Original subtitles

Television was in its infancy in this country

when I joined it, when I went to work in 1958,

and everything we did we were doing for the first time.

The first historical documentaries,

one or two were made in the '50s.

The thing that revealed to people like me

the possibilities of the medium for dealing with history

has to be the BBC series The Great War,

which was 26 episodes, 40 minutes long, on the First World War.

And they combined... those programmes combined

a desire to give people the experience of war,

the oomph, the pity of war,

the suffering of war, the heroism of war

with a rigorous historical thread

supplied as the sort of backbone of the programmes.

And they combined,

and this is what led to so many other people having a go,

they combined and juxtaposed newsreel images of war

with eyewitness testimony

to the subject matter that the newsreels were portraying.

And those two ingredients are of the essence

of any history of a war in the 20th century

and The World At War followed that formula

with far more newsreel to choose from,

with sound-on-film newsreel to provide variety

and with interviews with people

who were far closer to the war that they'd fought between 1939 and 1945

than the BBC's interviews could be in the early '60s

for a war that ended in 1913.

In order to do the series,

in order to get the point of view of people from all sides,

in Germany particularly,

was a difficult enterprise and we had set out...

We had told the people who we went to see

that what we wanted to do was to present

their point of view, their war, their experience of the war

without being judgemental.

We wanted, for the first time,

to present a picture which wasn't the old view

of Germany the Nazi villains

and the brave rest of the world.

The... That was the honest basis on which we approached the whole series.

I wanted to tell a story

that made people want to come back next week

and to that extent we treated the subject matter

as a story with a beginning, with lots of different middles, with an end.

To understand the way that making this series worked,

the first thing to understand is

to look at the whole...

the place it has

in the history of making multi-part historical documentaries

on television in this country.

And the point was that words were used extremely sparingly

in The World At War.

Russia, mid-June 1941.

A bewildered, uncertain country.

Rumours abounded of invasion by Hitler's Germany.

Pictures can and must tell the story.

Basically it was the pictures which were doing the communicating.

Get right away from what was then regarded

as the boring old convention of having talking heads explaining everything,

huge, laborious, prosy commentary and just pictures as illustrations,

little grainy black-and-white clips doing this and that. Boring.

Here in the Kremlin,

Russia's leaders seemed oblivious of the Nazi threat,

or if not oblivious, then complacent,

as if by ignoring it it might disappear.

The idea was that the pictures are going to tell everything,

and you would do that by huge film research into film archives,

getting out everything there is and making it tell the story it can tell.

And only where the pictures themselves can't tell the story

do you use, very sparingly, commentary,

as few words as you possibly can,

and if you get to a point at which you have to use a lot of words

to explain what's going on because the pictures don't,

then you'd better drop that particular passage altogether,

drop that clip and move on.

So that was a very strong ideology,

messianic faith in the power of pictures to tell a historical story.

I was the boss.

It was my idea and I was given the task of doing it

and I did two separate things.

The first was done in the very beginning with Noble Frankland,

and that was to map out the course the series would take,

what individual episodes would be about.

A purely chronological approach isn't adequate.

You have to get the architecture of the series right

and that means, first of all,

that every single film has to tell one story.

All good films tell only one story.

They don't try to tell three or four or five or 100 stories.

If you try to tell 100 stories, you've got an encyclopaedia,

not a film that exists in linear time.

So what I was doing initially,

my contribution to the architecture of the series,

with the advice of Noble Frankland and my colleagues...

We'd discuss things but nevertheless,

I decided what the 26 episodes of the series would be.

The whole idea behind The World At War as Jeremy had conceived it,

as we all were working on it,

was that it would be the story of the war

told from the point of view of the people

in the countries involved in the war,

that it was not going to be a history.

Jeremy, I think, felt very strongly

that we were not setting out to do a history of the war,

but it was to tell the story of the war

and the experience of the war

which had so shaped the post-war world.

What did he promise?

Work and bread for the masses,

for the millions of workers who were unemployed and hungry at that time.

Nowadays, in our prosperous society,

work and bread doesn't mean anything any more,

but then it was an absolutely basic need

and this promise, which wouldn't make any sense today,

then it sounded like a promise of paradise.

There would be one episode that was a preliminary to the war

and painted the scene in Europe and the world before the war began,

that there would be chronological episodes that told the story,

the narrative story of different parts of the war...

...the battle for France, the battle for Britain,

much later on the campaign in Egypt that led to the victory at El Alamein,

Hitler's assault on Russia,

the Japanese assault in the East

that led to the capture of Singapore and so on.

The series would partly consist of these narrative stories

and of course those stories, which sometimes overlapped,

would nevertheless be arranged in chronological order.

And within these stories I would intersperse episodes

which dealt with the themes of the war.

How was the British war effort organised?

How was the war at sea fought?

How was the bombing campaign against Germany conducted?

Each of those stories might cover a period that lasted two or three years,

but the trick was to arrange them in such a way

that when you finished watching one episode,

you were keen to watch the next.

Each of them had to seem to move the story on.

If you tell the history of a war

that lasted a finite six years just as simple narrative,

you miss a dimension,

you miss some understanding of how the thing is organised.

But if you only deal with it thematically rather than in narrative,

that's to say war weaponry, war psychology,

war thinking, war suffering, war bravery,

you'd end up with 26 episodes,

each of which spanned the whole six-year period of the war

but never seemed to move the thing forward,

each of them would begin it and end it

and you'd be facing the viewer each week

with six, ten, 20 different ways of looking at the war.

It was talking about a huge physical and emotional experience

which was still very, very fresh in British minds,

particularly British minds,

and it was the first time

that anybody had really put together the whole war in memories,

interviews with survivors who, of course,

were still, in the '70s, abounding,

thousands upon thousands of people who remembered and could tell.

Many of them in Germany weren't actually that keen to talk to you,

but certainly in Britain and certainly among some of the...

certainly among the soldiers in Germany,

it was almost as if it was the first time

that anybody had asked them about it

because the feeling about the war in post-war Germany

was such that their children... you tended not to talk about the war

in the same way in Germany as you did in Britain.

Therefore you got, often, perhaps, a fresher feeling from the Germans

because they hadn't rehearsed their glorious exploits.

The French had more tanks

and some better tanks, heavier tanks

than we have had Panzers,

but we managed our Panzer troops

what Guderian said in his instructions.

"Strike hard and quickly and don't disperse your forces."

The importance of big series is they cover the whole ground,

they show what can be achieved,

they give you a sense of the balance of different factors

and a sense of proportion about any one incident,

but they paint with a very broad brush

and they leave it to others coming after

to fill in a great deal of detail that there isn't any room for.

The audience responded with tremendous emotion.

It was as if they said, "They're singing our song."

You know, "Singing our song."

And in a sense the whole series was carried on

by a deep assent from the viewing audience.

I think Jeremy Isaacs and co,

they were smart enough to understand that that's how it would be.

There was an absolutely critical moment in February 1971.

The government changed the taxation system

to which the ITV companies,

the commercial television companies of Britain, were subjected.

Instead of their money being taxed at source as revenue

before it came into the company,

the government agreed that it could be taxed as profit

after it had been used in the company.

I went to my bosses at Thames Television

the day after the postmaster general,

the great middle-distance runner Christopher Chataway,

announced this in the House of Commons

and said, "Why don't we make a history of the Second World War?"

Thames had no real idea of what they had let themselves into

when they had agreed that Jeremy should go ahead with the series.

Well, they had been told that they could use

the revenues from the sale of advertising

that came into the company before they were taxed

provided they spent them on programmes.

The budget that he presented for the series, for the 26 one-hours,

was just over £400,000.

They fell over when I suggested this and agreed to it immediately.

The final cost was just over £900,000.

Nobody believes it nowadays.

You think, "You mean £900,000 per episode?"

No, £900,000 for 26 hours.

I never even had what today would be regarded as a budget for the series.

We kept tabs on the direct cost of what we were doing as we went along,

the cost of recording the music, the cost of processing the film,

the cost of hotels, travel and subsistence

in gathering the interviewees

and paying the expenses of the film researchers,

who would spend weeks in an archive.

What we had on that series which I don't think one would ever have again

is an enormous amount of time and seemingly endless resources,

and Jeremy was incredibly encouraging.

I got a terrific tip from a friend of mine, Muir Sutherland,

who was responsible for selling Thames's programmes in those days.

He went to the Savoy Hotel

with the managing director of Thames, Howard Thomas,

to sell the series before...

when only two out of 26 episodes were ready, to Australia,

and he sold it to a wonderful man called Packer, Clyde Packer,

who was Kerry Packer's father

and owned the Nines, the Channel Nines in Australia.

