the "Orde Wingate Forest", which is located in Israel at Mount Gilboa.
  • "Wingate and Chindits" is an episode of the documentary TV series Narrow Escapes of World War II first presented in the United States on the Military Channel in 2012.
  • An episode of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest titled "AMOK" features a highly fictional take on Wingate's legacy in which his death was "a bit of a charade...and a devilishly clever one at that". While exploring in Borneo, the Quest clan come across a mysterious valley and native village headed by Orde Wingate II, a fictionalized son of the true man. It is explained that during the course of WWII, Wingate had come across the valley and befriended the people indigenous to it. Finished with the war and knowing that the Allied Powers were close to winning in the Pacific, Wingate decided to lay low and live out the rest of his life peacefully in the valley, and so faked the plane crash leading to his apparent demise. In order to protect the valley from intruders, he created the identity of the Amok, a savage sloth-like, Bigfoot creature based on an Indonesian guardian spirit.

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