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Television was in its infancy
in this country

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

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

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The first historical documentaries,

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one or two were made in the '50s.

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The thing that revealed
to people like me

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the possibilities of the medium
for dealing with history

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has to be the BBC series
The Great War,

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

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And they combined...
those programmes combined

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a desire to give people
the experience of war,

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the oomph, the pity of war,

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the suffering of war,
the heroism of war

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with a rigorous historical thread

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supplied as the sort of backbone
of the programmes.

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And they combined,

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

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they combined and juxtaposed
newsreel images of war

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with eyewitness testimony

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to the subject matter
that the newsreels were portraying.

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And those two ingredients
are of the essence

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of any history of a war
in the 20th century

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and The World At War
followed that formula

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with far more newsreel to choose from,

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with sound-on-film newsreel
to provide variety

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and with interviews with people

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

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

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for a war that ended in 1913.

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In order to do the series,

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

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in Germany particularly,

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

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We had told the people
who we went to see

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that what we wanted to do
was to present

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

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without being judgemental.

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We wanted, for the first time,

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to present a picture
which wasn't the old view

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of Germany the Nazi villains

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and the brave rest of the world.

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

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I wanted to tell a story

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that made people
want to come back next week

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and to that extent
we treated the subject matter

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

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To understand the way
that making this series worked,

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the first thing to understand is

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to look at the whole...

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the place it has

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in the history of making
multi-part historical documentaries

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on television in this country.

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And the point was that words
were used extremely sparingly

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in The World At War.

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Russia, mid-June 1941.

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A bewildered, uncertain country.

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Rumours abounded
of invasion by Hitler's Germany.

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Pictures can and must tell the story.

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Basically it was the pictures
which were doing the communicating.

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Get right away
from what was then regarded

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

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

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

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Here in the Kremlin,

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Russia's leaders
seemed oblivious of the Nazi threat,

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or if not oblivious, then complacent,

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as if by ignoring it
it might disappear.

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

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

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

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

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do you use, very sparingly,
commentary,

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as few words as you possibly can,

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

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

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then you'd better drop
that particular passage altogether,

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drop that clip and move on.

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So that was a very strong ideology,

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

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I was the boss.

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

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and I did two separate things.

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

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

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what individual episodes
would be about.

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A purely chronological approach
isn't adequate.

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You have to get the architecture
of the series right

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and that means, first of all,

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that every single film
has to tell one story.

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All good films tell only one story.

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

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

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not a film that exists in linear time.

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So what I was doing initially,

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my contribution
to the architecture of the series,

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

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We'd discuss things but nevertheless,

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

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

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as we all were working on it,

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was that it would be
the story of the war

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told from the point of view
of the people

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in the countries involved in the war,

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that it was not going to be a history.

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Jeremy, I think, felt very strongly

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

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but it was to tell the story
of the war

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and the experience of the war

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which had so shaped
the post-war world.

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What did he promise?

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Work and bread for the masses,

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

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Nowadays, in our prosperous society,

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work and bread
doesn't mean anything any more,

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but then it was
an absolutely basic need

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

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then it sounded
like a promise of paradise.

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

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

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that there would be chronological
episodes that told the story,

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

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

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

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Hitler's assault on Russia,

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the Japanese assault in the East

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that led to the capture of Singapore
and so on.

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The series would partly consist
of these narrative stories

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and of course those stories,
which sometimes overlapped,

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would nevertheless be arranged
in chronological order.

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And within these stories
I would intersperse episodes

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which dealt with
the themes of the war.

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How was the British war effort
organised?

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How was the war at sea fought?

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How was the bombing campaign
against Germany conducted?

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

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but the trick was to arrange them
in such a way

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that when you finished
watching one episode,

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you were keen to watch the next.

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

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If you tell the history of a war

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that lasted a finite six years
just as simple narrative,

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you miss a dimension,

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you miss some understanding
of how the thing is organised.

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

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that's to say war weaponry,
war psychology,

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war thinking,
war suffering, war bravery,

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you'd end up with 26 episodes,

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

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but never seemed
to move the thing forward,

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each of them would begin it and end it

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and you'd be facing the viewer
each week

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

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It was talking about a huge
physical and emotional experience

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which was still very, very fresh
in British minds,

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particularly British minds,

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and it was the first time

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

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interviews with survivors
who, of course,

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were still, in the '70s, abounding,

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thousands upon thousands of people
who remembered and could tell.

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

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

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certainly among the soldiers
in Germany,

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it was almost as if
it was the first time

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that anybody had asked them about it

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because the feeling about the war
in post-war Germany

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

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

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

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because they hadn't rehearsed
their glorious exploits.

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The French had more tanks

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and some better tanks, heavier tanks

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than we have had Panzers,

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but we managed our Panzer troops

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what Guderian said
in his instructions.

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

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

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they show what can be achieved,

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they give you a sense
of the balance of different factors

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and a sense of proportion
about any one incident,

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but they paint with a very broad brush

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and they leave it
to others coming after

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

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The audience responded
with tremendous emotion.

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

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You know, "Singing our song."

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And in a sense
the whole series was carried on

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by a deep assent
from the viewing audience.

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I think Jeremy Isaacs and co,

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

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There was an absolutely
critical moment in February 1971.

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The government
changed the taxation system

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to which the ITV companies,

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the commercial television companies
of Britain, were subjected.

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Instead of their money
being taxed at source as revenue

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before it came into the company,

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the government agreed
that it could be taxed as profit

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after it had been used in the company.

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I went to my bosses
at Thames Television

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the day after the postmaster general,

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the great middle-distance runner
Christopher Chataway,

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announced this in the House of Commons

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

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

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

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Well, they had been told
that they could use

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the revenues
from the sale of advertising

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that came into the company
before they were taxed

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provided they spent them
on programmes.

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

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was just over £400,000.

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

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The final cost was just over £900,000.

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Nobody believes it nowadays.

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

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No, £900,000 for 26 hours.

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

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

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

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the cost of hotels,
travel and subsistence

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in gathering the interviewees

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and paying the expenses
of the film researchers,

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who would spend weeks in an archive.

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

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is an enormous amount of time
and seemingly endless resources,

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and Jeremy was incredibly encouraging.

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

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

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He went to the Savoy Hotel

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with the managing director of Thames,
Howard Thomas,

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to sell the series before...

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

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

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who was Kerry Packer's father

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and owned the Nines,
the Channel Nines in Australia.

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And on the way back
from the Savoy to Thames,

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

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or he'll go and spend more money."

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

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

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After one trip I came back
and said to Jeremy,

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"I actually haven't
got anything concrete."

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

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00:16:15,440 --> 00:16:18,280
"This is to get
the really big interviews."

245
00:16:18,360 --> 00:16:20,360
"I think in the end it will work."

246
00:16:20,440 --> 00:16:25,080
And he said, "Don't worry.
Don't worry. You can go again."

247
00:16:25,160 --> 00:16:29,280
And it was this ability
to go back again and again

248
00:16:29,360 --> 00:16:32,920
which helped to build up the trust

249
00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:38,520
and also to establish

250
00:16:38,600 --> 00:16:41,760
a really firm groundwork of facts

251
00:16:41,840 --> 00:16:44,880
and of knowledge
of that person's experience of the war

252
00:16:44,960 --> 00:16:48,680
so that we also then very meticulously

253
00:16:48,760 --> 00:16:52,760
checked and double-checked
the stories.

