ART THAT MADE US
BBC Two, 9pm
This “alternative history of these islands told through art” has been a revelation. History is famously written by the victors, but can be endlessly interpreted by successive generations of artists. Even if one hasn’t always agreed with the series’s mixed conclusions about Britain’s past, viewed through a cultural prism, it has always been an informative watch.
War and Peace, this series’s penultimate episode, explores the trauma of the two world wars and their impact on art. Its starting point is WB Yeats’s line “All changed, changed utterly” in his poem Easter, 1916 about the Irish uprising, which marked a major strike against the British empire. Also, conceptual artist Oliver Chanarin talks about William Orpen’s 1923 painting To the Unknown British Soldier in France
(on view at the Imperial War Museum in London), commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to commemorate the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919; and film producer Andrew Macdonald explores the controversy sparked by The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a wry take on the British war effort made by his grandfather Emeric Pressburger. It seriously enraged Winston Churchill, who attempted to ban it before it became a wellreceived hit. Veronica Lee