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This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library] On: 05 November 2014, At: 00:31 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20 The Great War Since The Great War Stephen Badsey Published online: 02 Aug 2010. To cite this article: Stephen Badsey (2002) The Great War Since The Great War, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 22:1, 37-45, DOI: 10.1080/01439680220120273 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439680220120273 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,

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This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 05 November 2014, At: 00:31Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

Historical Journal of Film,Radio and TelevisionPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20

The Great War Since TheGreat WarStephen BadseyPublished online: 02 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Stephen Badsey (2002) The Great War Since The GreatWar, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 22:1, 37-45, DOI:10.1080/01439680220120273

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439680220120273

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,

Page 2: The Great War Since The Great War

reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,Vol. 22, No. 1, 2002

The Great War Since The Great War

STEPHEN BADSEY, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst

The series The Great War was created by the BBC in 1964 consciously to mark the 50thanniversary of the war’s start. One reason for commemorating this now is that not onlyare veterans of the First World War itself becoming more scarce, so are veterans of theseries, and we wanted to acknowledge their achievement. It is no more than their dueto recognise that between them they not only � rst showed how a large televisionhistorical documentary series could be made, but also made it to such a high standardas to establish television in Britain as a respectable format for history. It was really the� rst time that anything like that had been done, and certainly never before on such ascale. By the time that the series had been made and transmitted, the production staffhad worked through the conceptual and practical problems of how to undertake sucha project.

Another reason is that 1964 marks as well as any other year the approximate start,in Britain and the rest of the developed Western world, of a cultural dominance interms of both news and entertainment of television as a medium, and of a small handfulof broadcast television stations over popular culture. The year 2000, if it does not markthe precise end of this era of television hegemony, at least marks a point at which it maybe seen to have ended. Almost by de� nition, the kind of cultural experience representedby The Great War series, the nuclear family clustered together around the television setat a special time each week, is not expected to occur again.

If, through some impossibility, war veterans in 1918 could have known thatsuch a commemorative television series would be made in 1964 (or, indeed, knownwhat television was), they would have understood the impulse, but probably mistakenits signi� cance. It was widely assumed in its aftermath that the ‘war to end wars’ wouldbe remembered and commemorated only by those who had personally experienced itas adults. It was originally planned and expected by some of its founders that theImperial War Museum would close down with the death of the last veteran of the war.Instead, something like the opposite has happened, and the last decades of the 20thcentury saw an increase both in scholarship and in public interest in the First WorldWar.

It is therefore pertinent to ask what has happened to the portrayal of the First WorldWar—the Great War, as it has once more rightly become known—since 1964, bydrama and television documentary, as well as to our historical understanding of thewar. It is also pertinent to ask what was learned from the experience of making andshowing The Great War in terms of historical television documentary techniques, andhow that has affected the way that television has shown warfare ever since.

The Great War series made a major impact on audiences at the time. Yet the history

ISSN 0143-9685 print/ISSN 1465-3451 online/02/010037-09 Ó 2002 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/01439680220120273

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of television itself tends to be remembered and recorded as ‘great moments’, chie� ythose of news and current affairs, more rarely of drama. The series received no specialmention in Lord Briggs’ of� cial history The BBC: the � rst � fty years, published in 1985,and it was only one of two major historical series mentioned in his appendix on ‘BBCmilestones’. Instead, the landmark of 1964 was the decision to take the satiricalmagazine programme That Was the Week that Was off the air for political reasons beforea general election. 1964 also saw the start of the science documentary magazine Horizonand of Match of the Day, and the � rst showing of a very different kind of wardocumentary that in its way also became a landmark, Peter Watkins’ Culloden.

Lord Briggs’ history does devote some space to the other major documentary seriesthat he considers worth mention, a BBC classic that appeared in 1969 chie� y as avehicle to popularise colour television, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on the history of thevisual and plastic arts and architecture. Art history shares with military history a featurethat makes them almost unique among scholarly historical studies—a direct andimmediate connection with mass popular culture. It is sometimes hard to explain thisto historians heavily focused on their own particular � eld of interest. Televisiondocumentary series can be made about major wars, or about great works of art, but themulti-part series about the Victorian sewage system is simply never going to get made.Unfortunately, the response has sometimes been to assume that, because they have thispopular link, military history and the history of the arts must necessarily be inferiorforms.

