Two articles written by Richard Burton attacking Churchill, one entitled "To Know Him is to Hate Him", caused great offense in the UK and the US when they were published in November 1974 before his program was broadcast. Burton's younger brother Graham Jenkins contended they were in poor taste after playing Churchill in a favorable light with considerable help from the wartime leader's family. It led to the blacklisting of Richard Burton from British TV drama for several years.
Richard Burton wrote in an article: "In the course of preparing myself to act the part of Winston Churchill in the television drama based on the first volume of his war memoirs, I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history. Lord Acton's observations that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and that "great men are almost always bad men" apply to Churchill as to all of history's other indirectly great men ... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, "We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth."? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity - but then so am I awed by Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane the Great, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. Yet so terrible a personification of evil cannot fail to raise every long-gone atavistic hair down the length of my spine. "That morbid creature, Hitler, of ferocious genius, that repository of human crime," Churchill said of the Austrian corporal. He might quite easily have been talking about himself when he had total authority over the British."
In one of his articles, Richard Burton accused Winston Churchill of having Welsh coal miners shot dead during the Tonypandy riots on 9 November 1910. In reality this never happened, as confirmed by Burton's younger brother Graham Jenkins in his 1988 book "Richard Burton: My Brother".
The BBC Drama Department banned Richard Burton for life after his attacks on Churchill. In the House of Commons, Norman Tebbit spoke of "an actor past his peak indulging in a fit of pique, jealousy and ignorant comment." Neville Trotter said, "If there were more Churchills and fewer Burtons we would be in a very much better country." Burton received scores of protesting letters. They went unanswered, even from friends like Robert Hardy. Burton later said, "Churchill has fascinated me since childhood, a bogeyman who hated us, the mining class, motivelessly. He ordered a few of us to be shot, you know, and the orders were carried out."
According to an interview with Robert Hardy, Richard Burton refused to shave his hair off to make himself look more like Churchill.