254
00:16:52,840 --> 00:16:56,480
Thames had
wonderfully successful programmes,

255
00:16:56,560 --> 00:17:02,320
always a higher share of the audience
than the BBC,

256
00:17:02,400 --> 00:17:05,920
always a higher share of the audience
in Thames's week

257
00:17:06,000 --> 00:17:08,640
than London Weekend's weekend,

258
00:17:08,720 --> 00:17:15,440
and so they had to be seen
to aim high in their programming

259
00:17:15,520 --> 00:17:18,880
and the director of programmes
at Thames, Brian Tesler,

260
00:17:18,960 --> 00:17:21,560
and the managing director,
Howard Thomas,

261
00:17:21,640 --> 00:17:25,960
instantly agreed to what I wanted
to do and backed it all the way.

262
00:17:26,040 --> 00:17:28,840
Thames had a split-site operation
at that time.

263
00:17:28,920 --> 00:17:31,600
The principal offices
were on Euston Road

264
00:17:31,680 --> 00:17:34,920
but the production facilities,
the studio facilities

265
00:17:35,000 --> 00:17:36,480
were down at Teddington.

266
00:17:36,560 --> 00:17:41,040
And so we were found little offices

267
00:17:41,120 --> 00:17:45,920
and little rooms
which became cutting rooms

268
00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:50,320
which had been prefabricated, I think,
almost during the period of the war.

269
00:17:50,400 --> 00:17:53,360
They were certainly very basic.

270
00:17:53,440 --> 00:17:57,600
The important thing was that I knew
where everybody was at any given time

271
00:17:57,680 --> 00:18:01,680
and had a schedule of sorts
of what was happening

272
00:18:01,760 --> 00:18:06,080
because with 26 episodes they
could not be all shot simultaneously,

273
00:18:06,160 --> 00:18:11,240
so we had to work out
who could do what when where.

274
00:18:11,320 --> 00:18:15,920
And so that's where
the fact that there were 26 episodes

275
00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:19,080
fitted in very nicely
with A through Z.

276
00:18:19,160 --> 00:18:25,400
And I can still almost rattle off
every one.

277
00:18:25,480 --> 00:18:29,920
A3 was the first episode
to be shot, A,

278
00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:33,400
but number 3, France Falls,
was the third one transmitted.

279
00:18:33,480 --> 00:18:35,720
It's called amongst the team A3.

280
00:18:35,800 --> 00:18:38,160
Everybody knows
what you're talking about.

281
00:18:38,240 --> 00:18:40,200
We set about researching
The World At War

282
00:18:40,280 --> 00:18:42,920
in the way that you then researched,

283
00:18:43,000 --> 00:18:46,600
and I'm sure still do research,
programmes.

284
00:18:46,680 --> 00:18:51,240
You start with a broad remit.

285
00:18:51,320 --> 00:18:55,800
You do a lot of reading
and you speak to people

286
00:18:55,880 --> 00:18:58,640
who then give you
perhaps one or two names

287
00:18:58,720 --> 00:19:00,680
and you then go and see those

288
00:19:00,760 --> 00:19:05,400
and they will usually
lead you on to more.

289
00:19:05,480 --> 00:19:08,320
People like the old soldiers
were fairly easy

290
00:19:08,400 --> 00:19:10,920
because you just go through
the old soldiers'...

291
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:15,120
You find out which units
were in the...

292
00:19:15,200 --> 00:19:18,360
which units were
in the different areas of battle

293
00:19:18,440 --> 00:19:20,040
that you're interested in

294
00:19:20,120 --> 00:19:24,160
and then you go through the
old soldiers' organisations.

295
00:19:24,240 --> 00:19:26,520
I found, in Germany particularly,

296
00:19:26,600 --> 00:19:30,520
the institute for Military History
in Freiburg was really helpful.

297
00:19:30,600 --> 00:19:34,120
The World At War
isn't a purely military history

298
00:19:34,200 --> 00:19:35,600
of the Second World War.

299
00:19:35,680 --> 00:19:37,840
I took the view that such a series...

300
00:19:37,920 --> 00:19:40,360
There's plenty of fighting
in The World At War,

301
00:19:40,440 --> 00:19:43,360
but I took the view
that if there were only fighting,

302
00:19:43,440 --> 00:19:48,440
tanks rolling and firing,
planes diving and bombing,

303
00:19:48,520 --> 00:19:53,160
shells exploding, troops advancing,

304
00:19:53,240 --> 00:19:57,440
although the war was fought
on all sorts of different fronts,

305
00:19:57,520 --> 00:20:01,120
I thought there would be
a homogeneity, if you like,

306
00:20:01,200 --> 00:20:04,680
but I thought
perhaps a monotony of texture

307
00:20:04,760 --> 00:20:08,080
if that was the sole content
of the series.

308
00:20:08,160 --> 00:20:12,920
I wanted to show instead,
or in addition,

309
00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:16,120
what the civilian experience
of the war was.

310
00:20:16,200 --> 00:20:17,960
Planes come over of a night,

311
00:20:18,040 --> 00:20:22,360
and they was, in my opinion, trying
to break the backs of the houses.

312
00:20:22,440 --> 00:20:25,160
I used to listen and shudder.
"The next one's mine."

313
00:20:25,240 --> 00:20:27,080
They'd have six bombs.

314
00:20:27,160 --> 00:20:30,240
One, two, three, four...
"This is mine."

315
00:20:30,320 --> 00:20:33,040
No, over the next one they'd go,
miss my house.

316
00:20:33,120 --> 00:20:34,800
And that used to go on all night.

317
00:20:34,880 --> 00:20:37,920
Britain had the nearest thing
to a command economy,

318
00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:40,200
with everybody working
in the war effort

319
00:20:40,280 --> 00:20:44,720
and nobody working for anything else
during the Second World War,

320
00:20:44,800 --> 00:20:48,000
almost than any of the other
combatant powers.

321
00:20:48,080 --> 00:20:49,680
I was very shocked when I heard

322
00:20:49,760 --> 00:20:51,200
on the news on Christmas Day

323
00:20:51,280 --> 00:20:53,520
that I was to be directed to the mines.

324
00:20:53,600 --> 00:20:59,040
I wanted to show how nations
geared themselves for war

325
00:20:59,120 --> 00:21:02,800
and what civilians experienced in war

326
00:21:02,880 --> 00:21:07,360
in Britain, in the United States,
in the Soviet Union

327
00:21:07,440 --> 00:21:09,640
and in Germany and Japan.

328
00:21:09,720 --> 00:21:13,480
I wanted a series
that didn't just show

329
00:21:13,560 --> 00:21:16,600
what Britain went through in the war.

330
00:21:16,680 --> 00:21:18,480
I wanted a series that showed

331
00:21:18,560 --> 00:21:21,840
what all the great combatant nations
went through in the war

332
00:21:21,920 --> 00:21:26,760
and which included
their attitudes, their experience,

333
00:21:26,840 --> 00:21:30,240
their pride, their suffering.

334
00:21:30,320 --> 00:21:33,800
We were very lucky in the timing
as far as the Germans were concerned

335
00:21:33,880 --> 00:21:40,720
because they were just beginning
to be able to talk about the war

336
00:21:40,800 --> 00:21:45,240
and seemed to welcome the opportunity
and did trust us,

337
00:21:45,320 --> 00:21:51,000
that what we wanted was their story,
was their explanation, in a way,

338
00:21:51,080 --> 00:21:53,240
of how it had happened

339
00:21:53,320 --> 00:21:58,760
and how the Nazi regime

340
00:21:58,840 --> 00:22:02,400
had come to control all their lives

341
00:22:02,480 --> 00:22:07,720
and what they had experienced
during the war.

342
00:22:09,800 --> 00:22:12,320
And we spoke to people who had been...