Both very successful series, The Great War and Civilisation also represent veryconveniently the archetypes—perhaps even the prototypes—of the two basic Britishapproaches to television historical documentary for the next three decades. On the onehand there is the style of The Great War, an approach that came out of BBC CurrentAffairs and results in programmes constructed like contemporary news stories. There isa strong but impersonal narrative, archive � lm and other visual images (including,increasingly, location footage as budgets got better) used chie� y as ‘wallpaper’ and assecondary in importance to the words of the story; interviewees or ‘talking heads’ usedonly to support the main narrative. On the other hand the Civilisation style camede� nitely from the BBC Arts tradition, and the result resembles an arts magazineprogramme. Its features are a charismatic individual appearing on camera frequentlyand holding the narrative together, particularly by delivering telling ‘pieces to camera’at signi� cant locations. The locations themselves are important within the fabric of theseries, and the visual is at least as important as the verbal. Little use is made of othercontributors except as a foil for the presenter. Obviously each major series has had itsown variations in style, but Alistair Cooke’s America in 1972 and Jacob Bronowski’s TheAscent of Man in 1974 fall into this category. A. J. P. Taylor’s remarkable unscriptedone-man lectures for the camera, broadcast in the same era, were perhaps unique.

After some less successful attempts this Arts style dropped out of favour for historydocumentary series, although remaining very popular for natural history and science;and it has never been attempted for a major series about warfare. This lack ofcon� dence by British television in the ability of the professional historical expert tocarry a major series as a presenter is itself part of an imbalance between the history ofthe written word and the history of the screen which has developed since The Great Warwas � rst shown. The only exception has been recent, the rather special relationship withthe camera established by Professor Richard Holmes for his series War Walks, and in1999 The Western Front. One approach that has never been used successfully on Britishtelevision is the purely American tradition of a ‘host’, a famous actor or personality who

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has no other role than to appear as a communicator between the material and theaudience. The only large British historical documentary series to experiment with thisform, the BBC series Soldiers of 1985 hosted by Frederick Forsyth, was judged a failurein Britain but met with success across the Atlantic, and is best regarded as intended forthe American market. British audiences have been quite comfortable with famous� gures as narrators off-camera, but less so with their actual appearance to be in chargeof the programme, unless the ‘host’ also has some credible knowledge of the subject.Bill Oddie on bird watching or Jack Charlton on � eld sports, or even Robert Hardy onmediaeval warfare, have been examples.

The approach to television documentary in the Current Affairs style pioneered byThe Great War has also been widely copied, with a mixture of success and failure. Firstand most obviously there is the very direct link, including the people involved in itsmaking, between The Great War and The World at War in 1974, following essentially thesame format. The World at War was, as a history of the Second World War with a muchgreater choice of material, able to be more accurate in its use of archive, and also moresensitive to the problem of how such material could be used. The relative absence of� lm on the 1939 Poland campaign, for example, led to this being minimised in theseries narrative. Asking which of the two series is better is rather like asking which ofthe two World Wars was more important; although it is something of a sore point thatThe World at War has been available on videocassette for some years before The GreatWar.

Some features of The Great War’s style did not endure, and remain almost unique tothe series. One such feature was that The Great War had to overcome the problem thatsenior political and military � gures of the First World War were dead in 1964, and didso by having their written words read out off-camera by actors. The World at War largelyabandoned this practice, and established � rmly the convention that, except for the mainnarration, the only speech allowed was by the original speaker, no matter how manyyears after the event, and that for authentication purposes the ‘talking head’ had noequal. The World at War also combined this with the convention established by TheGreat War, that there are only two perspectives to a major historical event: those of thevery highest political and military leaders, and those of the lowest, the ordinary peopleat war. Both these conventions have endured, to the point of becoming cliches ofBritish television history. A recent example was the Channel 4 documentary series TheBoer War of 1999, produced to mark its hundredth anniversary, and including inter-views with people whose sole connection with the war was that they were alive at thetime as children, and had lived to be interviewed for the series.

The other major feature of The Great War to be abandoned by The World at War, andnot revived since in any major series, was the employment of professional militaryhistorians as scriptwriters closely involved with the project, and with a major impact onthe � nished programmes. The career paths followed by the historians who wrote TheGreat War would, within a few years, almost cease to exist. John Terraine, CorrelliBarnett, Alistair Horne and others were in 1964 chie� y noted for their best-sellingbooks, but not attached to any particular institution. This was a form of existence whichwould shortly become commercially almost impossible, and which the establishment ofmilitary history in British universities and other institutions would make increasinglyunnecessary.