And on the way back from the Savoy to Thames,

Howard said to Muir, "Don't tell Jeremy what Packer said he'd pay

or he'll go and spend more money."

So I knew then that the series was going to...

I didn't know to what extent but I knew it would sell around the world.

After one trip I came back and said to Jeremy,

"I actually haven't got anything concrete."

"I've sown a lot of seeds, I've met a lot of people, some of them..."

"This is to get the really big interviews."

"I think in the end it will work."

And he said, "Don't worry. Don't worry. You can go again."

And it was this ability to go back again and again

which helped to build up the trust

and also to establish

a really firm groundwork of facts

and of knowledge of that person's experience of the war

so that we also then very meticulously

checked and double-checked the stories.

Thames had wonderfully successful programmes,

always a higher share of the audience than the BBC,

always a higher share of the audience in Thames's week

than London Weekend's weekend,

and so they had to be seen to aim high in their programming

and the director of programmes at Thames, Brian Tesler,

and the managing director, Howard Thomas,

instantly agreed to what I wanted to do and backed it all the way.

Thames had a split-site operation at that time.

The principal offices were on Euston Road

but the production facilities, the studio facilities

were down at Teddington.

And so we were found little offices

and little rooms which became cutting rooms

which had been prefabricated, I think, almost during the period of the war.

They were certainly very basic.

The important thing was that I knew where everybody was at any given time

and had a schedule of sorts of what was happening

because with 26 episodes they could not be all shot simultaneously,

so we had to work out who could do what when where.

And so that's where the fact that there were 26 episodes

fitted in very nicely with A through Z.

And I can still almost rattle off every one.

A3 was the first episode to be shot, A,

but number 3, France Falls, was the third one transmitted.

It's called amongst the team A3.

Everybody knows what you're talking about.

We set about researching The World At War

in the way that you then researched,

and I'm sure still do research, programmes.

You start with a broad remit.

You do a lot of reading and you speak to people

who then give you perhaps one or two names

and you then go and see those

and they will usually lead you on to more.

People like the old soldiers were fairly easy

because you just go through the old soldiers'...

You find out which units were in the...

which units were in the different areas of battle

that you're interested in

and then you go through the old soldiers' organisations.

I found, in Germany particularly,

the institute for Military History in Freiburg was really helpful.

The World At War isn't a purely military history

of the Second World War.

I took the view that such a series...

There's plenty of fighting in The World At War,

but I took the view that if there were only fighting,

tanks rolling and firing, planes diving and bombing,

shells exploding, troops advancing,

although the war was fought on all sorts of different fronts,

I thought there would be a homogeneity, if you like,

but I thought perhaps a monotony of texture

if that was the sole content of the series.

I wanted to show instead, or in addition,

what the civilian experience of the war was.

Planes come over of a night,

and they was, in my opinion, trying to break the backs of the houses.

I used to listen and shudder. "The next one's mine."

They'd have six bombs.

One, two, three, four... "This is mine."

No, over the next one they'd go, miss my house.

And that used to go on all night.

Britain had the nearest thing to a command economy,

with everybody working in the war effort

and nobody working for anything else during the Second World War,

almost than any of the other combatant powers.

I was very shocked when I heard

on the news on Christmas Day

that I was to be directed to the mines.

I wanted to show how nations geared themselves for war

and what civilians experienced in war

in Britain, in the United States, in the Soviet Union

and in Germany and Japan.

I wanted a series that didn't just show

what Britain went through in the war.

I wanted a series that showed

what all the great combatant nations went through in the war

and which included their attitudes, their experience,

their pride, their suffering.

We were very lucky in the timing as far as the Germans were concerned

because they were just beginning to be able to talk about the war

and seemed to welcome the opportunity and did trust us,

that what we wanted was their story, was their explanation, in a way,

of how it had happened

and how the Nazi regime

had come to control all their lives

and what they had experienced during the war.

And we spoke to people who had been...

Our aim was... which is what we put...

We needed to talk to people who had been convinced Nazis

and who had believed in what they were fighting for...

...for them to explain to us what it was at the time.

What we tried to do was to...

...to look at the war without the benefit of hindsight.

What we were trying to do, and I think that we managed to do,

particularly in the home front in Germany,

was to show the progress and the fun

and the lightening up after a period of depression and no money

and no work and six million unemployed,

and to show how the ordinary people perceived it,

who perhaps didn't think a great deal,

but suddenly there were fun things to do.

If you were a very ordinary person it was a very good time.

All this seemed ideal ground

for a prophet to say,

"I will lead you to the promised land."

"I will deliver you from evil."

Anyone who said that

would be greeted with enthusiasm.

Of course, there were people who said, "This is a false prophet,"

but who was to know whether they were right or not?

At that time no one did.

What we encouraged them to say

was how they had experienced it

without the fear of being judged.

And we tried not to be judgemental.

And I think at times that was very difficult.

There was an element of trust

because in order to be taken to see people

and meet people who were going to give you their view,

and as a background,

it was important for them to know that you were not going to just be

yet another Nazi hunter in a different guise.

So it was to be...

If we had said that was the basis on which we were doing it,

then yes, we were in a position of trust.

Not that one in any way supported what they'd done,

but that was not part of our job.

It was to be able to present the story, which was the greater aim.

It would have been wrong

to have got caught up in what is actually another issue.

I didn't make The World At War.

The World At War was made by 50 people who worked together for three years.

Once we'd agreed the shape and architecture of the series,

each programme became the responsibility

of an individual producer.

Some produced and directed their episodes,

some wrote and produced and directed their episodes,

some worked with collaborators,

but they were entrusted with the task

of making one programme in the series,

though several of them made more than that.

Each of them had some leeway, some little leeway

to do it in their own sort of way, in their own personal style,

and you can tell by looking at the programmes

which director... producer-director made each one,

but all of them had to conform rigidly and properly

to a framework that was laid down.

The single most diff cult question as we went along

was where each programme stopped and the next one began,

and there were territorial disputes about that along the way,

but they were all, in the end, happily settled.

Two people had a task, along with me, of overseeing the whole of it.

One was the historical adviser,

a very considerable figure called Noble Frankland,

who was director of the imperial War Museum,

and he was hugely helpful in the making of the series

since he told us what we ought to do and then let us get on with it.

We reciprocated by showing him every outline script

and every rough cut of a film or fine cut of a film before it was completed,

but basically he held my hand in getting right,

or as right as we could,

the coverage of different theatres of war.

Of 900 men in my battalion,

200 fell out because of freezing...

...in the first 14 days.

We tried to do justice to the experience in the war

and the contribution to the victory of the Soviet Union,

which was huge.

The war was won by American firepower, if you like,

and Soviet manpower.

The war was not won in the West, it was won on the Eastern Front.

And he was keen not to forget the Pacific,

to show that once Japan was in the war

it was a war of two theatres, Europe and the Far East.

And he helped us get that right.

And then my colleague Jerry Kuehl,

who was the associate producer of the series,

I gave him the task of nit-picker,

of spotting errors and correcting us,

and whereas Frankland had a say in the broad sweep of the thing,

Jerry helped us get the pictures right,

not completely right but as right as we could,

and the facts right. He checked the detail.

Another absolutely key figure

was Alan Afriat, the supervisory film editor,

because he set up the systems that made the whole thing work.

You have to remember that the film footage we were dealing with was 35mm,

and it was of very variable quality

in the libraries and archives of the world.

And Alan...

Thames Television was partly owned by Rediffusion.

Rediffusion owned Humphries Laboratories in Whitfield Street,

just across from where we're sitting now,

and Alan set up the systems

that meant that this film was papered up by film researchers,

Raye Farr and John Rowe,

in the archives of the world,

ordered, brought in, copied...

He'll tell you all about it.

And then he worked and worked and worked

with the film processing people and with the grader of the final print

to get the last possible pinpoint of quality out of the image

that cameras in very different and difficult circumstances had captured.

And he did all that and he set up a cutting room

and we began to get going

and we didn't hire the other four or five film editors

until there was enough material,

which all had to be researched and found and printed up

or shot and processed and prints delivered

and logged so that you never, ever lost anything

and you always knew exactly where to get

any one of the hundreds of interviews that we did

and the thousands of film stories that were printed up.

Alan set up the whole of that,

and he needed other people to help him in the end,

but he did an absolutely tremendous job

and I would say that without him and the system he created

the whole thing would have been chaos and completely impossible.