343
00:22:12,400 --> 00:22:15,200
Our aim was... which is what we put...

344
00:22:15,280 --> 00:22:19,600
We needed to talk to people
who had been convinced Nazis

345
00:22:19,680 --> 00:22:23,880
and who had believed
in what they were fighting for...

346
00:22:25,760 --> 00:22:28,720
...for them to explain to us
what it was at the time.

347
00:22:28,800 --> 00:22:31,280
What we tried to do was to...

348
00:22:33,080 --> 00:22:36,040
...to look at the war
without the benefit of hindsight.

349
00:22:36,120 --> 00:22:40,520
What we were trying to do,
and I think that we managed to do,

350
00:22:40,600 --> 00:22:43,240
particularly in the home front
in Germany,

351
00:22:43,320 --> 00:22:49,440
was to show the progress and the fun

352
00:22:49,520 --> 00:22:56,160
and the lightening up after a period
of depression and no money

353
00:22:56,240 --> 00:22:59,440
and no work
and six million unemployed,

354
00:22:59,520 --> 00:23:03,680
and to show how the ordinary people
perceived it,

355
00:23:03,760 --> 00:23:05,880
who perhaps didn't think a great deal,

356
00:23:05,960 --> 00:23:08,120
but suddenly
there were fun things to do.

357
00:23:08,200 --> 00:23:13,680
If you were a very ordinary person
it was a very good time.

358
00:23:15,880 --> 00:23:18,160
All this seemed ideal ground

359
00:23:18,240 --> 00:23:19,640
for a prophet to say,

360
00:23:19,720 --> 00:23:22,440
"I will lead you to the promised land."

361
00:23:22,520 --> 00:23:24,840
"I will deliver you from evil."

362
00:23:24,920 --> 00:23:26,240
Anyone who said that

363
00:23:26,320 --> 00:23:28,720
would be greeted with enthusiasm.

364
00:23:36,200 --> 00:23:39,880
Of course, there were people who said,
"This is a false prophet,"

365
00:23:39,960 --> 00:23:42,840
but who was to know
whether they were right or not?

366
00:23:42,920 --> 00:23:44,560
At that time no one did.

367
00:23:44,640 --> 00:23:48,240
What we encouraged them to say

368
00:23:48,320 --> 00:23:51,080
was how they had experienced it

369
00:23:51,160 --> 00:23:56,120
without the fear of being judged.

370
00:23:56,200 --> 00:24:01,000
And we tried not to be judgemental.

371
00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:04,760
And I think
at times that was very difficult.

372
00:24:04,840 --> 00:24:06,640
There was an element of trust

373
00:24:06,720 --> 00:24:09,240
because in order to be taken
to see people

374
00:24:09,320 --> 00:24:13,160
and meet people who were
going to give you their view,

375
00:24:13,240 --> 00:24:14,880
and as a background,

376
00:24:14,960 --> 00:24:21,840
it was important for them to know
that you were not going to just be

377
00:24:21,920 --> 00:24:25,240
yet another Nazi hunter
in a different guise.

378
00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:30,880
So it was to be...

379
00:24:30,960 --> 00:24:34,040
If we had said that was the basis
on which we were doing it,

380
00:24:34,120 --> 00:24:39,440
then yes,
we were in a position of trust.

381
00:24:39,520 --> 00:24:43,640
Not that one in any way
supported what they'd done,

382
00:24:43,720 --> 00:24:46,040
but that was not part of our job.

383
00:24:46,120 --> 00:24:52,280
It was to be able to present
the story, which was the greater aim.

384
00:24:53,640 --> 00:24:56,360
It would have been wrong

385
00:24:56,440 --> 00:25:00,400
to have got caught up
in what is actually another issue.

386
00:25:00,480 --> 00:25:02,160
I didn't make The World At War.

387
00:25:02,240 --> 00:25:07,680
The World At War was made by 50 people
who worked together for three years.

388
00:25:07,760 --> 00:25:11,520
Once we'd agreed the shape
and architecture of the series,

389
00:25:11,600 --> 00:25:14,360
each programme
became the responsibility

390
00:25:14,440 --> 00:25:16,880
of an individual producer.

391
00:25:16,960 --> 00:25:20,000
Some produced and directed
their episodes,

392
00:25:20,080 --> 00:25:24,400
some wrote and produced and directed
their episodes,

393
00:25:24,480 --> 00:25:26,640
some worked with collaborators,

394
00:25:26,720 --> 00:25:32,040
but they were entrusted with the task

395
00:25:32,120 --> 00:25:35,480
of making one programme in the series,

396
00:25:35,560 --> 00:25:39,200
though several of them
made more than that.

397
00:25:39,280 --> 00:25:43,880
Each of them had some leeway,
some little leeway

398
00:25:43,960 --> 00:25:48,200
to do it in their own sort of way,
in their own personal style,

399
00:25:48,280 --> 00:25:51,880
and you can tell
by looking at the programmes

400
00:25:51,960 --> 00:25:56,200
which director... producer-director
made each one,

401
00:25:56,280 --> 00:26:03,680
but all of them had to conform
rigidly and properly

402
00:26:03,760 --> 00:26:06,400
to a framework that was laid down.

403
00:26:06,480 --> 00:26:09,680
The single most diff cult question
as we went along

404
00:26:09,760 --> 00:26:13,000
was where each programme stopped
and the next one began,

405
00:26:13,080 --> 00:26:16,840
and there were territorial disputes
about that along the way,

406
00:26:16,920 --> 00:26:20,080
but they were all, in the end,
happily settled.

407
00:26:20,160 --> 00:26:24,920
Two people had a task, along with me,
of overseeing the whole of it.

408
00:26:25,000 --> 00:26:27,200
One was the historical adviser,

409
00:26:27,280 --> 00:26:30,160
a very considerable figure
called Noble Frankland,

410
00:26:30,240 --> 00:26:33,040
who was director
of the imperial War Museum,

411
00:26:33,120 --> 00:26:37,560
and he was hugely helpful
in the making of the series

412
00:26:37,640 --> 00:26:43,160
since he told us what we ought to do
and then let us get on with it.

413
00:26:43,240 --> 00:26:47,640
We reciprocated
by showing him every outline script

414
00:26:47,720 --> 00:26:53,120
and every rough cut of a film or fine
cut of a film before it was completed,

415
00:26:53,200 --> 00:26:58,360
but basically he held my hand
in getting right,

416
00:26:58,440 --> 00:27:00,240
or as right as we could,

417
00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:03,520
the coverage
of different theatres of war.

418
00:27:04,320 --> 00:27:07,480
Of 900 men in my battalion,

419
00:27:07,560 --> 00:27:11,080
200 fell out because of freezing...

420
00:27:12,840 --> 00:27:14,640
...in the first 14 days.

421
00:27:14,720 --> 00:27:19,120
We tried to do justice
to the experience in the war

422
00:27:19,200 --> 00:27:22,640
and the contribution to the victory
of the Soviet Union,

423
00:27:22,720 --> 00:27:24,960
which was huge.

424
00:27:25,040 --> 00:27:29,040
The war was won
by American firepower, if you like,

425
00:27:29,120 --> 00:27:31,240
and Soviet manpower.

426
00:27:31,320 --> 00:27:35,720
The war was not won in the West,
it was won on the Eastern Front.

427
00:27:35,800 --> 00:27:41,520
And he was keen
not to forget the Pacific,

428
00:27:41,600 --> 00:27:43,960
to show that once Japan was in the war

429
00:27:44,040 --> 00:27:48,920
it was a war of two theatres,
Europe and the Far East.