Since The Great War was made television producers have preferred to consultprofessional historians, read their books, use them as talking heads on some forms ofdocumentary for what might be described as ‘purposes of legitimising’ if contempo-

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raries are not alive to ful� l that function, but no more than that. On some wardocumentary series, the con� ict between a historian immersed in the documents andthe complex issues of a given war as history, and a production staff actually making theprogramme, has been considerable. The American historian Bruce Cummings hasrecorded his own frustrations at being employed to make the Time/Life series Korea:The Unknown War of 1988, only to � nd his attempts at analytical history thwarted bythe production process and his own � nal disillusion with a highly conventional series.Particularly memorable is Cummings’ account of his despair at � nding a member of theproduction staff consulting a book on the war that he considered seriously inaccurate,simply because it had such a good index.

This separation between professional historians and television programme makersthat has taken place since The Great War re� ects what has been a constant intelevision’s portrayal of the First World War, and indeed of many other historicalissues, which is its remarkably conservative and traditional approach. It is genuinelyhard to explain why this should be so. Documentary makers working in the hardsciences, in politics and current affairs, or other well-established � elds pride themselveson bringing the latest theories and developments to the attention of the public in acomprehensible and entertaining fashion. But this has not been the case with historicaldocumentaries: instead there must be one version of history, and usually it must be theone that is closest to accepted popular myth. Historians have been allowed to presentcontroversy only as a ‘personal view’ and never in a major series.

The major television historical documentary series died away in the 1980s, largelyunder � nancial pressure and the corresponding unwillingness of television companiesto take risks. Everything became on an altogether smaller scale, with a handful ofepisodes but more attractive locations. The problem was a combination of rising costswith rising audience expectations. All 26 episodes of The Great War cost £140,000, orabout £3 million at today’s prices, and the bulk of its real cost was hidden in the BBC’suse of its own extensive in-house facilities. The 1996 documentary history of the warbroadcast as 1914–18 in Great Britain and as The Great War and the Shaping of theTwentieth Century in the United States took 5 years to make seven episodes, and cost$5 million, or also about £3 million, with almost every item and moment paid fordirectly. Only recently has the full-scale historical documentary returned with TurnerEnterprises’ series The Cold War in 1998, with considerable British input and anarration spoken by Kenneth Brannagh, a series still very much in the tradition of TheGreat War.

Having said all this, The Great War itself remained the only major documentary seriesto deal with the First World War from 1964 until 1914–18, and the 1999 series TheWestern Front presented by Richard Holmes. Any in� uence of television documentarieson British perceptions of the First World War in the intervening years must be soughtamong the rare individual programmes about the war. There is no doubt that thisin� uence has existed. I have myself had the humbling experience of being told byundergraduates that their desire to study the First World War at university was � rstsparked by watching documentaries with which I have been involved. But its scale isvery hard to assess.

Instead, and rather surprisingly, the war was kept in front of the viewing public’s eyesby drama productions. In contrast to the portrayal of the Second World War, thismeant television drama, but not particularly feature � lm. The Great War series itself wasan exact contemporary of the 1964 British feature � lm King and Country; and anear-contemporary of the Joan Littlewood 1963 stage play Oh! What a Lovely

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War, and the 1969 Richard Attenborough � lm of the same name. Otherwise, feature� lms of the period dealt with the First World War from rather oblique angles, such asLawrence of Arabia in 1962, Doctor Zhivago in 1965 and The Blue Max in 1966.Attempts in the 1970s to portray the First World War in � lm were generally failures,such as Zeppelin in 1971, the translation of the plot of Journey’s End to a Royal FlyingCorps squadron as Aces High in 1976, and the remake of All Quiet on the Western Frontin 1979, featuring Ernest Borgine as a most improbable German. In the 1980s the FirstWorld War ceased to be of great interest to Hollywood, and was largely beyond thecommercial reach and interest of a weak British � lm industry, except for the occasionalsafe bet of adapting a novel about the soldier as victim, such as A Month in the Countryin 1987, or the Anglo-Canadian production Regeneration in 1997. The slight butcontinuing revival of the British � lm industry produced The Trench in 2000, an attemptto depict the common soldier at war.