I was probably the person at Thames

who was most experienced

in this kind of shooting.

I'd worked with Jeremy, not on The Life And Times Of Lord Mountbatten,

but on The Day Before Yesterday.

Jeremy was also involved in that.

So I in fact left Thames,

because we were all freelance on the series,

and my brief was to set up the whole machinery for handling the film...

...making sure that everything could be found easily

across several programmes which might be using the same material.

So we had to set up all kinds of ways

in which the film researchers could identify what film they'd found

and that could then be recognised when it arrived in the cutting rooms

and could then be assigned a card index

where it could be cross-referenced

so that if anybody wanted anything on Burma in 1942,

regardless of whether it was particularly for their programme

it was ordered, that they could find it easily.

The actual first episode of the series...

...the title of which escapes me at the moment,

N1, was the 14th programme to be made

because Jeremy, I think, felt that he wanted to get,

get some programmes made and finished

so that there was a feeling and a style established

so that the first programme could be created

as the right start to what was going to follow.

I didn't know how to make the series

until the film researcher Raye Farr found me some...

And I remember seeing it with her in the German film archive in Koblenz,

some quite marvellous footage that wasn't shot for newsreel

but was shot for documentary,

and it was shot behind the German lines on the Eastern Front.

Actually we're almost about to discover

precisely where that material was shot

because we can now compare it with photographs that have been uncovered

and it looks as if we know where it was now.

But we didn't know where it was then

and therefore it stood for generalities,

it stood for the experience of these men, these women.

The very first words of the series mean an enormous amount to me.

I went to Oradour-sur-Glane myself to see this village

which was destroyed and burned

by a Nazi SS... German SS division

and which the French left preserved,

standing exactly as it was then,

near Limoges in the Limousin,

and I knew then that that could be the opening title of the series

and the end of the series.

I'm not sure I realised immediately I could use it again at the end.

And Neal Ascherson got the series off to the best of all possible starts

with the commentary that he wrote for that beginning of the series,

"Down this road the soldiers came."

Not "the German soldiers", "the soldiers".

And that gave the thing a sort of claim to universality

that we hankered after and I like.

Down this road, on a summer day in 1944,

the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community which had lived for 1,000 years was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came the people were gathered together.

The men were taken to garages and barns,

the women and children were led down this road

and they were driven into this church.

Here they heard the firing as their men were shot.

Then they were killed too.

A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing

were themselves dead in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial.

Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

I think we got that dead right because we said,

"This village stands for thousands..."

"This ruin..."

"This... What happened here stands for

hundreds upon hundreds of other incidents

that happened in every theatre of the war

in a world at war."

That got us off to the start and then Carl...

We had John Stamp's marvellous main title and Carl's music

and we were off.

The title music was really very interesting to do

and one which I did very quickly,

or sketched very quickly.

That was really inspired by the ideas that Jeremy had given me

at our very first meeting.

I joked to myself at a certain point

that I chose a certain progression that is heard in Czech music,

in particular Smetana, Janáček and Martinů,

that line which always had a particular cadence,

that moved from minor keys to major keys.

And I like the idea somehow that the Czech music...

Czechoslovakia, as it was then,

was a small country that had aspirations towards democracy

but in its history always had a struggle trying to have it.

Remember that when we made this series we were at the height of the Cold War

and so attitudes towards various places,

which would be one thing then, were another.

The other aspect of a title theme and creating music for a title theme

is that I always try and work with the graphics people.

I had a really very interesting time on The World At War

because one was involved in something regarded as very crude then,

hand-drawn storyboards.

A storyboard, of course, is like a comic strip

in which the principal visual elements are drawn in a kind of progression.

And from that a composer could work out,

"What is the character of the visual elements going to be?"

Secondly, and this is all-important,

"How much time have I got? How many seconds have I got?"

Fortunately, and this is rare now,

there was the opportunity to create something of some dimension.

We had nearly a minute of title music to play with

and it was very interestingly integrated

because the programmes started with what we called the "hooker",

which is a sort of tease, something ahead of the programme,

to give the audience something which would carry them into the programme,

they would set up the subject of the programme.

That would take you into the title sequence,

so it was obviously...

It worked very well because the first notes that I conceived

were very dramatic.

It was going to start with something

that was like an explosion or a bombardment.

Indeed the idea of that worked very well

because the first little picture of the storyboard

was a sheet of flame

and then out of the flame were going to come faces

which would represent everybody.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, of these faces,

was that of a young girl, which I fantasised was Anne Frank.

Maybe it wasn't Anne Frank but it was a young girl.

That was the moment I decided it had to go from minor to major.

Somewhere around there the character of it would change

and there would be a ray of hope.

Then it would go back to the minor cadences.

There were other things. I tried to use a lot of music from the period.

And some of the German films, or some of all the films,

maybe I used a pop song of the period,

maybe it was film that was actually on a newsreel that was shown at the time

or a documentary that was made at the time.

But you couldn't use the music that was on the soundtrack

because it was covered with commentary or sound effects.

For example, there was the big parade at the end of the first programme,

the big Berlin parade,

where there was this spectacular piece of music, very dramatic piece of music

which I couldn't use off the newsreel

because it was covered with commentary and sound effects.

But it was absolutely the piece of music to use.

I didn't know what it was

and absolutely searched around trying to find where that piece of music was,

playing it to all sorts of people and saying, "What's this piece of music?"

And eventually we found out it was Bruckner's Fifth Symphony.

And so I used it because that was what was used at the time.

It was the way that that parade was seen

in the German cinemas at the time.

It was worth using that.

I thought better than composing...

Wonderful as Carl's music was,

I thought it was better to use music like that

than to use specially scored music.

Specially scored music works fine

when it's not trying to impart anything particular.

Moving the story along, that's OK.

But for situations like that it was nice to use the original music

that they'd chosen at the time.

If you were watching the film you wouldn't know that,

you wouldn't know why that piece of music had been used.

It was particularly difficult at the start of this

to define what role music was going to play.

The title theme was not such a problem

because Jeremy, at our very first meeting,

talked about the qualities that he wanted in the title music.

He defined his series as being one

which of course would take in the enormous battles,

the landmark battles and so on,

but he was particularly interested in emphasising the human problems

of what it felt like to be bombed or bombing,

what it felt like to be occupied etcetera.

In other words, what the individual statement was going to be.

That was going to be different from other series about the war,

that it was going to be that particularised.

And so a lot of the successful passages of music

actually had to do with the individual experience,

trying to interpret the individual experience,

whether it was arrogant or tragic or lyric, sometimes.

Initially I wrote very descriptive music

and that was found to be less effective

than areas where a director would actually clear the way

for some pictures which would not have talking over it

and in which I would actually make a very active contribution.

Olivier did all the recordings at Preview Two,

in a little wood-lined booth,

and he tried initially to do them to film

but found it too time-consuming,

so it was decided that he would just record it wild

with the editors timing each sequence so they knew they could fit.

Occasionally it would be,

"Excuse me, Sir Laurence, could we do that a little quicker?"

"Sir Laurence, could you just let that stretch a bit?"

And he was wonderfully good about it and had no problems with doing it all.

I can still remember going up to Larry Olivier

in the recording studio in Oxford Street...

...and saying to him, "You do realise, do you, that..."

He was wearing a big pair of red suspenders, braces,

and he was about to put his jacket on and come out of the booth.

He'd done it pretty well but I said to him,

"You do know, don't you,

that those words are the very first words

that will be heard in the entire series?"

"Ah," he said. He took his jacket off and said, "I'll do it again."

And he then did it with the total wonderful mastery

that he does deliver, making every single syllable count

and pronouncing the letter A

in at least three and maybe four different ways

in the course of those few words.

I had to do the catering for the lunch breaks in the thing

and his secretary, who I checked with, said,

"Sir Laurence would just like a glass of white wine and apples and cheese."

And as we did most of the recordings at Preview Two on Oxford Street,

it was very easy to go to Berwick Street Market and Marks & Spencer's

and get white wine and good cheese.

The apples that he really liked were golden russets, if I remember rightly.

And he was, of course, a man of the war.

He had flown in the Fleet Air Arm, if I remember rightly,

and he flew Skuas, which he had a lovely story about.

Because he was an actor and the press heard about it...

He was down at Worthy Down, which is one of the bases,

and was taxiing his Skua along the runway

and posing to the cameras and crashed it.

And when the series was over,

there was a chap at the imperial War Museum

who made wonderful model aircraft and so we asked him to make a Skua

which we presented to Sir Laurence as a "Thank you very much".

