Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Ian McDiarmid, Nicholas Farrell, Kenneth Cranham, Nicholas Asbury, Mark Lewis Jones, Rainer Sellien, François-Eric Gendron, Bill Paterson, Tim Pigott-Smith, Kate Ambler, Sinéad Cusack, André Kaczmarczyk, Holger Kunkel, James McArdle, Ludger Pistor, Urs Remond, Bernhard Schütz, Stephan Szasz, Niall Cusack, Gordon Fulton, George Lenz, Mary Moulds, Chris Reilly, Rainer Reiners, Patrick Fitzsymons, Ian Beattie, Simon Coury.
It started with a gun shot on the streets of Eastern Europe by Gavrilo Princip and the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria and finished, if it ever really did, with millions having died on the battlefields and in the sea. That fateful shot which dragged not just two nations into war but many as friendships and treaties tore the world apart, signalled the countdown to conflict, the road to war.
As part of the commemorations of the First World War’s 100th Anniversary, the B.B.C. started its look over the next four years in brilliant style with 37 Days. Spread over three nights, 37 Days took in most of the key decisions that led to the greatest and destructive conflict of modern times until the lessons were forgotten and they started all over again in 1939.
In a programme like this nobody stands out above anybody else, for the parts have to played and there is no deviation in the way that an actor can perform but it does have to said that to capture the essence of the likes of Winston Churchill (Nicholas Asbury), Eyre Crow (Nicholas Farrell), Edward Grey (Ian McDiarmid), David Lloyd George (Mark Lewis Jones) and Kaiser Wilhelm II (Rainer Sellien) was astonishing. To capture the creeping darkness, the lunacy of some, the sheer bloody mindedness in others and the call for patience in the rest was exceptional.
No end of news programmes, on the spot coverage and in depth reporting can ever truly capture the anxiety of the long term assault, the diplomacy that races back and forth between countries in the need to avoid war. Now 24 hour news may be in a boon in some respects but it is momentary, like a mayfly, the thoughts sometimes are transient, fleeting in the wind between one opinion and the next. It is only perhaps in the context of the long term, the ability how the game changed from a distance that brings true meaning and understanding.
The current crisis in the Ukraine, tellingly almost 100 years since the events that unfolded on that fateful day in the Balkans, and the game of chess between nations is one such issue in where opinions can change almost by the hour because of the cycle of news and information but it will take many years before any of it is ever really seen with sense of perspective from those whose people are not in any direct line of fire.
For this the writer of 37 Days, Mark Hayhurst, should be congratulated for making a superb and worryingly accurate account of the events that led up to the day when the old heads of Europe finally lost any sanity they had left and plunged the continent into blind darkness for the first time in a hundred years.
The past is never forgotten, and yet no matter what, we do repeat it; every time. In a hundred years will film makers and writers be showing a similar version that started on the streets of the Crimea, Syria or any part of the world in which the bullet fired leaves its mark?
Ian D. Hall