“I came across a diary entry where a woman mentions in passing that she joined the Resistance that morning”
Scriptwriter PETER BOWKER (left) talks to us about World on Fire, a new BBC One drama series that tells the story of the first year of the Second World War from the perspective of a multinational cast of characters How did World on Fire come about? Damien Timmer, a producer at Mammoth Screen, and I have always loved the 1970s documentary series The World at War. Damien was speculating about whether you could do a drama with the same ambition. I think the beginning was: is there a new way of telling the story of the Second World War that isn’t solely from the British perspective? So we have a Polish family, a German family, a French couple, and so on. That way, the terrain of the series is the world. It seemed insane, but then you go away and that’s the idea that won’t leave you.
Howdo you piece a series like this together?
The ambition is that every series will be one year of the war. I was commissioned to write a ‘bible’ for the whole seven years. You have the history to draw on, and then it’s a case as a dramatist of thinking, “Who are the characters? What do they want? What are the characters like?” And then let’s put the characters in these situations. I think it would have been deadly if I’d gone the other way around and started with the siege of Tobruk or Dunkirk.
I wanted to write about the particular but celebrate the universal. Wartime allows you to do that. In a way, I want to try to reclaim the wartime generation from a kind of over-sentimentalised version.
How did yougo about researching VJG VQpKE!|
Richard Overy of the University of Exeter advised from a historical overview perspective. And Imperial War Museums were incredibly helpful. We got access to their reading room, where you can order obscure manuscripts. I’d be saying, “Have you got anything written by young people, say a 19-year-old woman in Poland, at this time? I’ve got a character who’s a waitress.” And they would have diaries, and so on.
I came across an entry where a young woman says, “Trying to find decent coffee, trying to find a boyfriend” – and then happens to mention in passing that she joined the Resistance that morning. That’s a gift. And Richard Overy said very early: “You must remember that people’s day-to-day concerns don’t change. The concerns of humanity remain reassuringly mundane.”
Tell us about the German family, the Rosslers.
I wanted to write about a family who weren’t anti-Nazi activists, nor Nazis, but simply Germans living under a Nazi government on a day-to-day level. Their story becomes about eugenics and euthanasia in regard to children with disabilities.
World on Fire will be broadcast on BBC One in September