430
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:51,760
And he helped us get that right.

431
00:27:51,840 --> 00:27:54,320
And then my colleague Jerry Kuehl,

432
00:27:54,400 --> 00:27:57,160
who was the associate producer
of the series,

433
00:27:57,240 --> 00:28:00,360
I gave him the task of nit-picker,

434
00:28:00,440 --> 00:28:02,840
of spotting errors and correcting us,

435
00:28:02,920 --> 00:28:07,360
and whereas Frankland had a say
in the broad sweep of the thing,

436
00:28:07,440 --> 00:28:12,520
Jerry helped us
get the pictures right,

437
00:28:12,600 --> 00:28:15,520
not completely right
but as right as we could,

438
00:28:15,600 --> 00:28:18,920
and the facts right.
He checked the detail.

439
00:28:20,600 --> 00:28:22,960
Another absolutely key figure

440
00:28:23,040 --> 00:28:26,760
was Alan Afriat,
the supervisory film editor,

441
00:28:26,840 --> 00:28:30,480
because he set up the systems
that made the whole thing work.

442
00:28:30,560 --> 00:28:38,320
You have to remember that the film
footage we were dealing with was 35mm,

443
00:28:38,400 --> 00:28:44,280
and it was of very variable quality

444
00:28:44,360 --> 00:28:47,640
in the libraries and archives
of the world.

445
00:28:47,720 --> 00:28:50,400
And Alan...

446
00:28:50,480 --> 00:28:53,840
Thames Television
was partly owned by Rediffusion.

447
00:28:53,920 --> 00:28:57,840
Rediffusion owned Humphries
Laboratories in Whitfield Street,

448
00:28:57,920 --> 00:29:00,280
just across
from where we're sitting now,

449
00:29:00,360 --> 00:29:02,160
and Alan set up the systems

450
00:29:02,240 --> 00:29:07,760
that meant that this film
was papered up by film researchers,

451
00:29:07,840 --> 00:29:09,840
Raye Farr and John Rowe,

452
00:29:09,920 --> 00:29:13,000
in the archives of the world,

453
00:29:13,080 --> 00:29:16,640
ordered, brought in, copied...

454
00:29:16,720 --> 00:29:19,160
He'll tell you all about it.

455
00:29:19,240 --> 00:29:21,920
And then he worked
and worked and worked

456
00:29:22,000 --> 00:29:28,400
with the film processing people
and with the grader of the final print

457
00:29:28,480 --> 00:29:34,080
to get the last possible
pinpoint of quality out of the image

458
00:29:34,160 --> 00:29:38,920
that cameras in very different and
difficult circumstances had captured.

459
00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:43,520
And he did all that
and he set up a cutting room

460
00:29:43,600 --> 00:29:45,400
and we began to get going

461
00:29:45,480 --> 00:29:48,680
and we didn't hire
the other four or five film editors

462
00:29:48,760 --> 00:29:50,640
until there was enough material,

463
00:29:50,720 --> 00:29:54,960
which all had to be researched
and found and printed up

464
00:29:55,040 --> 00:30:02,440
or shot and processed
and prints delivered

465
00:30:02,520 --> 00:30:05,920
and logged so that
you never, ever lost anything

466
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:08,800
and you always knew
exactly where to get

467
00:30:08,880 --> 00:30:11,640
any one of the hundreds of interviews
that we did

468
00:30:11,720 --> 00:30:14,640
and the thousands of film stories
that were printed up.

469
00:30:14,720 --> 00:30:16,880
Alan set up the whole of that,

470
00:30:16,960 --> 00:30:19,840
and he needed other people
to help him in the end,

471
00:30:19,920 --> 00:30:22,760
but he did
an absolutely tremendous job

472
00:30:22,840 --> 00:30:25,800
and I would say that without him
and the system he created

473
00:30:25,880 --> 00:30:29,280
the whole thing would have been chaos
and completely impossible.

474
00:30:29,360 --> 00:30:31,720
I was probably the person at Thames

475
00:30:31,800 --> 00:30:35,160
who was most experienced

476
00:30:35,240 --> 00:30:38,200
in this kind of shooting.

477
00:30:38,280 --> 00:30:42,840
I'd worked with Jeremy, not on The
Life And Times Of Lord Mountbatten,

478
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:44,480
but on The Day Before Yesterday.

479
00:30:44,560 --> 00:30:48,040
Jeremy was also involved in that.

480
00:30:48,120 --> 00:30:50,520
So I in fact left Thames,

481
00:30:50,600 --> 00:30:53,240
because we were all freelance
on the series,

482
00:30:53,320 --> 00:30:59,320
and my brief was to set up the whole
machinery for handling the film...

483
00:31:01,560 --> 00:31:06,880
...making sure that everything
could be found easily

484
00:31:06,960 --> 00:31:11,600
across several programmes which
might be using the same material.

485
00:31:11,680 --> 00:31:15,960
So we had to set up all kinds of ways

486
00:31:16,040 --> 00:31:21,320
in which the film researchers
could identify what film they'd found

487
00:31:21,400 --> 00:31:26,360
and that could then be recognised
when it arrived in the cutting rooms

488
00:31:26,440 --> 00:31:34,240
and could then be assigned
a card index

489
00:31:34,320 --> 00:31:36,520
where it could be cross-referenced

490
00:31:36,600 --> 00:31:41,920
so that if anybody wanted
anything on Burma in 1942,

491
00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:45,880
regardless of whether it was
particularly for their programme

492
00:31:45,960 --> 00:31:49,080
it was ordered,
that they could find it easily.

493
00:31:49,160 --> 00:31:52,040
The actual first episode
of the series...

494
00:31:54,840 --> 00:31:57,360
...the title of which
escapes me at the moment,

495
00:31:57,440 --> 00:32:04,360
N1, was the 14th programme to be made

496
00:32:04,440 --> 00:32:09,440
because Jeremy, I think,
felt that he wanted to get,

497
00:32:09,520 --> 00:32:12,920
get some programmes made and finished

498
00:32:13,000 --> 00:32:16,960
so that there was a feeling
and a style established

499
00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:20,320
so that the first programme
could be created

500
00:32:20,400 --> 00:32:25,120
as the right start
to what was going to follow.

501
00:32:25,200 --> 00:32:27,280
I didn't know how to make the series

502
00:32:27,360 --> 00:32:31,480
until the film researcher Raye Farr
found me some...

503
00:32:31,560 --> 00:32:37,000
And I remember seeing it with her
in the German film archive in Koblenz,

504
00:32:37,080 --> 00:32:40,840
some quite marvellous footage
that wasn't shot for newsreel

505
00:32:40,920 --> 00:32:42,920
but was shot for documentary,

506
00:32:43,000 --> 00:32:47,400
and it was shot behind
the German lines on the Eastern Front.

507
00:32:47,480 --> 00:32:50,240
Actually we're almost
about to discover

508
00:32:50,320 --> 00:32:53,560
precisely where that material was shot

509
00:32:53,640 --> 00:32:58,000
because we can now compare it with
photographs that have been uncovered

510
00:32:58,080 --> 00:33:00,960
and it looks as if
we know where it was now.

511
00:33:01,040 --> 00:33:03,040
But we didn't know where it was then

512
00:33:03,120 --> 00:33:06,320
and therefore it stood for generalities,

513
00:33:06,400 --> 00:33:10,840
it stood for the experience
of these men, these women.

514
00:33:10,920 --> 00:33:16,280
The very first words of the series
mean an enormous amount to me.

