The horror of war
PICK OF THE WEEK: The Passing Bells, BBC1, Monday, 7pm.
NEW five-part drama marking the centenary of the First World World war, sees the conflict unfold through the eyes of two very ordinary young men. Deep in the countryside, Michael (Paddy Gibson) and Katie are young and in love, as yet untouched by rumours of war. In a small town, delivery boy Thomas (Jack Lowden) is equally oblivious to the rumblings of conflict coming from the continent. But as the news trickles through to their small communities, both boys are inspired by the thought of heroic deeds and foreign lands.
When war is announced, both Michael and Thomas defy their parents and slip out to the recruitment office, alongside thousands of other young men. As the boys don their uniforms, we see that Thomas is a British soldier and Michael is German. Each set of parents struggle to cope with their children’s deception. Rifts between their families cast a cloud over the boys’ final days at home.
Apprehensive of what lies ahead, Tommy and Michael set off for training. Michael makes friends easily with upright Freddie, scruffy Stefan, joker Lanzo and earnest Rudi, but that doesn’t stop him from missing Katie. Meanwhile, shy Tommy finds his niche with joker Cyril, gambling man Anthony, womanizer Kev and funny man Ben. But reality bites as the boys get their first taste of the trenches.
Written by Tony Jordan, The Passing Bells follows their lives over five years as they grow up, lose friends and find love amid the horrors of the war.
“When I was first asked to do this, I looked at the war films that had been done before – everything from period shows to Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan,” says Jordan, who started his career on EastEnders. “It struck me that they’d all done the same thing and I wanted to do something different.
“The one thing that always binds movies together in that genre is that there are always good guys and bad guys and I wanted to move away from that. In The Passing Bells there are no good guys, there are no bad guys. You’re not sure what’s right, what’s wrong, because that to me is the perspective of the boys who we sent there.
“The boys didn’t know – they didn’t even know where they were half the time. They certainly didn’t know about the tactics or the nature of a world war because it had never happened before. The antagonist, the only bad guy if you like, in the whole thing is the war itself.
“One of my source materials was a series called Forgotten Voices. What I found fascinating about it was that there were no clichés. It was just about the people who were there and their own stories in their own words. Some of them were surprising. Some of them said, ‘it was most the most terrible war ever, but I had a great time, I met the best friends I’d ever met…’
“I didn’t want to tell the tactics of the war, who was winning, who was losing and which battles did what. I wanted to tell a story literally from ground level, from the boys in the trenches. Those firsthand accounts were gold dust to me and from that point, the characters started to come to life and I could hear them talking in the tent. I realised that if I stopped thinking of them as soldiers but just thought of them as boys, then it would all make sense.”