The only consistent exception to this neglect of the First World War by feature � lmwas the work—very interesting to historians of war, of politics and of cinema—of theAustralians in recasting their national identity as independent of Britain while at thesame time developing their own � lm and television industry. This was done throughPeter Weir’s Gallipoli in 1981, the � lm-quality television drama series ANZACS in 1985(unof� cially known as ‘Paul Hogan’s heroes’), and � nally The Lighthorsemen in 1988.

But looking at British television drama over the same period, the situation is quitedifferent, especially considering the dearth of television documentaries about the war.If feature � lms about the First World War were not commercial ventures, and televisioncompanies were increasingly unwilling to take the commercial risk with large-scalehistorical documentary series, they were willing to pay for costume dramas, includingthose about the First World War, which were considerably more expensive to make, butwith a larger probable audience. Major British television drama series about the warincluded Wings in 1977, again set with the Royal Flying Corps; Testament of Youth in1979, a dramatisation based on Vera Brittain’s experiences as a VAD nurse in the war;the highly controversial series The Monocled Mutineer in 1986; and a revival of R. C.Sherriff’s play Journey’s End in 1988. The culmination, if that is exactly the word, wasundoubtedly the 1989 light comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth, which consciouslytraded on every cliche and misremembered piece of history about the Western Front,and was in� uential enough to draw a surprising degree of angry criticism fromprofessional historians as a result. The most recent British television portrayal of theFirst World War has been the BBC drama All the King’s Men of 1999, set in theGallipoli campaign.

These � ctional portrayals of the First World War were also a re� ection of a popularinterest in the war that has grown rather than diminishing since the 1970s. There is noone cause for this phenomenon. Part of the explanation should be sought in thedevelopment of British education over the same period. The history of warfare, after acentury of being assailed by the Whig tradition as irrelevant as well as unpleasant,gained a measure of academic respectability roughly between the foundation of the WarStudies Department at King’s College London in 1964, and the foundation of theOpen University in 1969. But this was done only by creating what came to be knownas ‘the new military history’, of which Professor Arthur Marwick at the Open Universitywas in particular a devotee. It is hard to describe this, or any school of historicalthought, brie� y without the risk of caricature. But essentially it has been a study ofprocesses, and of the relationship between war and society that virtually excludedmilitary history in the sense of actual � ghting. If it has had a place for battles at all, it

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has been to view them as a form of social and increasingly cultural interaction. Theinstitutional triumph of the ‘war and society’ approach may be witnessed in the 3-dayAnglo-American conference, organised by the Institute of Historical Research on thetheme of ‘War and Peace’ in London in 2000, that found no place at all for operationalhistory or battle.

Perhaps more important than the actual approach was the fact that the 1970s saw theemergence of the � rst generation of British university-trained military historians, thegeneration which is alive and working today, with a second generation now comingthrough. Meanwhile, the popular understanding of the First World War remainedrooted � rmly in the older tradition marked by The Great War, of battles as not only partof the relationship between war and society but essential to what that expression means.Despite the gradual dying-off of the generation that had fought the Great War, the1970s saw an increase in popular interest in the war, prompted by many factorsincluding the emergence of commercial battle� eld tourism on a signi� cant scale, andculminating in the founding of the Western Front Association in 1980.

The decade also began with another best-selling book about the war, The First Dayon the Somme by Martin Middlebrook in 1971. This book, with its very clear andaccessible (if now perhaps dated) description of the worst day’s experience on theWestern Front for the British, 1 July 1916, has a fairytale quality in that its author,originally an amateur who came across the battle almost by accident, went on toestablish a reputation as Britain’s best oral historian of 20th century warfare. Middle-brook’s choice of the � rst day on the Somme also reinforced—and perhaps created fora new generation—the centrality of that dreadful event in British popular understandingof the war.

This focus on the Battle of the Somme of 1916, a noted British disaster, rather thanon the victories of 1918, was re� ected in the best of a number of single British televisiondocumentaries about the First World War made in the 1970s and 1980s. This was theBBC’s award-winning The Battle of the Somme of 1976 (not to be confused with theoriginal contemporary documentary � lm of the same name, from which it usedmaterial). The producer was Malcolm Brown, himself a specialist on the period, whohas become a notable writer on the history of the war.

