TV & RADIO
February BBC One
All the must-see/hear programmes
Between 7 September 1940 and 11 May 1941, German planes dropped an estimated 32,000 tonnes of bombs on Britain’s towns, city centres and suburbs. These were the days when Hermann Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to pummel London, ports such as Cardiff, Glasgow and Plymouth, and industrial areas including Birmingham, Coventry and Manchester.
During the eight months of the Blitz, 44,652 souls perished as destruction rained down from the sky in raid after raid, people dying beneath the rubble of their homes, or in tube stations or backyard bomb shelters.
How do you even begin to sum up eight months that have come to underpin the nation’s self-image? In this featurelength documentary presented by Lucy Worsley and made by the award-winning production team behind Suffragettes With Lucy Worsley, the solution is to see the era in great part through the stories of six real people, portrayed here by actors who read from first-hand accounts, including those preserved in the Mass Observation archives. These were men and women who served on the home front, when thousands stepped forward to take on roles such as air-raid wardens, stretcher-bearers and nurses with the Civil Defence force.
Their courage should not be doubted, but this is a documentary that looks beyond familiar phrases such as ‘blitz spirit’ and ‘keep calm and carry on’ (a phrase that didn’t connect with ordinary people at the time) to explore “why we remember what we do and what’s been left out”.
This turns out to be a complex story. Or, to use Worsley’s own word, a “messier” tale of a time when ordinary people had to think anew about what it meant to be British – and what it might mean in the years of conflict that lay ahead. Featuring evocative and sometimes outright frightening archive footage, this is a terrific documentary.