He was quite pleased about that.

To start with, he was not the intended narrator.

He only...

We only recorded with him in October/November of 1972,

after we'd been in production for 18 months...

...because there had been some change of thinking about it

and it was decided that because it was going to be terrific,

it needed the best voice in the business.

Originally we had gone for Rene Cutforth,

the late, great war correspondent,

and he had recorded the first four episodes.

And it was then decided that no, we wanted something different.

And in the time between deciding that Rene was not going to do the rest

and getting Olivier on board,

Allan Hargreaves, who was the staff voice,

recorded quite a number as guide tracks

so that the editors could continue cutting to that.

And then, certainly, we started over with Olivier in October,

recording Peter Batty's France Falls, A3.

It's better on this kind of programme if the producer doesn't get too close

because one has to get ideas across as clearly as you can

and often you're not really quite sure whether things are working or not.

And if the producer is too close to the material,

neither of you are helping each other, you're all... you're too close,

you need to see something with a fresh eye

and say, "I don't know what that's all about,"

or, "That's OK but it's in the wrong place."

So the editor's often too close

to be able to see things that are more apparent

to somebody who's not seen the material before.

The editor knows every single cut

whereas the director is only really aware of sequences.

I think that the faith in the power of the pictures to tell the story,

the primacy of the picture, if you like,

was a moment in the history of historical documentary making.

Doing World War Two was quite different.

You were in a world which abounded with film,

in which research and archives

could turn up amazing film which nobody knew existed,

which hadn't been looked at for 30 years.

It was a period when people felt, "Let us make film a new way."

"Let's make documentaries in a different way

and let the pictures do the work because they can."

The subject, of course, made it possible to do that.

But it wasn't just the subject that enabled this,

it was a general mood which was, as I say,

faith in the picture itself and a feeling...

I think it was a feeling that you could escape

from some sort of editorial expert, non-television control

by relying on the pictures.

If you rely on the pictures,

that absolutely confirmed the status of the producer as the boss

and there was no getting away from that.

I think that also played a role.

Later, much later, after The World At War,

things changed again for a lot of different reasons.

The way of making historical documentaries changed.

The almost obsessive emphasis on the primacy of the picture

began to dwindle, particularly because people...

They started colliding with really difficult, contorted subjects

in which you were trying to tell people things

not only that they didn't know but they didn't want to know.

At that point, the minimal commentary and the total primacy of the picture

begins to be much more difficult to operate.

You have to have lucid explication of what's going on.

You have to say, "You think this is happening

but I'm going to tell you that behind the scenes it was quite different."

"They told you that Berlin was about to fall

and that the Soviets were going to move in."

"It never, ever crossed the Soviets' mind to do this, actually."

"You were being fooled and they, the authorities, knew this."

And that kind of example.

You can't do that in the way that The Worid At War approached its subject.

Programmes like this aren't tightly scripted.

The programme starts with an outline brief

which might come from the director and the writer,

it might come only from the director.

There would be a whole lot of briefs

which would come for the various programmes.

We were not so much going out with a detailed remit,

but a broad remit as to what we were trying to achieve in each programme.

Jeremy sorted out what area was going to be covered by which programme.

Each programme had an overall feeling

of what you wanted to achieve

as a view for that particular theatre of war,

so there was the home front in Britain and the home front in Germany,

which were kind of mirror programmes.

A producer would go away,

whether it was John Pett inventing wonderful ways

of using voiceovers in his episode on D-Day

or his episode on the war in the Pacific,

or Peter Batty who did six programmes,

five of which gave an enormous narrative impulse

to the first half of the series.

They would finish what they had to do,

they would brief the researchers that would find them interviewees,

though some of them, Peter Batty for example,

preferred to chat up his own interviewees.

He had a very good line in German generals,

whom he seemed to get on with.

They would brief the researcher to find interviewees

and they would brief the film researcher

as to the material they were looking for visually to make up the episode

and this would come back

and it would be logged under Alan Afriat's supervision

and go into the cutting room and be assembled.

The film researchers would go out and look for film to cover

whatever they could find

on the areas that the outline script wanted to cover.

A BBC cameraman called Ronnie Noble, who worked in newsreel,

he took pictures of what happened there

and none of them were used

because the British people couldn't be shown

what their troops, what their brothers and husbands and lovers and sons

looked like on the beaches of Dunkirk.

It was just too rough to take,

so although Britain tried to cheer everybody up

with, "Let's have another cup of tea," and, "We can do it,"

what we went through, even,

is not adequately portrayed in The World At War,

let alone the appalling experience of the people of occupied Europe

or of the war on the Eastern Front,

where the Russians may have lost 25 million dead,

and where one third of every Pole in Poland died

in the Second World War, including the Jews.

Those experiences would have been hard to take

and if you knew about them, even, they were hard to take.

One tended to go for a kind of blanket coverage,

like archive material.

The researchers would go out

and they would try and find pretty well everything they could,

so you'd get a lot of duplicate coverage from all different sources,

some of it exactly the same.

A lot of it came from neutral countries.

Often the stuff from the neutral countries was in the best condition

because nobody had looked at it or done anything with it.

So you had German newsreels

which were sitting in archives in Portugal, for instance,

and they were much better quality than what you got from Germany.

There would be quite a substantial amount of interviewing,

again covering the area, the broad scope of a particular programme.

The factual correctness was something we were very careful to get right.

The other thing was that by getting to know people over a longer period

and speaking to them several times,

you did actually get a very broad picture

of what their experience had been,

so that you were able then perhaps

to pick out the most representative or most relevant part from that.

It was very important that we had that amount of time

to build up the picture of each episode

so that we could feed that in.

The process of editing then started,

of assembling the material

into a kind of manageable format

in some kind of predetermined order.

There would be a lot of repetition,

a lot of interviews where people were saying the same thing.

Sometimes people were saying it better than others.

A lot of people were covering the same ground.

And a lot of the archive material was, again, quite repetitious.

But the initial long process

was going through the material to start with

and getting it into a programme

which might have run five or six hours, probably.

I would think a first assembly might well have run five or six hours,

probably out of about 12, 14, 15 hours of material, maybe.

So you were already whittling down at that early stage,

getting rid of any duplication of coverage,

looking for the best archive material,

leaving more of the interviewing in.

Although people were saying the same thing,

it depended how it was put together who you might use.

If you wanted to cross-cut two people saying the same thing,

you might use more of one than another.

You'd have quite a lot of repetition of interview in that first assembly.

But then from that first assembly

you would gradually whittle it down

to the final running time of 52 minutes.

The way these things were made was perhaps unusual.

There are cases in which somebody is invited

to write a script, a commentary

and then a reverent producer appears

who then films it, as it were,

provides pictures for it.

The World At War was completely unlike that.

As I've said, this was a period when there was this messianic faith

in the power of the moving image,

and so the producer was the boss.

And as a commentary writer...

...and I learned this trade, I'd never done this before,

you were completely the... not exactly the slave,

but the junior collaborator of the producer,

who told you what he or she wanted and then you did it.

You could fight for your point of view.

What I do remember about the ones that I worked on,

and I worked on some about Germany, pre-war and during the war,

and I worked on some about the Soviet Union at war, for example,

I remember arguments about content with the producers

and the producers were, in fact,

acting as political commissars as well,

or historians or however you like to put it.

They said, "Well, this is what happened."

I could at times say, "I don't think that is what happened."

"It happened differently."

Then we would have an argument and sometimes I'd win

and sometimes the producer would win,

but the producer was absolutely the boss

and the commentary writer was, in the last analysis, his or her servant.

I quite liked that, I admired it

because I was impressed by this faith in the power of the image.

The film researchers, who would spend weeks in an archive...

John Rowe would turn up on the doorstep

of the National Film Archive in Washington

before it opened in the morning

and not leave until they threw him out at night, day after day.

They'd never seen researchers like the researchers that we had,

John in Washington, Raye Farr in Koblenz and so on and so forth.

There are a lot of challenges as an editor doing something like this

because were trying very hard,

and this is one of the things we talked about a lot

when making the series,

we were trying very hard to get something really authentic.

We didn't want to have a lot of fake material etcetera.

We'd have endless discussions about "Is this genuine? Is it training?"

"Was it shot after the action?"

"Is it actually a newsreel cameraman out there at the front shooting?"

A lot of the British material was all re-enacted afterwards.

They'd get soldiers trotting through the sand,

firing off Bren guns and artillery pieces etcetera.

A lot of the Russian stuff was again set up,

but very much more elaborately set up.

