Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE HIDDEN CASUALTIES OF WAR
Sean Bean’s epic new drama World On Fire follows the first year of the Second World War through the intertwining loves, losses, sacrifices and traumas of ordinary people
The Nazi invasion of Poland, the fall of Paris, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain – all cataclysmic events at the start of the Second World War that affected millions of people and would shape the next five brutal years of bloodshed. Now BBC1’s explosive new series World On Fire – the most ambitious war drama ever made for TV, chronicling that tumultuous first year of the conflict – covers them all, and more, on the grandest of scales.
Writer and creator Peter Bowker’s seven-part series not only boasts some of the most stunning set-piece scenes ever attempted on the small screen, it features more than 100 speaking parts, involves thousands of extras for scenes filmed in four countries and required a staggering 80 make-up artists to convey the horror of that year. ‘It’s one of the biggest television projects ever made anywhere in the world,’ says series producer Chris Clough. ‘It’s so global that when I first read the scripts I thought it was madness.’
The Dunkirk evacuation of 1940, for example, when more than 330,000 Allied troops escaped from France, required 600 cast and crew plus dozens of period trucks, tractors, ambulances and cars. Acres of sand on the beach at Lytham St Annes in Lancashire were covered in discarded boots, helmets, ration tins, boxes of ammunition, mortar bombs and tattered uniforms. At the centre of the choreographed chaos was a full-sized replica of an RAF Spitfire, partly buried and with its propeller bent and twisted.
But World On Fire also gives a very personal take on the war, with the tale unfolding through the intertwining fates of a few ordinary people from Britain, Poland, France, Germany and the US.
There’s the Rossler family in Germany who risk losing both of their children, their epileptic daughter Hilda to Nazi ethnic cleansing and their soldier son Klaus to an Allied bullet. In Poland there’s the Tomaszeskis, waitress Kasia and her brother Grzegorz, who goes with his father to defend the town of Danzig as the Germans approach. American journalist Nancy Campbell is in Berlin, trying to broadcast stories the Nazis want to suppress, while at the American Hospital in Paris her nephew Webster, a surgeon, and French nurse Henriette are hatching a plan to smuggle patients out as the city falls.
But the action starts in England in March 1939, when Harry Chase (Howards End’s Jonah Hauer-King) and his girlfriend Lois (Shetland’s Julia Brown) attend a fascist rally in Manchester, which they disrupt by singing, ‘ Bye- bye blackshirts!’ at full volume. A fight ensues and they both end up in the police station, though there are far bigger battles to come.
The action moves on to August 1939, with Harry installed as a translator in Warsaw. ‘Harry goes from working at the British Embassy in Warsaw just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, to a soldier fighting the Germans as they advance across Europe,’ says Jonah. ‘He also has a complicated private life. He has his first love Lois back in Manchester, but he’s also smitten with Kasia, a waitress he meets in Warsaw.’ There’s another woman in Harry’s life too, his mother Robina, played by Oscar-nominated Mum star Lesley Manville. ‘There’s something quite frozen about her at the beginning of the series,’ says Lesley. ‘She’s emotionally repressed.’ Gradually, however, she changes. ‘She melts a bit and comes to a level of understanding about herself and how she’s conducted her life.’
That’s partly due to the arrival from Warsaw of Jan, Kasia’s younger brother. ‘Kasia smuggles Jan aboard a train out of Poland, and Robina looks after the boy when he arrives in England,’ explains Lesley. ‘Initially she’s aghast – why would her son Harry think she could look after a strange child who doesn’t speak her language? But Jan becomes a
Helen. ‘She saw sacks hanging on a fence, and when the wind blew them she saw hundreds of German tanks ranged behind them.’
In real life, as the Germans poured across the border, a few dozen men desperately tried to defend the main post office in the Polish town of Danzig, an act of bravery that became a symbol of Polish defiance. In World On Fire, Stefan and Grzegorz, Kasia’s father and brother, are among those who take up arms as the Germans lay siege to the building.
None of the battles in World On Fire was more challenging to recreate than the Battle Of The River Plate, involving three Royal Navy cruisers and the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of South America.
The answer was to personalise it, so the battle is seen through the eyes of Tom Bennett, Douglas’s son and Lois’s brother. ‘By the end of episode two, Tom has joined the Navy and we see him go through the Battle Of The River Plate aboard HMS Exeter,’ says Peter.
‘When I was reading about that battle, a captain had written that they went down to the engine room and the only thing that had survived
‘People were made of sterner stuff back then’ BLAKE HARRISON