Life under fire
Britain’s Wartime Treasures – Imperial War Museums at 100 TV BBC Two scheduled for March
The Imperial War Museum was founded 100 years ago to record the sacrifice – both military and civil – of Britain and the empire nations during the First World War. Since opening its doors in 1920, it has continued to record the stories of the nation and the Commonwealth at war.
It’s also an organisation that’s expanded hugely in scope, adding four new sites to its main museum in Southwark: Churchill War Rooms, HMS Belfast, IWM North and IWM Duxford.
How to do justice to such an extensive collection? Presented by Falklands veteran Simon Weston CBE, this one-off documentary takes a less-is-more approach as it focuses on just 10 artefacts from the IWM’s extensive collections.
Each object is assigned a famous ‘advocate’, who explores what the item reveals. These include adventurer Bear Grylls, who jumps on board HMS Belfast; comedian Al Murray, who reads a revealing wartime diary among the Spitfires at Duxford; foreign correspondent Kate Adie, who relates the unpromising but fascinating tale of the typewriter in the Churchill War Rooms; and journalist Anita Rani, who tells a story of remarkable heroism involving a soldier in the British-Indian army.