Some of it was very hard to spot that it was set up.

A lot of the German stuff was much more genuine,

and the American stuff was much more genuine.

But of course you're then cutting all this material together

and you might have a lot of film

which you know came from that particular battle

at that particular time.

You don't know whether it's day one of the battle

and it was ten miles down the front this way.

You don't know whether it was day three of the battle

and it was 15 miles away in the other direction.

So you're cutting material together,

you're trying to make a sequence which is reasonably fast-moving

because you want the programme to move

and you're trying to be honest

but a lot of the material, although it's absolutely genuine...

...it's... it might be less honest than if you'd faked the whole thing,

if you see what I mean.

So you're always weighing up these problems

of how to use the material in an honest way

without making a really boring story.

You've no idea how intense the action is of what you're using.

There are a number of people I spoke to during the research trip,

or trips,

Obviously we didn't interview everybody

There were a variety of reasons why we didn't interview everybody.

Some were better interviewees.

One particular person who I had interviewed,

who I spoke to, who I then discussed in some...

And who was very difficult to find and very unwilling to talk to me,

but he did eventually,

he was somebody who Mike Darlow met

and we then decided, Michael decided really,

that he didn't feel he was being honest with himself

and therefore that it would...

It was not achieving what we were hoping to achieve in that series

and in that programme,

that people should be being as honest as possible with themselves

and not making excuses

or... telling a...

...shifted story with a shifted emphasis.

Almost imperceptible reasons.

There are other problems, you see, like when you're editing interviews.

Some people talk very slowly and have a lot of ums and ahs in between.

Sometimes the camera cuts and you have to reload

and the question's been asked in the previous magazine, the previous roll,

and you're tightening the way people speak up,

editing it to make everything come through clearly

and coherently,

which again is...

Sometimes you're actually, without intending to,

you're distorting slightly what people say

because they weren't that positive.

When you've finished editing what they're saying

they've come over as very articulate and positive,

and if you actually listen to the interview

as it was originally recorded,

they weren't nearly as positive or articulate

as they appear to be in the final film.

I was helped in judging what we could do...

"Yes, wait on a bit longer to see if you can get that chap,"

"Yes, go back to that archive and see if they've got anything in colour,"

or whatever

because I knew that my bosses

wanted the thing to be as perfect as it could be.

The way we worked, because we had a lot of time...

I had months, or over a year in some cases.

For instance, Traudl Junge, who was Hitler's secretary,

I came across entirely by chance.

I was talking to Ursula von Kardorff, who was a journalist in Munich,

and she said, "I don't know whether I can really remember much..."

She was of the generation who'd lived through the war.

She said, "I don't know that I can be much help."

"The person you really need to talk to

is the woman who lives upstairs from me in my block of flats."

"But I don't think she'll talk to you because she never talks to anybody

and she won't talk about the war, she doesn't."

She was then working as a secretary.

So I said, "Fine, what's her address?"

And... I was living round the corner with some friends.

And so I bought a bunch of flowers

and went round to the block of flats

at a sort of late afternoon, teatime time.

And I arrived on her doorstep with a bunch of flowers

and said that Ursula von Kardorff had suggested

that I might come and see her, she lived downstairs,

and I explained what I was doing

and that I would very much...

Would she talk to me?

At first she didn't want to know

but I just chatted to her on the doorstep

and I was fairly unthreatening

and she eventually said, "Well, you might as well come in."

And that was the beginning of a very long...

She began to talk the very first evening

about her experiences in the bunker at the very end

and it was one of those quite amazing experiences.

And she... We chatted and we just... We got on.

And so we talked and then I left

and said could I come back and see her again when I was in Munich next time

and, "Yes," she said, "Fine."

And I then went... That's what I mean about having a lot of time.

I was backwards and forwards to Munich,

which was quite an important base during the research, a lot.

And every time I was there I would go and see her and build up...

And I never mentioned the possibility of her doing an interview

but I spoke to her.

I told her how we were getting on with the series,

what it was all about, what we were hoping to do...

...and I'd built up a great deal of knowledge

of what her experience had been

and we also got to know and like each other on a personal level

and established a trust so that in the end I took...

I said to her would she think about doing an interview

and she was very unsure about it

and I then suggested that she should meet Michael Darlow,

who was the producer I was working with very closely

on all the German interviews, or one of the producers,

and I took him along to meet her

and he was able to explain to her what it would involve.

She liked him as well

and we eventually persuaded her

that her testimony was so unique -

she had also thought a lot about it since the war -

that her testimony was so unique

that it was something that in a personal history,

in a people's history of the war as we were doing,

that it was of enormous importance,

if she felt able to do it, that she should be part of the series

because we were trying to understand how the Third Reich had worked

and she had been very close to the centre of it.

And she finally agreed

and she came to... She agreed...

Her flat was very small

and we were working in the days of very large crews

and the thought of a large crew in her small flat was pretty daunting.

She also agreed, which was quite remarkable,

to do the interview in English for us.

So she agreed that she would come over to London

and that she would do the interview for us in London

and that she would stay with me for a day or so beforehand

in order to get her English really going.

And that's what we did,

and we interviewed her at Thames for...

I think we did two sessions

and Michael and I interviewed her side by side.

But that was based on having known her for 13 months

and having had the time and the resources

to be able to go back again and again

and to get to know somebody

and to work out the kind of contribution that they could make

without there being any pressure on them...

To meet them once and then ask them if they'd do an interview.

And it was...

We worked very hard at the content

of what she felt able to tell us and what she was able...

Which was fantastic, what she was able to...

The light she was able to shed on the more ordinary side of Hitler

and life in the centre and life in the central command

and her own personal experience of having married somebody

who was in central command

and then went off and was killed on the Eastern Front.

And also, because I'd got to know her,

I stayed friends with her until she died

and she came and stayed with me and met my children.

He was very friendly and pleasant...

When they asked her what Hitler was like

and she said, "Actually he was a very nice man," the two young...

I can't remember how old they were, they were quite young boys,

they kind of shrunk back and looked completely horrified.

She came out afterwards and said, "I think I've upset your children."

"They can't understand that I seem fine

but that I found Hitler to be OK."

And that, in a way, shows how lasting the horror of people is

towards what Hitler was and represented and the inability still to understand

that anybody could have thought that he was a nice man.

Towards the end she did a very big interview with a company in America

and they have sold it as the first time she's ever spoken,

which actually is not true.

The tensions that people suffered in the making of a series

in which at least one marriage broke up

and people became... had babies and you know...

We were together for three years.

The tensions were more experienced by researchers

who, frankly, had nightmares

over the horrors of which they'd become witnesses.

I saw people lying there with no head

and some with their arms blown off...

Researching the footage and the interviews

for Michael Darlow's film on Auschwitz, for example, Genocide,

it was harrowing beyond belief.

Particularly when I came to talk to people

who had been very involved in the final solution

and I had to sit there and listen

and encourage people to explain to me

what it had been like for them as young men or women at the time...

...caught up by the ideal,

and I would then go from that kind of thing, talking to them,

I would then go to talking to people who'd been involved in the resistance

or who had been in some way or another unacceptable to the regime

and who suffered as a result of that.

But it was very important not to judge people

but to try and keep it

on a factual and honest level

from both sides.

And to represent them fairly,

not to cut the film in such a way

that they looked like traditional baddies.

Finding, as Sue McConachy did,

the SS people who would talk about killing as a routine,

or Michael Darlow's chap who drove the train

right up to the door of the gas chamber...

...those things, people dreamed, they slept The World At War

and dreamed The World At War while they were working on it

and for quite a while after they finished it.

It took over our lives, as history sometimes does.

The big interview in terms of SS was Karl Wolff.

Karl Wolff was at the end of a very long trail

which started, again, in Michael Darlow's filming...

It was through a contact in Holland.

And again it was a long, drawn-out process

where we met various people and were clearly being vetted.

When I was on the trail for Karl Wolff,

the initial contacts had to be done through a series of intermediaries

and we then had to write a letter to an ex-wife...

It was a very complicated trail because he was clearly somebody

who they didn't want to be exposed to anybody

and they needed to find out what our intentions were.

That was an area where we felt

that he was going to be a very important person

if we could get to him.

When I finally got to meet him,

he was, on the face of it, a lonely old man

living in a nice flat on his own...

...with his medals behind him

and he was very... actually very interested

to have somebody to talk to.

Because we really wanted to understand

how it was that as a young man he had come to the SS

and what it was about the SS

that had captured his imagination and his loyalty.