515
00:33:16,360 --> 00:33:22,560
I went to Oradour-sur-Glane myself
to see this village

516
00:33:22,640 --> 00:33:25,760
which was destroyed and burned

517
00:33:25,840 --> 00:33:30,960
by a Nazi SS... German SS division

518
00:33:31,040 --> 00:33:33,480
and which the French left preserved,

519
00:33:33,560 --> 00:33:37,120
standing exactly as it was then,

520
00:33:37,200 --> 00:33:39,960
near Limoges in the Limousin,

521
00:33:40,040 --> 00:33:46,760
and I knew then that that could be
the opening title of the series

522
00:33:46,840 --> 00:33:50,000
and the end of the series.

523
00:33:50,080 --> 00:33:54,840
I'm not sure I realised immediately
I could use it again at the end.

524
00:33:54,920 --> 00:34:00,440
And Neal Ascherson got the series off
to the best of all possible starts

525
00:34:00,520 --> 00:34:04,800
with the commentary that he wrote
for that beginning of the series,

526
00:34:04,880 --> 00:34:07,880
"Down this road the soldiers came."

527
00:34:07,960 --> 00:34:11,240
Not "the German soldiers",
"the soldiers".

528
00:34:11,320 --> 00:34:15,360
And that gave the thing
a sort of claim to universality

529
00:34:15,440 --> 00:34:19,480
that we hankered after and I like.

530
00:34:20,920 --> 00:34:25,920
Down this road,
on a summer day in 1944,

531
00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:28,000
the soldiers came.

532
00:34:29,760 --> 00:34:31,760
Nobody lives here now.

533
00:34:37,800 --> 00:34:40,720
They stayed only a few hours.

534
00:34:40,800 --> 00:34:42,000
When they had gone,

535
00:34:42,080 --> 00:34:46,800
a community which had lived
for 1,000 years was dead.

536
00:34:49,760 --> 00:34:54,080
This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

537
00:34:55,480 --> 00:35:00,440
The day the soldiers came
the people were gathered together.

538
00:35:00,520 --> 00:35:04,080
The men were taken
to garages and barns,

539
00:35:04,160 --> 00:35:07,800
the women and children
were led down this road

540
00:35:09,360 --> 00:35:12,160
and they were driven into this church.

541
00:35:13,720 --> 00:35:18,240
Here they heard the firing
as their men were shot.

542
00:35:19,400 --> 00:35:21,960
Then they were killed too.

543
00:35:22,920 --> 00:35:27,280
A few weeks later, many of those
who had done the killing

544
00:35:27,360 --> 00:35:30,800
were themselves dead in battle.

545
00:35:34,640 --> 00:35:38,880
They never rebuilt Oradour.
Its ruins are a memorial.

546
00:35:41,040 --> 00:35:45,560
Its martyrdom stands for thousand
upon thousand of other martyrdoms

547
00:35:45,640 --> 00:35:51,680
in Poland, in Russia,
in Burma, in China,

548
00:35:51,760 --> 00:35:53,760
in a world at war.

549
00:35:55,200 --> 00:35:58,120
I think we got that dead right
because we said,

550
00:35:58,200 --> 00:36:00,440
"This village stands for thousands..."

551
00:36:00,520 --> 00:36:02,640
"This ruin..."

552
00:36:02,720 --> 00:36:06,760
"This... What happened here stands for

553
00:36:06,840 --> 00:36:09,880
hundreds upon hundreds
of other incidents

554
00:36:09,960 --> 00:36:13,960
that happened
in every theatre of the war

555
00:36:14,040 --> 00:36:16,040
in a world at war."

556
00:36:16,120 --> 00:36:19,920
That got us off to the start
and then Carl...

557
00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:26,480
We had John Stamp's marvellous
main title and Carl's music

558
00:36:26,560 --> 00:36:28,120
and we were off.

559
00:36:28,200 --> 00:36:32,760
The title music
was really very interesting to do

560
00:36:32,840 --> 00:36:36,680
and one which I did very quickly,

561
00:36:36,760 --> 00:36:39,280
or sketched very quickly.

562
00:36:39,360 --> 00:36:42,680
That was really inspired
by the ideas that Jeremy had given me

563
00:36:42,760 --> 00:36:44,760
at our very first meeting.

564
00:36:44,840 --> 00:36:46,880
I joked to myself at a certain point

565
00:36:46,960 --> 00:36:53,960
that I chose a certain progression
that is heard in Czech music,

566
00:36:54,040 --> 00:36:59,360
in particular Smetana,
Janáček and Martinů,

567
00:36:59,440 --> 00:37:03,600
that line which always had
a particular cadence,

568
00:37:03,680 --> 00:37:07,560
that moved from minor keys
to major keys.

569
00:37:07,640 --> 00:37:11,840
And I like the idea somehow
that the Czech music...

570
00:37:11,920 --> 00:37:14,800
Czechoslovakia, as it was then,

571
00:37:14,880 --> 00:37:19,840
was a small country that had
aspirations towards democracy

572
00:37:19,920 --> 00:37:25,160
but in its history always
had a struggle trying to have it.

573
00:37:27,240 --> 00:37:31,400
Remember that when we made this series
we were at the height of the Cold War

574
00:37:31,480 --> 00:37:35,160
and so attitudes
towards various places,

575
00:37:35,240 --> 00:37:38,800
which would be one thing then,
were another.

576
00:37:38,880 --> 00:37:43,280
The other aspect of a title theme
and creating music for a title theme

577
00:37:43,360 --> 00:37:48,600
is that I always try and work
with the graphics people.

578
00:37:48,680 --> 00:37:51,840
I had a really very interesting time
on The World At War

579
00:37:51,920 --> 00:37:58,640
because one was involved in something
regarded as very crude then,

580
00:37:58,720 --> 00:38:01,600
hand-drawn storyboards.

581
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:04,680
A storyboard, of course,
is like a comic strip

582
00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:10,040
in which the principal visual elements
are drawn in a kind of progression.

583
00:38:10,120 --> 00:38:13,600
And from that a composer
could work out,

584
00:38:13,680 --> 00:38:17,960
"What is the character
of the visual elements going to be?"

585
00:38:18,040 --> 00:38:20,480
Secondly, and this is all-important,

586
00:38:20,560 --> 00:38:24,880
"How much time have I got?
How many seconds have I got?"

587
00:38:24,960 --> 00:38:28,160
Fortunately, and this is rare now,

588
00:38:28,240 --> 00:38:33,680
there was the opportunity
to create something of some dimension.

589
00:38:34,880 --> 00:38:41,280
We had nearly a minute
of title music to play with

590
00:38:41,360 --> 00:38:43,720
and it was
very interestingly integrated

591
00:38:43,800 --> 00:38:48,560
because the programmes started
with what we called the "hooker",

592
00:38:48,640 --> 00:38:52,720
which is a sort of tease,
something ahead of the programme,

593
00:38:52,800 --> 00:38:57,080
to give the audience something which
would carry them into the programme,

594
00:38:57,160 --> 00:38:59,680
they would set up
the subject of the programme.

595
00:38:59,760 --> 00:39:04,040
That would take you
into the title sequence,

596
00:39:04,120 --> 00:39:06,000
so it was obviously...

597
00:39:06,080 --> 00:39:09,360
It worked very well because
the first notes that I conceived

598
00:39:09,440 --> 00:39:11,160
were very dramatic.

599
00:39:11,240 --> 00:39:13,360
It was going to start with something

600
00:39:13,440 --> 00:39:16,160
that was like an explosion
or a bombardment.

