Dear Auntie, do you have to turn World War I into Peaky Blinders?

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS LAST NIGHT’S TV 100 Days To Victory HHHHI World War Weird HHHHI

Peaky Blinders has a lot to answer for. The World War i documentary 100 Days To Victory (BBC2) opened with our army chief General Haig walking down a corridor in slow-mo, his walrus moustache swinging ominously.

The heavy rock soundtrack thundered as French commander-inchief General Foch joined him to march at his side. More grim-eyed supremos fell into step, loping towards the camera.

But instead of gangsters, these were middle-aged World War i officers. if flames had spouted from the doorways while nick Cave sung about a ‘red right hand’, you might as well have called the whole production Peaky Blackadder.

after this dubious beginning, the programme settled down, given ballast by the weight of its research. Choreographed generals were replaced by shots of battlefield chaos, with readings from letters and diaries of men on the front.

This was the story of how the Great War was very nearly lost and then won during eight months in 1918. The statistics were staggering: once Germany was able to unleash all its forces on the Western Front, following the end of the war in russia, the allies were almost overrun in a few days.

at the start of the spring Offensive, the kaiser’s army fired a third of a billion shells at our trenches in five hours. Their artillery was soon close enough to be lobbing bombs into the heart of Paris. it was, as the voiceover pointed out, the prototype for the nazi Blitzkrieg.

For decades the trend has been to deride the allied commanders as donkeys leading lions to slaughter. This documentary’s silly start did nothing to dispel that. But the fact Britain and France survived a volcanic onslaught in the spring, and devised counter-attacks powerful enough to win the entire war, was an astonishing achievement.

Gradually, with lavish reconstructions and computer graphics, 100 days To Victory began to explain how this was done. We saw simulations of tank attacks across no Man’s land, bearing down on the German positions.

One scottish tank driver described the exhilaration of the charge: ‘i press the pedal and she roars like the great man-eater that she is.’ The poetry of the men’s letters often masked the ghastly truth that for most tank crews this was a suicide mission — if they didn’t suffocate on carbon monoxide fumes, they were incinerated when shells burst through their armour.

Thorough research also revealed some of the stranger tactics, such as flavoured smoke bombs that panicked the Germans into believing they faced a new kind of poison gas. That was so bizarre it could have earned a segment on World War Weird (yesterday channel), a compendium of strange-buttrue stories from the two global conflicts, from a chorus of military historians including the Mail’s Guy Walters.

The producers have asked each of their experts to tell the same story, and cut from one voice to another, often mid-sentence. it’s a clever way to reinvigorate the ‘talking head’ format.

The tales are well chosen, too, ranging from the bonkers (nazi anthropolgists on missions to the Himalayas, to measure the skulls of Tibetans in search of a super-race), to the inspiring (the soviet war widow who bought her own T-34 tank, dubbed the Fighting Girlfriend, to wreak vengeance on the Germans).

The episode closed with the angel Of Mons legend — how a heavenly host delivered the British army to safety during the first major retreat of World War i. all this was achieved without the need for slow-mo or heavy rock. amazing.