He would inspire a new awakening of the Germanic race

within the German people.

I asked him to explain what the SS had meant to him

and he'd been...

He was an older person, he'd been in the Guards Regiment,

and he was in the SS because it was the elite.

And there was a tremendous amount of vanity.

The man in charge

asked me, "Were you a soldier?"

I said, "Yes, indeed."

"In the First World War?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Do you have awards for bravery?"

"Yes, indeed."

"What do you have?"

Then I said, "Iron Cross, first and second class,

and I served in the Hessian Life Guard Regiment."

The vanity was one of the things, I think,

that made him more ready to talk to me.

And also he had believed passionately in what he was doing

and he'd been involved in working...

He'd been to Wewelsburg, the SS school

where each room was devoted

to a different myth from German legend.

And in explaining it to me,

I did understand what it had been

that had made him want to be a part of it.

And it was quite diff cult

to stand there, or to sit there

for long periods of time talking to him reminiscing.

He hadn't had the opportunity much

to reminisce with somebody of my generation

because with hindsight the people within Germany and outside

didn't particularly want to sit and talk at length

about the good things about the SS.

And what was really important for us and for the series

was to understand what the motivation had been

and what the attraction had been.

And that was what made him a very valuable witness.

And again, as with Traudl, I got to know him very well

and spent a lot of time talking to him

and I did find, particularly talking to him, that I needed...

I had a lot of good friends, having worked in Germany.

...that I did need to come up for air

and get a grip on reality as we now knew it

and in a way not to live...

Because I was living in the war when I was talking to these people.

And so I needed to come back and live in the present day.

In a way it was like our war when we were researching it

because we were listening to people's memories.

There was a structure of a kind of assembly order...

...largely based on the interviews,

so one tended to slot the archive sequences...

It was a little bit arbitrary

because after you'd seen it a few times you'd decide,

"That ought to go before that, that ought to go after that."

You wouldn't have them in the right order to start with.

You'd be looking for transitions

so that you would get a bang into the next sequence

rather than a whimper, if you see what I mean.

So maybe there's a sequence which was about the same date

and took on another theme which could follow quite well after that theme

and it started with a steam engine or something hooting,

and so you get quite a nice transition,

you suddenly get a whistle blast

coming through the end of the previous sequence.

There were things which just felt that that was the way that it could go.

Some things, it was quite arbitrary which order the sequence could go in.

There was a visual variety that you could put,

but on The New Germany, on the first programme

there were things that could have gone in more or less any order, really.

It wouldn't matter whether that sequence went before or after that.

But you looked for a variety of contrasts

and of getting good transitions from one thing to the next.

There were other things, sometimes you were using newsreels...

The material you were using, sometimes it was newsreels

which had been edited by the newsreel editor.

Sometimes you were using uncut footage

which was original source material which you'd got,

rushes which hadn't been used that had been shot at the time.

Sometimes you were working from compilation films,

so there were sequences that were already edited by somebody,

not in the way that we would necessarily want to use them.

Sometimes you would want to mix all different sorts of material.

You'd want to use some original shots

and you'd want to use a bit of compilation

and you'd want to use a bit of a newsreel story

on that particular event.

They didn't necessarily gel together very well

because they would have been shot with different contrast films,

some would be flat, some would be contrasty.

You didn't want it to look too jagged, you see,

so sometimes you had to throw out quite good shots

because they were so contrasty, they wouldn't blend in.

Well, I'll tell you one of the drawbacks.

This sounds technical but as a matter of fact it's very important.

One of the things about history is that it's uncertain.

There are contested versions

and you can never be quite sure what really happened.

Historical documentaries have to face that.

They face the fact that you can't hold up the flow of a film indefinitely

to say, "Well, we don't really know why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union."

"There are two versions, maybe three, but we don't really know which is true."

"The evidence... This is still being argued out," and so on and so forth.

Now, the difficulty about The World At War

is that it came at a moment

when the television and filmmaking profession in Britain

was also at the height of its craft.

Filmmaking in Britain became a craft of quite extraordinary achievement.

They were like wonderful, wonderful cabinet-makers, you know,

and they could craft these beautiful artefacts

which shone and gleamed and were lovingly polished

and above all they were lovingly polished

so that they flowed and you couldn't see the joins.

You couldn't see the joins, so these picture-led episodes,

in which one sequence flowed easily, movingly,

helped on by these few lapidary words of commentary, into the next,

it was exquisite, you couldn't...

Everything was dramatically done,

dramatic sequences would slow down a little and then start up again,

all paced and timed and...

You see, history isn't really like that.

History is a mess.

It's got a horrible, grainy, battered surface,

there are cracks and potholes, spaces of gravel, darkness,

and that's what history is like.

And that way of making...

that sheer incredible craftsmanship of the British film industry

in the end became, I thought,

a major enemy to making a historical documentary.

And the fact that it was so good, so moving,

that it flowed so beautifully,

it sang, as people often said, looking at what they'd just done,

was, although I thought it was wonderful,

was often so moved by the end product,

yet it was false to the way that history really is

and sooner or later some of us knew that making historical documentaries

would have to come to terms with what history's really like.

It would have to stop being so exquisitely crafted,

it would have to show the joins

and indeed make something of them and point them out,

and that of course is what has now come to happen.

Where there was a specific writer, which was in most cases,

the writer would have come along right from the beginning

to most major viewings. So when you started off

you would have had a rough cut running five or six hours.

So you would then be shaping it from that.

So the writer and the producer were aware

of what material was there.

Now, it may be that there was some material needed that wasn't there.

It may be that more material was required.

It may be that there was some material

which hadn't gone into that assembly because it didn't particularly fit,

or the editors hadn't thought it was particularly relevant at that time,

but maybe it would have been better to include it.

So there would be, from this very long opening assembly,

there would be a compressing down,

reordering and clarifying operations going on.

The second great task that I had

was to intervene very near the completion of the process

of finalising each programme and make absolutely certain,

frame by frame and split second by split second,

that we had got it dead right,

that there was clarity,

that the thing flowed,

that the balance between voice and picture was the way it should be.

And so I went with a fine-tooth comb over every single episode

as it got to the fine cut

and as it got, more critical even than that, to the dub.

We used to try to make certain that there wasn't too much commentary,

that the ear could always breathe,

that commentary didn't clash with voiceover,

that voiceover didn't clash with sound effects,

that sound effects didn't clash with music.

Each of those had to have a kind of limpidity, a kind of lucidity about it

with a tiny bit of space between

so that the ear could cope as well as the eye.

Jeremy Isaacs would often come in quite late,

when everybody else thought they'd done something really quite good,

and we'd find that we were more or less back at square one

and reshaping it

because he has a very good knack of coming in

with great clarity and incisiveness...

...which can change the direction of a programme quite radically

after you've already gone quite a long way along the production process.

Which was a good thing. It was no bad thing.

A lot of programmes were radically improved

because of an incisiveness coming in,

often at quite a late stage in the process.

I had the huge happiness, and I don't think I've ever done anything

that gave me more satisfaction in my life,

of having a hand in the architecture of the building

and also having a hand in the final detail

of every single room of the building.

And that's what the series producer does.

I didn't have to bother about the budget.

Thames was going to back this all the way.

If I were asked what is

the most salient, emotional, to me,

episode of the Second World War,

I would say it is the Jewish Holocaust,

it is what was done to the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.

What we went through

will be difficult to understand even for our contemporaries

and much more difficult for the generations

that have already no personal experience from those days.

In the first post-war decades, people thought about...

If you said, "What is the most spectacular, important,

memorable event of World War Two?"

they would probably say something else.

D-Day, they might say,

or maybe some British people would say

Battle of Britain or whatever it might be,

or others would say the liberation of occupied countries

and the restoration of independence and freedom to peoples.

And the fate of the Jews wouldn't have been salient in that way.

That changed really, I guess, in the course of the 1960s,

and I think The World At War was made

at a point at which it had, not all that long ago,

become a kind of consensus

that the final solution and the murder of Europe's Jews

was an event which really towered over

almost everything else which had happened in the Second World War.

It hadn't reached its complete ascendancy

which it rather occupies today,

but you can see its importance in The World At War,

but it doesn't yet absolutely dominate

the proposals about what you should remember

which The World At War carried.

Because I'm a Jew I put in the series

the episode about the Nazi genocide against the Jews

because I simply couldn't leave it out.

It's not a military subject but I felt it had to be done

and I think that Charles Bloomberg and Michael Darlow again,

Michael Darlow did that marvellously,

and that has interviews in it which rivet me

and are unforgettable.