601
00:39:16,240 --> 00:39:18,600
Indeed the idea of that
worked very well

602
00:39:18,680 --> 00:39:21,440
because the first little picture
of the storyboard

603
00:39:21,520 --> 00:39:23,520
was a sheet of flame

604
00:39:23,600 --> 00:39:27,360
and then out of the flame
were going to come faces

605
00:39:27,440 --> 00:39:31,400
which would represent everybody.

606
00:39:44,160 --> 00:39:47,560
And somewhere in the middle
of all that, of these faces,

607
00:39:47,640 --> 00:39:50,840
was that of a young girl,
which I fantasised was Anne Frank.

608
00:39:50,920 --> 00:39:54,440
Maybe it wasn't Anne Frank
but it was a young girl.

609
00:39:54,520 --> 00:39:59,520
That was the moment I decided
it had to go from minor to major.

610
00:39:59,600 --> 00:40:04,360
Somewhere around there
the character of it would change

611
00:40:04,440 --> 00:40:06,440
and there would be a ray of hope.

612
00:40:11,040 --> 00:40:16,160
Then it would go back
to the minor cadences.

613
00:40:22,160 --> 00:40:26,440
There were other things. I tried
to use a lot of music from the period.

614
00:40:26,520 --> 00:40:30,880
And some of the German films,
or some of all the films,

615
00:40:30,960 --> 00:40:33,680
maybe I used a pop song of the period,

616
00:40:33,760 --> 00:40:40,320
maybe it was film that was actually on
a newsreel that was shown at the time

617
00:40:40,400 --> 00:40:45,000
or a documentary
that was made at the time.

618
00:40:45,080 --> 00:40:49,360
But you couldn't use the music
that was on the soundtrack

619
00:40:49,440 --> 00:40:56,680
because it was covered
with commentary or sound effects.

620
00:40:56,760 --> 00:41:01,680
For example, there was the big parade
at the end of the first programme,

621
00:41:01,760 --> 00:41:05,400
the big Berlin parade,

622
00:41:05,480 --> 00:41:10,320
where there was this spectacular piece
of music, very dramatic piece of music

623
00:41:10,400 --> 00:41:13,000
which I couldn't use off the newsreel

624
00:41:13,080 --> 00:41:19,840
because it was covered
with commentary and sound effects.

625
00:41:19,920 --> 00:41:22,360
But it was absolutely
the piece of music to use.

626
00:41:22,440 --> 00:41:24,720
I didn't know what it was

627
00:41:24,800 --> 00:41:30,760
and absolutely searched around trying
to find where that piece of music was,

628
00:41:30,840 --> 00:41:34,760
playing it to all sorts of people and
saying, "What's this piece of music?"

629
00:41:34,840 --> 00:41:38,720
And eventually we found out
it was Bruckner's Fifth Symphony.

630
00:41:38,800 --> 00:41:44,200
And so I used it because
that was what was used at the time.

631
00:41:44,280 --> 00:41:48,240
It was the way that
that parade was seen

632
00:41:48,320 --> 00:41:51,320
in the German cinemas at the time.

633
00:41:51,400 --> 00:41:54,840
It was worth using that.

634
00:41:54,920 --> 00:41:57,240
I thought better than composing...

635
00:41:57,320 --> 00:41:59,440
Wonderful as Carl's music was,

636
00:41:59,520 --> 00:42:02,480
I thought it was better
to use music like that

637
00:42:02,560 --> 00:42:04,680
than to use specially scored music.

638
00:42:04,760 --> 00:42:06,920
Specially scored music works fine

639
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:10,160
when it's not trying
to impart anything particular.

640
00:42:10,240 --> 00:42:15,400
Moving the story along, that's OK.

641
00:42:15,480 --> 00:42:22,280
But for situations like that
it was nice to use the original music

642
00:42:22,360 --> 00:42:25,320
that they'd chosen at the time.

643
00:42:25,400 --> 00:42:28,360
If you were watching the film
you wouldn't know that,

644
00:42:28,440 --> 00:42:32,280
you wouldn't know why
that piece of music had been used.

645
00:42:32,360 --> 00:42:36,880
It was particularly difficult
at the start of this

646
00:42:36,960 --> 00:42:41,880
to define what role
music was going to play.

647
00:42:41,960 --> 00:42:44,400
The title theme was not such a problem

648
00:42:44,480 --> 00:42:47,240
because Jeremy,
at our very first meeting,

649
00:42:47,320 --> 00:42:51,720
talked about the qualities
that he wanted in the title music.

650
00:42:52,720 --> 00:42:55,240
He defined his series as being one

651
00:42:55,320 --> 00:42:59,680
which of course would take in
the enormous battles,

652
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:01,760
the landmark battles and so on,

653
00:43:01,840 --> 00:43:06,240
but he was particularly interested
in emphasising the human problems

654
00:43:06,320 --> 00:43:12,720
of what it felt like
to be bombed or bombing,

655
00:43:12,800 --> 00:43:16,920
what it felt like to be occupied
etcetera.

656
00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:21,800
In other words, what the individual
statement was going to be.

657
00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:25,680
That was going to be different
from other series about the war,

658
00:43:25,760 --> 00:43:28,360
that it was going to be
that particularised.

659
00:43:28,440 --> 00:43:34,160
And so a lot of
the successful passages of music

660
00:43:34,240 --> 00:43:36,920
actually had to do
with the individual experience,

661
00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:39,480
trying to interpret
the individual experience,

662
00:43:39,560 --> 00:43:44,040
whether it was arrogant
or tragic or lyric, sometimes.

663
00:43:44,120 --> 00:43:46,320
Initially I wrote
very descriptive music

664
00:43:46,400 --> 00:43:48,760
and that was found to be
less effective

665
00:43:48,840 --> 00:43:53,240
than areas where a director
would actually clear the way

666
00:43:53,320 --> 00:43:57,320
for some pictures
which would not have talking over it

667
00:43:57,400 --> 00:44:01,880
and in which I would actually make
a very active contribution.

668
00:44:01,960 --> 00:44:05,880
Olivier did all the recordings
at Preview Two,

669
00:44:05,960 --> 00:44:08,360
in a little wood-lined booth,

670
00:44:08,440 --> 00:44:13,320
and he tried initially
to do them to film

671
00:44:13,400 --> 00:44:15,760
but found it too time-consuming,

672
00:44:15,840 --> 00:44:19,280
so it was decided
that he would just record it wild

673
00:44:19,360 --> 00:44:23,080
with the editors timing each sequence
so they knew they could fit.

674
00:44:23,160 --> 00:44:24,640
Occasionally it would be,

675
00:44:24,720 --> 00:44:28,200
"Excuse me, Sir Laurence,
could we do that a little quicker?"

676
00:44:28,280 --> 00:44:31,320
"Sir Laurence, could you
just let that stretch a bit?"

677
00:44:31,400 --> 00:44:38,600
And he was wonderfully good about it
and had no problems with doing it all.

678
00:44:38,680 --> 00:44:42,280
I can still remember
going up to Larry Olivier

679
00:44:42,360 --> 00:44:46,160
in the recording studio
in Oxford Street...

680
00:44:47,880 --> 00:44:51,360
...and saying to him,
"You do realise, do you, that..."

681
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:56,760
He was wearing a big pair
of red suspenders, braces,

682
00:44:56,840 --> 00:45:01,200
and he was about to put his jacket on
and come out of the booth.

683
00:45:01,280 --> 00:45:05,480
He'd done it pretty well
but I said to him,

684
00:45:05,560 --> 00:45:06,960
"You do know, don't you,

685
00:45:07,040 --> 00:45:10,480
that those words
are the very first words

686
00:45:10,560 --> 00:45:14,920
that will be heard
in the entire series?"

