Cast: Theo Barkham-Biggs, Callum Callaghan, Justin Michael Deuster, Brian Ferguson, Jefferson Hall, Daniel Kendrick, Stephen Leask, Dominic Thorburn, Frankie Wilson, Sion Young.
The trouble with being taught history at school is along the way it loses so many young minds to the way of the bored or disinterested. For many it is the sheer weight of facts to remember, perhaps the subject matter doesn’t grab the mind or imagination, for some they just cannot see the relevance to the our society today. That may be argued as understandable when looking at the lives of The Tudors or the Georgian society unless of course you are the type of person who is absorbed by all history, social, economic and personal. When it comes to the events that took the world on a course of destruction a 100 years ago, the relevance is palpable, you can almost hear the beating, thumping heart of your great-grandparents and their breathe clinging to the air around you as history is still so close and so real to many.
Our World War, part of the B.B.C.’s series of commemorative programmes, looks at the first days of the First World War through the people and their accounts of the Royal Fusiliers holding the line at Mons against overwhelming odds until it was quite obvious that a “tactical retreat” was the only sane option left to the British army.
The programme was inspired by the BAFTA winning series Our War, however there is something more profound about Our World War which digs away at the soul, it establishes the reality of a conflict that for many is only thought of as black and white Pathe News affair, seeing soldiers in monochrome in the trenches and dusty stories half remembered being taught by teachers who perhaps arguably had no interest in getting across the point that what this war was carnage; unforgiving mechanical death in which saw a generation wiped out.
Our World War was dynamic, terrifying, eye-opening, even for those that have read much on the subject, and the way it was filmed, with a huge nod to the Oscar winning film Saving Private Ryan as it didn’t shy away from the near savagery that the first mechanised war produced.
When a piece of television is as well researched as this and doesn’t pull punches on the way that 500 German soldiers were mown down like blades of glass on the other side of the canal that surrounded Mons, when it uses first hand testimony from soldiers of the disturbing nature of the war, for the courage, on both sides and in some cases the honour that was to be lost as the world rumbled further into the 21st Century, then not only do the actors have to be congratulated for the way they portrayed men such as Sid Godley, who despite a bullet lodged in his skull, survived the slaughter that was to come but also to the writer Joe Barton who bought every facet of the first battle of the First World War to a brutal and chilling conclusion.
War is not pretty, war is not hell, war is two sides fighting on behalf of Governments who cannot talk to each other but in some cases it is inevitable as the sun rising. Our World War though shows the human cost of conflict in a way that schools never showed you, that the road to empire is filled with the blood of innocent men and women. Our World War is the type of hard hitting programme that the 100th anniversary of the start of this bitter war cries out to be shown in the same way that The Monocled Mutineer deserves to be shown again during the next couple of years.
Ian D. Hall