They're shooting.

People are already lying dead.

My daughter was in my arms

the whole time.

Somehow I found the strength

to carry her.

She was so close to me

that I couldn't undress.

She wouldn't let me.

She said, "Let's run away. They're killing us."

Obviously the most difficult one was the final solution and the camps

and what we were to do with that.

All occupied Europe had a concentration camp system

based on the model camp, Dachau.

The camps were not only an instrument of terror,

they were an important factor in war production,

each with its cluster of labour camps attached.

Now they were also to be the means of the final solution.

In the occupied East, new camps were specially built

and old ones equipped with new industrial capacity.

They were to be machines to kill human beings by the million,

utilise the by-products, dispose of the waste.

The camps were sited on railway routes to facilitate transportation.

Eichmann chartered rolling stock from the state railways.

The biggest camp of all was built

astride the main railway line from Krakow to Vienna,

in the outskirts of the Polish town of Oswiecim.

Auschwitz.

Hermann Langbein, who was the head of the Auschwitz survivors group,

he led us to, in fact, one of the perpetrators, Richard Böck,

who is a remarkable man, who had been made...

He was a very ordinary man who found himself in Auschwitz

and he went one day with one of his friends

who worked down near the gas chambers.

He went one day, for whatever reason, curiosity, whatever,

but he went and saw what was happening,

but he was then made an honorary member

of the Auschwitz survivors group

because he tried not to be drawn in

to the real horror...

He tried to maintain his own personal integrity within that situation

although he found himself there.

So you had very interesting characters like that.

Obviously Hermann Langbein led us to a lot of the victims as well.

And that was then pursued in Israel

by an Israeli colleague researcher

who followed up a lot of the victims.

I'd found the names and addresses but most people were in Israel,

so she followed that up.

I had a lot of help when working on the Auschwitz programmes

from the two lawyers who ran the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in the '60s.

And they not only put me in touch with quite a lot of the people

who had been convicted or had served their time,

and with one person who was still in jail,

and I went to see him in jail,

but other people who were out,

and I would go and speak to them and then I would be able...

because of the court documents

I was able to check and double-check the stories.

It was very important for us that we made absolutely sure

that everything that we got from those people was factually correct

and that they weren't spinning us some tale

with extenuating reasons, circumstances,

for why they'd done these things.

I would have liked to have worked, I think,

in fact I would have liked to work

on the one about the final solution in concentration camps.

And I didn't get to do that

because it was done by one of the very strange and remarkable figures

who appeared in this little constellation of people making it.

He was called Charlie Bloomberg.

And Charlie was a very elusive, very secretive, charming South African.

He was a sort of clandestine figure.

He, I think, became banned from South Africa

and then I met him there.

Extraordinary. He wasn't supposed to be there.

He would have been subject to instant arrest and so on.

I met him, he just appeared.

He was a mysterious guy but he was a brilliant, very, very gifted writer.

He's dead. He died very young.

And he did that particular one,

which was of course one of the central items in the whole series,

about the Holocaust, the concentration camps,

the deportations of the Dutch Jews in particular,

which is where I think Charles had roots of his own.

He certainly had Jewish roots

and I think they may have been in the Netherlands.

But that's the one he did and he did it quite wonderfully

and I of course couldn't not envy

having been involved in writing commentary of that one.

Some episodes I have always loved and enjoyed.

I love the sense of young men going into battle for the first time

on D-Day to help liberate a continent

and I love the lad that says, "I was 18 and I was afraid,"

as the parachutists go in the night before the land and sea invasion.

I love the French woman on the beach saying,

"We welcomed these people who had come from so far

and we gave them calvados also," she says.

I remember that.

I love... I think Stalingrad is a very fine, sombre film,

without a single interview in it, by the way.

To me, two programmes have a particular interest

because of their subject matter.

I very much admire the programme

that Michael Darlow and Charles Bloomberg made about occupation

because I think that war involves moral choices.

Indeed, I think that living in a world in conflict involves moral choices

and I thought that programme forced each of us to think,

"What would we do if we lived under tyranny?"

Would we resist and risk our lives and our families' lives?

Would we do nothing? Would we perhaps collaborate?

Anne Frank in her diary, June 6, 1944.

"Would the long-awaited liberation,

which still seems too wonderful, too much like a fairy tale,

ever come true?"

"Could we be granted victory this year, 1944?"

"We don't know yet, but hope is revived within us."

"Now, more than ever, we must clench our teeth and not cry out."

The people of Holland had lived under Nazi occupation for four long years.

I decided that we should do that programme in Holland

rather than in Poland or Yugoslavia

because I thought that the Englishness of Holland

and the fact that some of the Dutch would speak English

would invite British people to consider...

If that could happen in that small country not that far away,

what would life had been like here?

I think one of the things that made a big impression on me

was that I'd done the home front in Britain

and we then did the home front in Germany

and we spoke to a woman

who was working in a Red Cross hospital

in Cologne, I think it was,

and she was saying how terrifying it was hearing the bombers coming.

And soon after the first bombs fell around us.

We were all shaking with fear.

Some people nearly fainted.

Many of the patients were crying.

The roaring and crashing came closer and closer.

We really thought all hell was breaking loose.

We then had a wonderful piece of newsreel

with the sort of gung-ho "Our brave boys fly off to bomb the enemy."

So you were experiencing the other end of our bombing and our brave boys.

You began to feel the universal awfulness of it

for the ordinary people,

which is not a particularly big point to make and it's fairly obvious,

but having done the home front in Britain,

to then realise that the home front in Germany, for most people,

at that level of being bombed, was exactly the same.

And the... Because we did the bombings in Coventry and Plymouth

and I'd spoken to people who'd been under the bombs there,

and the experience was...

if people are dropping bombs on you,

the experience is the same wherever you are.

I'm interested, as I say, in this question of how people behave,

and in the episode that Phillip Whitehead made

about inside The Feich,

there's a marvellous juxtaposition of three people

talking about what they knew of what was happening to the Jews in Germany.

And a great woman called Christabel Bielenberg,

who was an English woman married to a German doctor,

talks about how she tried to save a couple of Jews

but was advised that she couldn't keep them more than a couple of nights

because she was risking her family's lives by having them.

And she tells them they've got to be gone

and when she comes in the next morning the bed is made up and they've gone

and she's wringing her hands like this and saying,

"I knew then that Adolf Hitler... Hitler had turned me into a murderer."

I knew later that they were caught buying a ticket at a railway station

and were transported to Auschwitz.

And why I say this is the most painful and terrible story

for me to have to tell

was because after they left

I realised that Hitler had turned me into a murderer.

And then there's Albert Speer, and Albert Speer says,

"I didn't really know what was going on."

"I'd heard that terrible things were happening in the East

and Gauleiter Hanke told me not to ask, not to enquire,

to be careful not to turn that corner

and find out what was going on in that camp."

"And I should have gone."

"I now think that I should have gone to Hitler

and asked him what was going on and I didn't do it,

and not doing it is, I think, one of the worst mistakes of my life."

Together with other hints I got,

I should have made... should have made my decision

to go to Hitler immediately, or to Himmler,

and to ask them what is going on.

And then I follow that with Emmi Bonhoeffer,

who talks about standing in a greengrocery queue

and saying to the other people in the queue,

"You know what they're doing to the Jews, don't you?"

"They're gassing them and making soap out of their body fat."

And they say, "Frau Bonhoeffer, you're mad."

"You mustn't say things like that or they'll lock you up too."

"You're crazy, you can't believe it."

And she said, "No, I know and I know for sure."

"It's not true. You shouldn't believe these things."

"You heard them from the foreign broadcasts or so

and they tell these things to make enemies against Germany."

And I say, "No, that's not from broadcasts."

"I know that directly from first hand, you can be sure it is that way."

Now, that story tells you several things.

One, that she knew but that not everybody knew

because they didn't believe her when she told them,

and it also shows you that Speer is lying because...

We don't say he's lying

but we put him between two people who weren't afraid to know,

and it's the people who weren't afraid to know and tell

that make moments of the series utterly remarkable.

Christabel Bielenberg, who was one of the people we spoke to,

was saying that when she was living in Berlin

in an area with Nazi neighbours,

she would find that she was helping people

to rescue stuff from their house

and that she would be running out of a house

with a bust of Göring stuck under her arm,

which is not something she would normally do,

but in that moment of trying to...

You were all in it together, whatever your ideas or politics were,

and it was that sense of the bonding nature of a shared danger.

