CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: When Churchill sent the King a gift-wrapped gun... to kill Nazis By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail Published: 00:35 BST, 6 May 2019 | Updated: 00:35 BST, 6 May 2019 Viewcomments D-Day: The King Who Fooled Hitler Rating: Tenable All Stars Rating: Talk about On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It seems the Queen has aired one or two ideas about foreign policy over the years that might have required James Bond and his licence to kill. A fascinating coda, at the end of D-Day: The King Who Fooled Hitler (C4), described a dinner at Buckingham Palace in 1955, during a time of increased Arab nationalism in the Middle East. Prime Minister Anthony Eden was at the monarch's elbow, as was a Foreign Office mandarin named Evelyn Shuckburgh, who recorded the royal conversation in his diary. King George VI played a key role in fooling the Nazis as to the Allies' invasion plans ahead of the D-Day landings Jordan's 19-year-old King Hussein, an Old Harrovian, was under the malign influence of his uncle, Sharif Nasser Bin Jamil. The Queen remarked pointedly that 'she was surprised nobody had found means of putting something in his coffee'. The implication seemed obvious — assassination. Shuckburgh was so startled that he could only make a bland joke about how many people might deserve the same treatment. Afterwards, he wished he had thought to remind Queen Elizabeth that Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered after her predecessor Henry II once made a similar comment out loud. No one who watched this documentary (and waded through its often irrelevant archive footage) could fail to understand that the Windsors have a warlike side. Warwick Davies is on to a winner with Tenable All Stars True, George VI backed PM Neville Chamberlain's efforts to avert hostilities with Germany in the Thirties by appeasing Hitler, but that was because the King had seen active service during World War I. When Nazi invasion loomed in 1940, George refused to evacuate his family from Britain. He was determined to stay and fight, and told Winston Churchill that he intended to 'kill his German'. Churchill retorted that he might have to kill more than one, and sent him a gift-wrapped Thompson sub-machine gun. All the family practised firing it, though the Queen Mum found more entertainment in shooting rats in the palace gardens with her revolver. Vignettes like these were the real gems hidden in the show. The main research centred on the King's role as a decoy before the D-Day landings. The royal diary, including troop inspections, was choreographed to mislead German spies about the Allied plans. That's not much of a scoop. Much more fun was the tale of how, after the war, George was eager to read an MI5 account of the role played by daring double-agents. The manuscript was beyond top secret... but the King absent-mindedly tucked it away in a despatch box on his desk. It was lost for more than a year, until the Queen Mum uncovered it. If the Queen, a fan of quiz shows, was watching Tenable All Stars (ITV), she might have scored well on the opening round — by naming Bond movies with the letter 'Y' in the title. Tight budget of the weekend: Chris Wade filmed The Immortal Orson Welles (Talking Pictures, Freeview 81) for £1,000. His hero wasn't so frugal. Costs of The Magnificent Ambersons soared to over $1 million (the equivalent $16million today). Surely she would have beaten former javelin champion Tessa Sanderson, whose first answer was Live And Let Die. There's no 'Y' in that... unless she was thinking of Roger Moore's hair — Live And Let Dye, perhaps. Daytime telly viewers will be familiar with this game, where Warwick Davis challenges players to compile lists of ten items in frequently fiendish categories. This is its first evening screening, and if the success of the Beeb's Pointless Celebrities is any guide, Warwick's on a winner. The questions were slightly easier. Tessa and her fellow ex-athletes were asked to name ten cities that hosted the Olympics — practically their specialist subject. But it's all for charity, so that's fair. Share or comment on this article: All rights reserved for this news site dailymail and under his responsibility