Every Sunday night I watch TV the way it’s meant to be watched — one episode a week. At the moment I’m starting light — season four of the Coogan/Brydon comedy The Trip1 where they are on the trail of the Odyssey around Greece — followed by The West Wing (half way through season two) and finishing with an episode of Mad Men so I can read the equivalent chapter of Matt Zoller Seitz’s exhaustive appreciation of the show, Mad Men Carousel.
In between West Wing and Mad Men streaming, I have been watching something on disc — the complete box set of the 1973 ITV documentary series The World at War which is still available from from JB Hi-Fi or direct from ViaVision in Australia.
It’s 26 episodes, plus about eight extras with material that couldn’t fit into the original series, so it’s a project that I’ve been on for more than six months2.
I can’t imagine a better example of popular but serious history. Producer Jeremy Isaacs marshalled a huge team of writers, producer, researchers and directors, cleverly breaking the story of the war into episode-sized topics rather than attempting a pure chronology.
Even by today’s standards the research was prodigious. Much of the material was drawn from archives in the defeated powers and the Soviet material in particular can be harrowing. Much of the show’s power, though, comes from the first-person witnesses, some of whom were prominent (Albert Speer, Hitler’s director of war production) but many were just ordinary folk with stories to tell. There was some urgency to getting this testimony as, even in the early seventies, age was taking its toll.
As the series progresses, you can see how fast media technology was changing — cameras were getting lighter and could go to places that were previously impossible, film speeds were faster which meant image quality improved. And then, after Pearl Harbour, the Americans arrived and things go up a few more notches. I reviewed Five Came Back, the brilliant Netflix series of documentaries based on Mark Harris’s book about the Hollywood directors who captured so much of World War II — often to the detriment of their careers and their health, for Jesse Mulligan back in 2017, and the work of Capra, Ford, Wyler, Huston and Stevens and less well-known contributors, is essential to our appreciation of what the world went through.
There is extraordinary footage of planes basically crashing on to rudimentary aircraft carrier decks while witnesses talk of how the need to black the ships out at night meant that up to a third of the pilots who went out to sink the Japanese navy could not find their way home and were forced to ditch in the dark.
The unflinching footage of the dead and wounded across the Pacific, from the Tarawa Atoll in the Marshall Islands and on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, is so horrific it must need a content warning every time it’s broadcast. The episode devoted to the holocaust contains material that is almost impossible to fathom but should be essential viewing for all young humans who will now be confronted throughout their lives by forces trying to persuade them that none of it ever happened.
First broadcast in 1973, with GOAT narration by Laurence Olivier and a score by Carl Davis that chills you every time you hear it, The World at War has never been off screen, and is still a staple of public broadcasters and cable stations worldwide, which might explain why it hasn’t become available to streamers.
The recently restored Blu-ray box set3 should be in every home and school library but, if you find the cost to be too much of an obstacle, an earlier DVD version of the series has been uploaded to the Internet Archive.
This was the F&S home page just now, suggesting that it’s time I laid off politics for a while!
Where to watch The World at War
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