I made myself, and it's the one programme that I did do myself,

I indulgently, self-indulgently, allowed myself

to do the last programme of the series,

which I knew, for quite a long time,

I wanted to be a programme not about the war, but about war,

and I would collect all sorts of interviews

that reflected on the experience of war,

some of the experience happy, some of it mystifying,

some of it lugubrious and shattering.

I think one of the questions you can ask about The World At War is

to what extent did it tackle really difficult, contentious subjects?

At what point did it try to say, "You have been sold a false image

and what happened was something quite different,

you were being fooled"?

One example of The World At War

trying to do a job of going against received public opinion

was about the aerial bombing of Germany and Air Marshal Harris,

and at that point, in those programmes,

the series did try to say,

"They told you at the time that this was destroying German morale

and German civil wish to resist and continue the war."

"In fact we can now tell you this wasn't the case."

if anything, the great bombings

like Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Darmstadt and so on, the Ruhr,

probably marginally stiffened German civilian wish to resist

rather than the opposite

and it was a complete failure, almost total failure,

and its impact on German industry was quite slight,

although that was mostly the Americans.

But anyway, the impact on civilian morale was surprisingly slight

and it was a failure.

If I were making the series again at the time that I made it,

there's nothing I would do differently.

If you thought about making such a series today

and it hadn't been made and one had to embark on it today,

there are one or two things that would certainly be done differently.

First of all there are things that we know now that we didn't know then.

We didn't know anything about Ultra and Enigma.

The papers that showed how effectively

the British were cracking... the West were cracking German codes

weren't published until July 1974

and The World At War finished its first run

on ITV in Britain in May 1974,

so the series had been broadcast before we knew.

We refer in the series to "We had cracked the German codes"

but precisely how it was done we didn't know.

And I suspect that if we had known

we'd pretty certainly not just have been able

to inform different stories with that knowledge,

but we might have made an episode to codes and so on.

And Richard Overy points out

in work that he's done on the Second World War recently,

and indeed on The World At War,

that we know a great deal more about the conduct of the German army,

we know how widespread was

deliberate brutality, cruelty and genocidal behaviour.

It wasn't just confined to the SS.

The Wehrmacht was involved

in a way that we simply probably didn't appreciate then.

The single technical matter

where I would have tried to argue for a different approach today,

but I don't know that I would have been successful,

is I think now

that subtitles are a more effective way

of portraying the personality and the tenor of an interview

than dubbing someone else's voice over a foreign language

in which he or she is expressing themselves.

But in those days it was simply taken for granted

that a programme that was going to try to reach the widest possible audience

always in Britain,

because the ITV companies made their money initially in Britain,

and in the United States when they sold it to the United States,

it was taken for granted that you didn't subtitle.

If you subtitled something

people thought it was foreign and didn't watch it,

and so you dubbed.

So in addition to having Olivier to narrate it

and Carl Davis to write music for it, we dubbed the interviews.

I think there's a case for subtitling them rather than dubbing them.

Looking at The World At War,

there is a great deal in it about generals and armies

and strategic decisions by presidents and prime ministers

and Führers and all the rest of it,

but one of its strengths is that there's a great deal

about the civilian population and what happened to them.

And of course that really is important.

It was in the second half of the 20th century

that war really did change its nature quite rapidly.

In the First World War most of those who were killed were combatants.

In the Second World War

the overwhelming majority of people who were killed were civilians.

The Cold War wars, it was also true.

Most of the people killed in Korea and Vietnam were probably civilians.

Now we're in a period of doubt about this,

and for all the appalling things that they do in other parts of the world...

...statesmen in charge of colossal military force

are nervous about what they may do to civilian populations,

and if you compare what has been happening in Iraq, terrible as it is,

the way in which Baghdad has been bombed

with at least an effort not to plaster centres of civilian housing,

that compares with, say, the Americans

who dropped 15,000 tons of bombs,

really within a week or so, on Hanoi

back in the '60s and early '70s,

there is a change of mood

and even military commanders would like to show mercy.

I think there's something else which goes with that

and people who watch The World At War might register this change as well.

The human race has grown, particularly in Europe and North America again,

what you might call the West,

has grown considerably more squeamish.

This is wonderful.

People have grown also more cowardly.

This is also wonderful.

It means that, compared above all to the soldiers of the First World War,

but also to some of the soldiers you see in action in the Second World War,

soldiers now are very unwilling to get their heads shot off

at the orders of some public-school pipsqueak with a whistle.

They are serving under officers

who are deeply, deeply unwilling to risk casualties

and will husband, indeed, be miserly

about the lives and safety of their own men,

and there is a deep aversion

to exposing yourself to danger among soldiers.

That is good news.

In one sense it's bad news

because the temptation to plaster the hell out of some area

by bombing from 35,000 feet is a temptation which exists.

But on the other hand it is in other ways good.

There is a wish to try to reverse, to start moving away,

to get this curve to turn at last

away from mounting proportions of casualties which are civilian

back to professionalising war, if you like,

trying to limit it to soldiers shooting at soldiers.

So that's good.

There are wars in the world today.

One has to think about war and what it's for and what it can achieve

and whether it's worth the cost in life and suffering that it exacts.

I don't have any doubt at all

that the Second World War was a just war.

A lovely historian called Steve Ambrose,

one of the few historians we interviewed in the series,

he has this great white woolly sweater and his lovely hair,

and he says the right side won.

The Nazis were crushed,

the militarists in Japan were crushed,

the fascists in Italy were crushed

and surely justice has never been better served.

We felt at the end that we'd told the story that needed to be told

and we were glad to have told it,

even if we encountered horrors along the way.

When you're working on a series like that

you're much more conscious of its drawbacks and failures...

...except in one sense.

We knew that some of the ones that we'd done were certainly...

I didn't work on all that many,

I probably worked on four or five only out of all those programmes.

One or two of those we really knew, as we finished them,

that we'd done something wonderful.

Red Star, for example, whose producer was Martin Smith.

Red Star still makes people cry.

And I feel proud of that.

I don't think, on the other hand, that we knew

that The World At War would have this great lasting success.

We were very excited when it was completed

and I remember Jeremy talking optimistically

about how it would become a great educational aid

and it would be put on discs and cassettes

and every school ought to have one

and it would be part of the national resource of memory and so on,

which we thought was an adventurous idea.

None of us realised that it would go on and on and on.

It's become like The Mousetrap.

It gets repeated and repeated.

A base thought,

if only we'd all signed up to take a percentage cut instead of a flat fee,

we'd be rolling in wealth.

Still, good luck.

It was a team like no other team I've ever worked on

and we still have a very close...

If we all get together again it's the most fantastic team.

And a lot of that was down to Jeremy,

who had pulled us all together

and who held the series very much in his hand

in a way that got the most fantastic work out of all...

I think we all worked better than each of us individually could

or had perhaps ever worked before.

So it was a great team to have been part of.

It was brilliant.

If making the series took a toll on the people who worked on it,

it's partly because they worked very, very, very hard, obsessively hard.

The people who worked on all the programmes

worked seven days a week or six days a week for three years.

And partly because what they were dealing with was fraught,

but I think in the end we were the masters of our subject matter

and we felt we were shaping it

and we were very proud and happy with what we did in the end,

so it was something that meant something in our lives.

And I think that one of the privileges

of working in television or in history

is to do something that you believe in

and I think the people who worked on The World At War

felt at the end of it that they'd done something worthwhile.

The series which is known all over the world as The World At War

didn't start off like that.

We didn't settle on the title for quite a long way down

and it started off known everywhere,

and for all intents and purposes,

and this is the sticky yellow tape on which everything was bound,

as The Second World War.

And the paper heading has got

an embossed Second World War on it, very elegant.

And really it was some... a couple of years before the title...

and indeed, while debate about the title was going on,

so the graphics department were trying to devise,

and we had all sorts of different versions of the titles,

including sort of Action Man things and things of that kind,

and then eventually it became The World At War

with the fabulously good titles that everybody knows.

The first transmission of the series in this country

was 31 October, 1973,

and we decided to have a party on the following Friday, 2 November.

And the invitations went out to everybody.

"Thames Television requests the pleasure of your company

to celebrate the outbreak of The World At War."

And there was also a press launch and the lunch was of the period.

"Potato and leek soup, summer supper dish,

jugged rabbit, corned beef fritters,

sliced spam, Lord Woolton pie,

bubble and squeak, carrots in parsley sauce,

bread and butter pudding, Bakewell tart with chocolate sauce,

tea and coffee and boiled sweets."