Something to watch tonight: Thursday 2 October

The World at War (Isaacs, 1973)

Every Sunday night I watch TV the way it’s meant to be watched — one epis­ode a week. At the moment I’m start­ing light — sea­son four of the Coogan/Brydon com­edy The Trip1 where they are on the trail of the Odyssey around Greece — fol­lowed by The West Wing (half way through sea­son two) and fin­ish­ing with an epis­ode of Mad Men so I can read the equi­val­ent chapter of Matt Zoller Seitz’s exhaust­ive appre­ci­ation of the show, Mad Men Carousel.

In between West Wing and Mad Men stream­ing, I have been watch­ing some­thing on disc — the com­plete box set of the 1973 ITV doc­u­ment­ary series The World at War which is still avail­able from from JB Hi-Fi or dir­ect from ViaVision in Australia.

It’s 26 epis­odes, plus about eight extras with mater­i­al that couldn’t fit into the ori­gin­al series, so it’s a pro­ject that I’ve been on for more than six months2.

I can’t ima­gine a bet­ter example of pop­u­lar but ser­i­ous his­tory. Producer Jeremy Isaacs mar­shalled a huge team of writers, pro­du­cer, research­ers and dir­ect­ors, clev­erly break­ing the story of the war into episode-sized top­ics rather than attempt­ing a pure chronology.

Even by today’s stand­ards the research was prodi­gious. Much of the mater­i­al was drawn from archives in the defeated powers and the Soviet mater­i­al in par­tic­u­lar can be har­row­ing. Much of the show’s power, though, comes from the first-person wit­nesses, some of whom were prom­in­ent (Albert Speer, Hitler’s dir­ect­or of war pro­duc­tion) but many were just ordin­ary folk with stor­ies to tell. There was some urgency to get­ting this testi­mony as, even in the early sev­en­ties, age was tak­ing its toll.

As the series pro­gresses, you can see how fast media tech­no­logy was chan­ging — cam­er­as were get­ting light­er and could go to places that were pre­vi­ously impossible, film speeds were faster which meant image qual­ity improved. And then, after Pearl Harbour, the Americans arrived and things go up a few more notches. I reviewed Five Came Back, the bril­liant Netflix series of doc­u­ment­ar­ies based on Mark Harris’s book about the Hollywood dir­ect­ors who cap­tured so much of World War II — often to the det­ri­ment of their careers and their health, for Jesse Mulligan back in 2017, and the work of Capra, Ford, Wyler, Huston and Stevens and less well-known con­trib­ut­ors, is essen­tial to our appre­ci­ation of what the world went through.

There is extraordin­ary foot­age of planes basic­ally crash­ing on to rudi­ment­ary air­craft car­ri­er decks while wit­nesses talk of how the need to black the ships out at night meant that up to a third of the pilots who went out to sink the Japanese navy could not find their way home and were forced to ditch in the dark.

The unflinch­ing foot­age of the dead and wounded across the Pacific, from the Tarawa Atoll in the Marshall Islands and on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, is so hor­rif­ic it must need a con­tent warn­ing every time it’s broad­cast. The epis­ode devoted to the holo­caust con­tains mater­i­al that is almost impossible to fathom but should be essen­tial view­ing for all young humans who will now be con­fron­ted through­out their lives by forces try­ing to per­suade them that none of it ever happened.

First broad­cast in 1973, with GOAT nar­ra­tion by Laurence Olivier and a score by Carl Davis that chills you every time you hear it, The World at War has nev­er been off screen, and is still a staple of pub­lic broad­casters and cable sta­tions world­wide, which might explain why it hasn’t become avail­able to streamers.

The recently restored Blu-ray box set3 should be in every home and school lib­rary but, if you find the cost to be too much of an obstacle, an earli­er DVD ver­sion of the series has been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

This was the F&S home page just now, sug­gest­ing that it’s time I laid off polit­ics for a while!

Where to watch The World at War

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Australia: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Canada: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Digital pur­chase from Amazon

UK: Not cur­rently avail­able online