Other than its generally high quality, which won it many accolades, the programmeThe Battle of the Somme is notable for the manner in which the producer solved theproblem of how to personalise the experience of such a vast battle for television, whichhas remained very much concerned with personalities. The solution was to employ asa narrator on the battle� eld the honey-voiced actor Leo McKern, standing in for thesoldiers themselves. A New Zealander by birth who had served in the Second WorldWar, McKern was something more than an American-style ‘host’, and gave theprogramme an Arts-like style which still makes it quite exceptional, and in its own wayas unique as Watkins’ Culloden.

It would be nonsense, of course, to suggest that at the time of The Great War in 1964there was one single British view or perception of the First World War. But the size andcultural importance of the series at least suggests a degree of coherence, an agreementboth about the events of the war and their signi� cance. By about the time that MalcolmBrown’s The Battle of the Somme appeared, this had changed. Within British universitiesthe study of warfare was—and has remained—a barely tolerated and beleaguereddiscipline; and academic or scholarly interest in the First World War as it existed withinuniversities was already following paths increasingly remote from those of popularunderstanding. Although a handful of universities have embraced that most unusual

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phenomenon, a genuine and broadly based popular desire to study a � eld of history,most have turned their backs and regarded it with suspicion, because it is the historyof warfare. So a new generation of students inspired by informal study arrived inuniversities in the 1990s, expecting to study the battles of Western Front, only todiscover that courses in military history could be Hamlet without the Prince ofDenmark.

But also by about the time that The Battle of the Somme was shown in 1976, a furtherdivision was taking place within the British university and academic communityconcerning the nature of the First World War which has not yet been resolved, and isnow generally known as the ‘Two Western Fronts’ debate—the Western Front ofmilitary history against the Western Front of literature. This division, which may havebegun as remote from the very practical business of television documentary, has hadunexpected consequences for the genre. Its origins, again at the risk of caricature, maybe identi� ed with the publication of two signi� cant books.

One of these books was The Great War and Modern Memory in 1975 by the Americanliterary scholar Paul Fussell. As an expression of the Western Front as eternal,unchanging and futile, the view of the Western Front found in Blackadder Goes Forthmight have been taken directly from Fussell. Much in� uenced by French Postmod-ernism, Fussell argued for a Great War and a Western Front that could not beapproached or understood as history, but which took place uniquely outside the normalcourse of historical development, and was accessible only through the imagination andliterature. Fussell’s work has since been subject to considerable criticism pointing outhis lack of historical rigor. But the persistence of his in� uence, and the continuedstrengths of the method of approach to the First World War through literature andcultural artefacts, has contributed greatly to historical understanding.

The second book, which marked a very different approach to the First World Warbut was not speci� cally focused on the war itself, appeared in 1972, The Collapse ofBritish Power by Correlli Barnett. This was the � rst of what would become a trilogy,described by the author as ‘operational histories’, examining British society in themiddle 20th century. In an important passage in The Collapse of British Power, Barnettraised questions about the perception of the First World War during the inter-war yearsin Britain, and in particular the value of its portrayal in poetry and literature. One wasthe extent to which the experiences of educated, articulate privileged young men ofsensibility and sensitivity genuinely provided a representative sample of opinion in aBritish Army that was composed predominantly of the industrial working class. An-other was the accuracy of a picture of the Western Front which depended on highlyselective slices taken from the experience of predominantly infantry of� cers of aparticular social and cultural background, with no experience of military life before1914, and which characteristically ended with death or wounding rather than withvictory. Was it true, as Brian Gardner wrote in the popular anthology of trench poetryUp the Line to Death, that ‘After July 1916, the poets differed only in that they weremore articulate than their comrades’, or was their experience signi� cantly different? Itis perhaps stating the obvious to say that if Siegfried Sassoon had really been a typicalof� cer, then the British Army would have followed him in 1917 by mutinying, whichit never did on a large scale, unlike the armies of France, Austria–Hungary, Russia andGermany.

The revisionist school of British military historians on the First World War thatemerged in the 1980s and 1990s did not, however, come directly from Barnett’s workor even that of John Terraine before him; it was far too broad-based for that. It came

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partly from King’s College London and particularly the work of Brian Bond; partlyfrom the Imperial War Museum and Peter Simpkin, who much earlier in his career hadparticipated in the museum’s involvement in The Great War series, and partly fromwhat was then a haven for historians, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Butchie� y it came from contacts being established between full-time professional historiansin Britain and the broader group of interested amateurs throughout the country; andalso with historians from the Commonwealth and the United States.

