When DS Terry Batchelor received the call informing him of the whereabouts of the French couple suspected of bombing the Rainbow Warrior, he was eating a pie. The suspects were in Auckland, he learned, preparing to return their hired Toyota HiAce campervan to the rental depot. A scoop! Batchelor, who was based nearby, gathered his team and set off in hot – and ultimately successful – pursuit. And the pie? “Actually,” reflects the retiree, peering at us over his moustache, “I hadn’t started the pie yet.” A pause, heavy with the threat of italics. “But I was about to.”
There is a lot of this sort of thing in Sky Documentaries’ Rainbow Warrior, a feature-length retelling of the events surrounding the July 1985 sinking of the titular Greenpeace flagship. That is to say; granular recollections, delivered by elderly men with combative facial hair, seemingly irrelevant in isolation but riveting and oddly comforting when viewed as part of a startling and frequently unhinged whole.