687
00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:19,480
"Ah," he said. He took his jacket off
and said, "I'll do it again."

688
00:45:19,560 --> 00:45:25,360
And he then did it
with the total wonderful mastery

689
00:45:25,440 --> 00:45:29,640
that he does deliver,
making every single syllable count

690
00:45:29,720 --> 00:45:32,080
and pronouncing the letter A

691
00:45:32,160 --> 00:45:35,840
in at least three
and maybe four different ways

692
00:45:35,920 --> 00:45:37,760
in the course of those few words.

693
00:45:37,840 --> 00:45:42,720
I had to do the catering
for the lunch breaks in the thing

694
00:45:42,800 --> 00:45:45,320
and his secretary,
who I checked with, said,

695
00:45:45,400 --> 00:45:50,280
"Sir Laurence would just like a glass
of white wine and apples and cheese."

696
00:45:50,360 --> 00:45:54,520
And as we did most of the recordings
at Preview Two on Oxford Street,

697
00:45:54,600 --> 00:45:58,240
it was very easy to go to Berwick
Street Market and Marks and Spencer's

698
00:45:58,320 --> 00:46:04,680
and get white wine and good cheese.

699
00:46:04,760 --> 00:46:09,280
The apples that he really liked were
golden russets, if I remember rightly.

700
00:46:09,360 --> 00:46:12,120
And he was, of course,
a man of the war.

701
00:46:12,200 --> 00:46:17,680
He had flown in the Fleet Air Arm,
if I remember rightly,

702
00:46:17,760 --> 00:46:21,720
and he flew Skuas,
which he had a lovely story about.

703
00:46:21,800 --> 00:46:26,840
Because he was an actor
and the press heard about it...

704
00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:29,840
He was down at Worthy Down,
which is one of the bases,

705
00:46:29,920 --> 00:46:34,160
and was taxiing his Skua
along the runway

706
00:46:34,240 --> 00:46:37,720
and posing to the cameras
and crashed it.

707
00:46:39,160 --> 00:46:42,320
And when the series was over,

708
00:46:42,400 --> 00:46:44,920
there was a chap
at the imperial War Museum

709
00:46:45,000 --> 00:46:50,880
who made wonderful model aircraft
and so we asked him to make a Skua

710
00:46:50,960 --> 00:46:55,040
which we presented to Sir Laurence
as a "Thank you very much".

711
00:46:55,120 --> 00:46:56,920
He was quite pleased about that.

712
00:46:57,000 --> 00:47:02,040
To start with,
he was not the intended narrator.

713
00:47:02,120 --> 00:47:04,200
He only...

714
00:47:05,400 --> 00:47:11,160
We only recorded with him
in October/November of 1972,

715
00:47:11,240 --> 00:47:14,520
after we'd been in production
for 18 months...

716
00:47:16,040 --> 00:47:21,760
...because there had been
some change of thinking about it

717
00:47:21,840 --> 00:47:25,400
and it was decided that
because it was going to be terrific,

718
00:47:25,480 --> 00:47:28,560
it needed the best voice
in the business.

719
00:47:28,640 --> 00:47:32,000
Originally we had gone
for Rene Cutforth,

720
00:47:32,080 --> 00:47:35,560
the late, great war correspondent,

721
00:47:35,640 --> 00:47:38,920
and he had recorded
the first four episodes.

722
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:44,080
And it was then decided that no,
we wanted something different.

723
00:47:44,160 --> 00:47:50,040
And in the time between deciding that
Rene was not going to do the rest

724
00:47:50,120 --> 00:47:51,920
and getting Olivier on board,

725
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:55,320
Allan Hargreaves,
who was the staff voice,

726
00:47:55,400 --> 00:47:57,640
recorded quite a number
as guide tracks

727
00:47:57,720 --> 00:48:01,320
so that the editors
could continue cutting to that.

728
00:48:01,400 --> 00:48:06,560
And then, certainly, we started over
with Olivier in October,

729
00:48:06,640 --> 00:48:10,960
recording Peter Batty's
France Falls, A3.

730
00:48:11,040 --> 00:48:15,600
It's better on this kind of programme
if the producer doesn't get too close

731
00:48:15,680 --> 00:48:22,040
because one has to get ideas across
as clearly as you can

732
00:48:22,120 --> 00:48:26,760
and often you're not really quite sure
whether things are working or not.

733
00:48:26,840 --> 00:48:31,600
And if the producer
is too close to the material,

734
00:48:31,680 --> 00:48:35,880
neither of you are helping each other,
you're all... you're too close,

735
00:48:35,960 --> 00:48:39,280
you need to see something
with a fresh eye

736
00:48:39,360 --> 00:48:41,920
and say, "I don't know
what that's all about,"

737
00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:45,520
or, "That's OK
but it's in the wrong place."

738
00:48:45,600 --> 00:48:49,320
So the editor's often too close

739
00:48:49,400 --> 00:48:54,640
to be able to see things
that are more apparent

740
00:48:54,720 --> 00:48:57,320
to somebody
who's not seen the material before.

741
00:48:57,400 --> 00:49:00,640
The editor knows every single cut

742
00:49:00,720 --> 00:49:04,720
whereas the director
is only really aware of sequences.

743
00:49:04,800 --> 00:49:10,240
I think that the faith in the power
of the pictures to tell the story,

744
00:49:10,320 --> 00:49:12,560
the primacy of the picture,
if you like,

745
00:49:12,640 --> 00:49:18,160
was a moment in the history
of historical documentary making.

746
00:49:18,240 --> 00:49:20,720
Doing World War Two was quite different.

747
00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:24,080
You were in a world
which abounded with film,

748
00:49:24,160 --> 00:49:25,920
in which research and archives

749
00:49:26,000 --> 00:49:28,880
could turn up amazing film
which nobody knew existed,

750
00:49:28,960 --> 00:49:32,120
which hadn't been looked at
for 30 years.

751
00:49:33,960 --> 00:49:38,680
It was a period when people felt,
"Let us make film a new way."

752
00:49:38,760 --> 00:49:41,200
"Let's make documentaries
in a different way

753
00:49:41,280 --> 00:49:44,520
and let the pictures do the work
because they can."

754
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:47,480
The subject, of course,
made it possible to do that.

755
00:49:47,560 --> 00:49:51,640
But it wasn't just the subject
that enabled this,

756
00:49:51,720 --> 00:49:54,640
it was a general mood
which was, as I say,

757
00:49:54,720 --> 00:49:58,080
faith in the picture itself
and a feeling...

758
00:49:58,160 --> 00:50:00,680
I think it was a feeling
that you could escape

759
00:50:00,760 --> 00:50:07,280
from some sort of editorial expert,
non-television control

760
00:50:07,360 --> 00:50:09,080
by relying on the pictures.

761
00:50:09,160 --> 00:50:10,760
If you rely on the pictures,

762
00:50:10,840 --> 00:50:14,480
that absolutely confirmed the status
of the producer as the boss

763
00:50:14,560 --> 00:50:16,640
and there was no getting away
from that.

764
00:50:16,720 --> 00:50:18,360
I think that also played a role.

765
00:50:18,440 --> 00:50:20,680
Later, much later,
after The World At War,

766
00:50:20,760 --> 00:50:24,600
things changed again
for a lot of different reasons.

767
00:50:24,680 --> 00:50:29,360
The way of making
historical documentaries changed.

768
00:50:29,440 --> 00:50:33,960
The almost obsessive emphasis
on the primacy of the picture

769
00:50:34,040 --> 00:50:36,800
began to dwindle,
particularly because people...

