The Great War (TV series)
The Great War is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. The documentary was a co-production of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The narrator is Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is minutes long.
Production
In August 1963, at the suggestion of Alasdair Milne, producer of the BBC's current affairs programme Tonight, the BBC resolved to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War with a big television project. The series was the first to feature veterans, many of them still relatively fit men in their late sixties or early seventies, speaking of their experiences after a public appeal for veterans was published in the national press. Those who appeared in the series included Edward Spears, Henry Williamson, Horace Birks, Benjamin Muse, Melvin Krulewitch, George Langley, Keith Officer, Douglas Wimberley, Charles Carrington, Egbert Cadbury, Euan Rabagliati, Robert Cotton Money, Richard Talbot Kelly, Norman Demuth, Walter Greenwood and Cecil Arthur Lewis. The small number of Germans who appeared included Stephan Westmann and Gustav Lachmann. Others who were interviewed by the BBC but not featured in the series included Norman MacMillan, Mabel Lethbridge, Edgar von Spiegel, Edmund Blunden, Martin Niemöller, John Shea, Hans Howaldt, William Ibbett, Marthe Bibesco, Philip Joubert de la Ferté and Eric Dorman O'Gowan.Title sequence
In the series title sequence a rostrum camera created a montage of three images. The first shows a British soldier, in silhouette, standing over the grave of a comrade, the camera initially focusing on the grave's cross, where the words IN MEMORY are glimpsed. The second image shows a uniformed, skeletal corpse by the entrance to a dugout. The final image shows a lone Irish soldier, looking directly into the camera, apparently surrounded by corpses; this is a montage of several images combined for dramatic effect. The original image of the staring soldier, showing him surrounded by fellow soldiers rather than corpses, was taken from photograph Q 1 in the Imperial War Museum photograph archive but has been described as having quickly become symbolic of the First World War. This title sequence was set against the series theme music, composed by Wilfred Josephs and performed by the BBC Northern Orchestra.Episode listing
The episode titles are taken from quotations, the origins of which are shown in parentheses. With few exceptions, successive blocks of episodes are devoted to each year of the war: episodes 1–6 to 1914, 7–10 to 1915, 11–14 to 1916, 15–19 to 1917, 20–23 and 26 to 1918.Two "Extra" episodes exist on the dual-layer DVD edition:
- "Voices from the Western Front"
- "The Finished Fighter"