The Great War (documentary)

The Great War
Image from the Imperial War Museum photo archive, part of the opening titles.
Written by	John Terraine Corelli Barnett
Voices of	Marius Goring Ralph Richardson Cyril Luckham Sebastian Shaw Emlyn Williams
Narrated by	Michael Redgrave
Theme music composer	Wilfred Josephs
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	26
Production
Producer(s)	Tony Essex Gordon Watkins John Terraine (Associate Producer, Britain) Ed Rollins (Associate Producer, Canada) Tom Manefield (Associate Producer, Australia)
Running time	40 minutes
Production company(s)	BBC TV Imperial War Museum Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Australian Broadcasting Commission
Release
Original network	BBC1
Picture format	Black-and-white
Original release	30 May – 22 November 1964

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 was Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is c. 40 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 major 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.^[1] Those who appeared in the series included Edward Spears,^[2] Henry Williamson,^[3] Horace Birks,^[4] Benjamin Muse,^[5] Gustav Lachmann, George Langley,^[6] Keith Officer, Douglas Wimberley,^[7] Charles Carrington,^[8] Egbert Cadbury,^[9] Euan Rabagliati,^[10] Robert Cotton Money,^[11] Norman Demuth, Walter Greenwood and Cecil Arthur Lewis.^[12] Others who were interviewed by the BBC, but not featured in the series included Norman MacMillan,^[13] Mabel Lethbridge,^[14] Edgar von Spiegel,^[15] John Shea,^[16] Hans Howaldt,^[17] Marthe Bibesco ^[18] and Eric Dorman O'Gowan.^[19]

Title sequence

The series title sequence used a rostrum camera to create montage of three images, the first showing a silhouetted British soldier standing over the grave of a comrade, the camera first focuses on the cross, where the almost imperceptible words IN MEMORY are glanced, the second shows a uniformed, skeletal corpse by the entrance to a dugout. The final image shows a lone British soldier, looking directly into the camera apparently surrounded by corpses, which is a montage of several images combined for dramatic effect.^[20][21] 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.^{[22][nb 1]} This title sequence was set against the series theme music, composed by Wilfred Josephs and performed by the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra.^[23]

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 (only on the dual layer DVD edition):

1. Voices from the Western Front
2. The Finished Fighter

Musical score

The music for the series was composed by Wilfred Josephs. It was performed by the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Hurst. His expressive yet unsentimental score was widely acclaimed at the time and many have recalled the strong contribution it made to the series: in August 2007, Guardian columnist Ian Jack remembered how at the start of each episode Josephs' 'ominous music ushered the audience into the trenches'.^[25] Much use was made of 20th Century symphonies, including Shostakovitch's 11th and Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antartica. The opening music is the last refrain from Rachmaninov's Symphony No 1. Such musical references do not appear in the credits, therefore a full list of these extra musical elements would be welcome.^{[nb 2]}

Reception

Each episode of The Great War was seen by an average audience of over eight million people, a 17 percent share of the estimated viewing population. The fourth episode, the most popular of the series, reached an audience of over eleven million (22.6 percent of the audience).^[26]

Awards

Following transmission of the series by the Republic of Ireland's national TV station, Telefís Éireann, The Great War won a Jacob's Award at the 1964 presentation ceremony in Dublin.^[27]

First World War centenary

On 16 October 2013, fifty years after the release of the series, the BBC announced that unshown interview material, recorded during the making of The Great War, will be used in a new programme, My Great War, to be shown as part of the BBC's programmes during the First World War centenary.^[28] The programme was first broadcast on 14 March 2014 and entitled "I Was There: the Great War Interviews".

DVD releases

There appear to be two releases as of mid-2007, both in the UK, both Region 2. The audio has been remastered. The first shows copyright 2001 and consists of five volumes, each housing two DVDs (single-layer). On the cover descriptions^{[29][30][31][32][33]} there is no mention of the Extra episodes The other shows copyright 2002 and consists of seven DVDs — six containing the original 26 episodes and one with the two Extras. These discs are dual-layer. It is distributed by DD Video. In October 2007 the Daily Mail distributed the series on DVD to its readers as part of a promotion.^[34]

See also

• World War One – CBS production (1964)
• The World at War - Thames Television production (1973)
• The Somme – From Defeat to Victory BBC production (2006)

Notes

Footnotes

References

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: The Great War (documentary)

• How the Great War Was Lost - and Found (The review wrongly implies the score for the series was either indebted to, or written by Sir William Walton, whom it also erroneously cites for the score of Scott of the Antarctic, written by Ralph Vaughan Williams.)
• The Great War, Episode 6
• The Great War at the Internet Movie Database
• IWM Interview with Euan Rabagliati, who appeared in "We Must Hack Our Way Through"
• IWM Interview with Frederick Atkinson, who appeared in "Our Hats We Doff To General Joffre"
• IWM Interview with Ernest Amis, who appeared in "So Sleep Easy In Your Beds"
• IWM Interview with Joseph Murray, who appeared in "Please God Send Us A Victory"
• IWM Interview with Richard Talbot Kelly, who appeared in "What Are Our Allies Doing?" & "Surely We Have Perished"
• IWM Interview with Horace Birks, who appeared in "The Hell Where Youth And Laughter Go"
• IWM Interview with Herbert Sulzbach, who appeared in "And We Were Young"