Again to describe it without caricature, the revisionist position has signi� cantlyre-evaluated understanding of the First World War by moving the conduct of battleback to its central place within the war and society structure; and by an investigationin depth into the micro-history of events, aided by the almost obsessive record-keepingand letter-writing of participants. Its Western Front, although a place of horror andviolence, is also a place of learning and technological advance; and a place thatultimately marked the greatest military victory—at least in terms of scale—in Britishhistory.

It was only in the middle 1990s that the revisionist school on the First World Waremerged as a fully respectable historical position: to pick a date, between the publi-cation of The First World War and British Military History, edited by Brian Bond in 1991,and the 1994 Leeds University conference on the war, the proceedings of which werelater published as Facing Armageddon, edited by Peter Liddle and Hugh Cecil. By thistime the revisionist position was so far apart from the literary or cultural historian’sposition on the Western Front that the � rst mutual reaction was one largely ofincomprehension: hence the ‘Two Western Fronts’. Since then, attempts have beenmade to see what we can learn from each other.

This academic debate may seem far removed from The Great War series, or fromtelevision documentary history; but rather unusually, the debate has escaped fromacademia and has reached the television screens, the ‘Two Western Fronts’ portrayedin the form of contrasting television documentary styles. Arguably the most importantsingle British documentary about the First World War since Malcolm Brown’s TheBattle of the Somme was made in 1996 as part of the BBC Timewatch series, and entitledHaig: the unknown soldier, also released on videocassette early in 2000. This programmewas a fusion of television historical documentary imperatives with revisionist historicalideas. The producer, Helen Bettinson, who has since left television and is presentlystudying for a doctorate on the First World War as a mature student, was inspired tomake the programme after contact with a number of First World War historians—in-cluding myself—on an earlier programme about tanks on the Western Front. The needof television to personalise the issue led to the programme being about Haig, as a hookon which to hang the argument, and to its being made for the 80th anniversary of the� rst day of the Battle of the Somme.

Haig: the unknown soldier forms a contrast not just in visual styles but in portrayalof the Western Front at a fundamental level with the 1996 series—to use itsAmerican title—The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. This was thebrainchild of the very respected American-born cultural historian, Dr Jay Winter ofCambridge University, author of the book Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning of 1995,credited as Series Historian. It began life as a co-production between KCET ofLos Angeles and the BBC, in association with the Imperial War Museum.The choice of title was a re� ection of the series’ central thesis that what was importantabout the war was its impact on the present-day world. Both the series’ content and itsvisual style—which owed more to Civilisation than to The Great War, despite the

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absence of a host—were also a re� ection of the personal experience as being the centralevent of the war, to which the political, military and social were at best secondary.Interestingly, the difference in styles between what was judged acceptable for Americanaudiences and what was acceptable for the British led to signi� cant changes before theBBC version, 1914–18, was shown.

The debate about the nature of the Great War and our historical understanding of itis now out of academia, into popular culture, and on our television screens. This is are� ection of how far we have come, and in what directions, since the original Great Warseries back in 1964.

Correspondence: Dr Stephen Badsey, War Studies Department, Royal Military AcademySandhurst, Camberley, Surrey GU15 4PQ, UK. Fax: 1 44 (0)1276 412359; E-mail:[email protected]

Dr Stephen Badsey, MA FRHistS, is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal MilitaryAcademy Sandhurst, and a specialist in military theory and media depictions of warfare. He has over fortypublications, including several on historical and media depictions of the First World War, and has for manyyears been a frequent contributor to television documentaries. From 1980–1983 he was the principal cataloguerof the Imperial War Museum’s collection of First World War � lms (published by Flicks Books, Trowbridge,1994, edited by Roger Smither). Among his most recent publications are ‘Blackadder Goes Forth and the TwoWestern Fronts Debate’ in Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor (eds) The Historian, Television, andTelevision History, (University of Luton Press, Luton, 2001), ‘The Impact of Communications and theMedia on the Art of War Since 1815’ in Andrew Weist and Geoffrey Jensen (eds) War in the Age ofTechnology (New York University Press, New York, 2001) and ‘Haig and the Press’ in Brian Bond andNigel Cave (eds) Haig: A Reappraisal 70 Years On (Leo Cooper, London, 1999).

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