The World at War and the Lost Art of the TV Documentary Series
1968 was a year of exciting change in Britain. Arthur C Clarke published 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine hit cinemas, and the first Isle of Wight music festival was held, a year before Woodstock. British television was changing, too. The publicly funded BBC had been the only broadcaster in the country from 1927 until Independent Television (ITV) was founded in 1955. ITV was a private broadcaster, supposed to act as an umbrella for local networks all across the country. By 1968, it had grown into a major player on the British media scene, and its first round of contracts with local networks had come up for renewal. The fight for the contract to produce programming for London was particularly contentious, and after much brouhaha it was awarded to the newly-formed Thames Television, the product of a merger between two production companies.
Thames Television were eager to make their mark on a TV landscape still largely dominated by the BBC, so in 1969, less than twelve months after their formation, they made the bold decision to spend four years and £900,000 (£11.5 million or $18 million today) making a 26-episode documentary about the Second World War. It was, at the time, the most expensive series in the history of British television.
It was the perfect time for such a production. Britain had spent six years fighting the war, but more than a decade recovering from it. Commodities like sugar, milk and meat were still rationed well into the 1950s, and reconstruction work on areas devastated by German bombing had taken even longer. By the end of the Sixties, Britain was finally starting to move on. Children who had grown up with no memory of the violent reality of war on their doorstep were becoming adults. As society faced the new challenge of a cold war, there was an opportunity to reflect on the older conflicts of the century.
Although Britain was recovering and progressing, the war had not been forgotten. Those who had been middle- and high-ranking military officers and politicians when the war began, and had been lucky enough to survive it, were for the most part still alive and able to tell their stories. It’s these first-hand accounts that form the backbone of The World at War, and make it an invaluable historical document.
Jeremy Isaacs, the series’ producer, knew exactly how important these accounts were. He realised that in another twenty years most of the veterans of WWII would be dead, so he set about trying to record their stories as comprehensively as possible. He managed to secure interviews with an astonishing array of people from all sides of the conflict with knowledge of all aspects of the war. Isaacs decided to focus on the aides and adjutants of the great leaders in the war, rather than the leaders themselves. Albert Speer, minister in the Third Reich and Hitler’s personal architect; Karl Wolff, SS officer and Himmler’s chief of staff; Karl Donitz, mastermind of the German U-Boat campaign; Earl Mountbatten, architect of the cross-channel Commando raids; Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the first bomber wave to strike Pearl Harbour; J. B. Priestly, author and war-time radio broadcaster: these are just a few of the more notable people who related their experiences to Thames TV’s cameras. Isaacs also took care to interview ordinary civilians and compile a picture of home life during the war.
The interviews and first-hand accounts are fascinating by themselves, but they are only one part of the fabric of World at War. The story of each episode is conveyed through archive footage of the events in question, often in colour, narrated with incomparable gravitas by Laurence Olivier. Every aspect of the production is careful, professional and reverent. It’s a testament to how seriously the show’s makers took their task that the beginning of the episode about the U-Boat campaigns features a to-camera segment from Isaacs, in which he apologises personally for not having any footage of a battle that took place at night, in the middle of the Atlantic, in a raging storm, under water.
More than the production values and the quality of the source material, it is the scope of World at War that makes it so powerful. 26 epsiodes of 52 minutes each would probably seem like an impossible amount of time to fill to a modern documentarian, but World at War uses every second of it to great effect, and covers parts of the war that 13 years of British schooling never taught me.
Rather than simply chronicling the events of the war in sequence, the episodes jump between topics and geographies. The first, for example, deals with the rise to power of the Nazi party and the state of Germany and German society in the years leading up to the war. A later episode tells a similar story of the rise of the Japanese Empire. Mixed in with the episodes about Stalingrad, the Battle of Britain and the war in the Pacific are those about civilian life in isolated war-time Britain, occupied Holland, and Nazi Germany. The particularly harrowing episode about Nazi racial theory is simply titled ‘Genocide’.
At no point does World at War glamorize the events it describes, or shy away from their horror. Olivier’s low, steady narration keeps a sombre tone throughout, and pulls no punches when it comes the less proud moments of the allied campaign, like the bombing of German cities and the behaviour of the advancing Russian army in the dying months of the war in Europe. Far from demonizing the Germans and the Japanese, World at War does a remarkable job of helping the viewer to empathise with them, and imagine what it might be like to be lead in to a misguided and ultimately catastrophic war by a charismatic and popular leader.
For me, The World at War is a treasure the like of which we may never see again. Enthralling, moving, beautiful and informative, it is the product of a bygone era in TV production. Modern non-fiction programming from major networks largely consists of bombastic news broadcasts and various flavours of reality show. The few documentaries they commission are usually one-off human interest stories or fly-on-the-wall depictions of some mundane workplace. The true documentary series is now limited to niche channels that lack the budget, manpower and audience to produce much beyond six episodes on how alien sharks stole Hitler’s gay brain. BBC Nature seems to be the only production company left that is willing to spend years and millions on TV documentaries, and anyone who has watched even a single episode of Planet Earth will tell you that the investment is well worth it.
All the more reason, then, to track down a copy of the DVD box set and set aside a few winter nights to watch The World at War, and learn a little about what TV used to be like, as well as World War Two.