770
00:50:36,880 --> 00:50:40,520
They started colliding with
really difficult, contorted subjects

771
00:50:40,600 --> 00:50:43,000
in which you were trying
to tell people things

772
00:50:43,080 --> 00:50:46,280
not only that they didn't know
but they didn't want to know.

773
00:50:46,360 --> 00:50:50,360
At that point, the minimal commentary
and the total primacy of the picture

774
00:50:50,440 --> 00:50:52,920
begins to be
much more difficult to operate.

775
00:50:53,000 --> 00:50:57,920
You have to have lucid explication
of what's going on.

776
00:50:58,000 --> 00:51:00,440
You have to say,
"You think this is happening

777
00:51:00,520 --> 00:51:04,440
but I'm going to tell you that behind
the scenes it was quite different."

778
00:51:04,520 --> 00:51:08,400
"They told you that Berlin
was about to fall

779
00:51:08,480 --> 00:51:11,520
and that the Soviets
were going to move in."

780
00:51:11,600 --> 00:51:15,080
"It never, ever crossed the Soviets'
mind to do this, actually."

781
00:51:15,160 --> 00:51:19,080
"You were being fooled
and they, the authorities, knew this."

782
00:51:19,160 --> 00:51:20,600
And that kind of example.

783
00:51:20,680 --> 00:51:26,880
You can't do that in the way that The
Worid At War approached its subject.

784
00:51:26,960 --> 00:51:30,320
Programmes like this
aren't tightly scripted.

785
00:51:31,760 --> 00:51:35,320
The programme starts
with an outline brief

786
00:51:35,400 --> 00:51:40,880
which might come
from the director and the writer,

787
00:51:40,960 --> 00:51:43,480
it might come only from the director.

788
00:51:43,560 --> 00:51:46,320
There would be a whole lot of briefs

789
00:51:46,400 --> 00:51:48,800
which would come
for the various programmes.

790
00:51:48,880 --> 00:51:51,840
We were not so much
going out with a detailed remit,

791
00:51:51,920 --> 00:51:55,920
but a broad remit as to what we were
trying to achieve in each programme.

792
00:51:56,000 --> 00:52:01,000
Jeremy sorted out what area was going
to be covered by which programme.

793
00:52:01,080 --> 00:52:05,640
Each programme had an overall feeling

794
00:52:05,720 --> 00:52:10,040
of what you wanted to achieve

795
00:52:10,120 --> 00:52:13,960
as a view
for that particular theatre of war,

796
00:52:14,040 --> 00:52:17,560
so there was the home front in Britain
and the home front in Germany,

797
00:52:17,640 --> 00:52:19,880
which were kind of mirror programmes.

798
00:52:19,960 --> 00:52:22,040
A producer would go away,

799
00:52:22,120 --> 00:52:25,520
whether it was John Pett
inventing wonderful ways

800
00:52:25,600 --> 00:52:30,040
of using voiceovers
in his episode on D-Day

801
00:52:30,120 --> 00:52:33,600
or his episode
on the war in the Pacific,

802
00:52:33,680 --> 00:52:37,000
or Peter Batty
who did six programmes,

803
00:52:37,080 --> 00:52:41,000
five of which gave
an enormous narrative impulse

804
00:52:41,080 --> 00:52:44,400
to the first half of the series.

805
00:52:45,600 --> 00:52:47,680
They would finish what they had to do,

806
00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:51,640
they would brief the researchers
that would find them interviewees,

807
00:52:51,720 --> 00:52:54,760
though some of them,
Peter Batty for example,

808
00:52:54,840 --> 00:52:57,160
preferred to chat up
his own interviewees.

809
00:52:57,240 --> 00:52:59,800
He had a very good line
in German generals,

810
00:52:59,880 --> 00:53:01,600
whom he seemed to get on with.

811
00:53:01,680 --> 00:53:05,760
They would brief the researcher
to find interviewees

812
00:53:05,840 --> 00:53:08,080
and they would brief the film researcher

813
00:53:08,160 --> 00:53:12,720
as to the material they were looking
for visually to make up the episode

814
00:53:12,800 --> 00:53:15,000
and this would come back

815
00:53:15,080 --> 00:53:18,080
and it would be logged
under Alan Afriat's supervision

816
00:53:18,160 --> 00:53:21,240
and go into the cutting room
and be assembled.

817
00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:27,520
The film researchers would go out
and look for film to cover

818
00:53:27,600 --> 00:53:29,760
whatever they could find

819
00:53:29,840 --> 00:53:33,760
on the areas that
the outline script wanted to cover.

820
00:53:33,840 --> 00:53:38,000
A BBC cameraman called Ronnie Noble,
who worked in newsreel,

821
00:53:38,080 --> 00:53:43,040
he took pictures
of what happened there

822
00:53:43,120 --> 00:53:44,920
and none of them were used

823
00:53:45,000 --> 00:53:47,600
because the British people
couldn't be shown

824
00:53:47,680 --> 00:53:52,920
what their troops, what their brothers
and husbands and lovers and sons

825
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:55,760
looked like on the beaches of Dunkirk.

826
00:53:55,840 --> 00:53:57,480
It was just too rough to take,

827
00:53:57,560 --> 00:54:00,880
so although Britain tried
to cheer everybody up

828
00:54:00,960 --> 00:54:05,640
with, "Let's have another cup of tea,"
and, "We can do it,"

829
00:54:05,720 --> 00:54:08,640
what we went through, even,

830
00:54:08,720 --> 00:54:12,120
is not adequately portrayed
in The World At War,

831
00:54:12,200 --> 00:54:17,240
let alone the appalling experience
of the people of occupied Europe

832
00:54:17,320 --> 00:54:19,760
or of the war on the Eastern Front,

833
00:54:19,840 --> 00:54:23,960
where the Russians
may have lost 25 million dead,

834
00:54:24,040 --> 00:54:29,560
and where one third of every Pole
in Poland died

835
00:54:29,640 --> 00:54:32,120
in the Second World War,
including the Jews.

836
00:54:32,200 --> 00:54:37,520
Those experiences
would have been hard to take

837
00:54:37,600 --> 00:54:41,880
and if you knew about them, even,
they were hard to take.

838
00:54:41,960 --> 00:54:44,600
One tended to go
for a kind of blanket coverage,

839
00:54:44,680 --> 00:54:46,680
like archive material.

840
00:54:46,760 --> 00:54:48,600
The researchers would go out

841
00:54:48,680 --> 00:54:52,160
and they would try and find
pretty well everything they could,

842
00:54:52,240 --> 00:54:55,800
so you'd get a lot of duplicate
coverage from all different sources,

843
00:54:55,880 --> 00:54:58,240
some of it exactly the same.

844
00:54:58,320 --> 00:55:01,280
A lot of it came
from neutral countries.

845
00:55:01,360 --> 00:55:05,600
Often the stuff from the neutral
countries was in the best condition

846
00:55:05,680 --> 00:55:08,800
because nobody had looked at it
or done anything with it.

847
00:55:08,880 --> 00:55:11,160
So you had German newsreels

848
00:55:11,240 --> 00:55:15,840
which were sitting in archives
in Portugal, for instance,

849
00:55:15,920 --> 00:55:19,400
and they were much better quality
than what you got from Germany.

850
00:55:19,480 --> 00:55:24,720
There would be quite
a substantial amount of interviewing,

851
00:55:24,800 --> 00:55:30,240
again covering the area, the broad
scope of a particular programme.

852
00:55:30,320 --> 00:55:37,280
The factual correctness was something
we were very careful to get right.

853
00:55:37,360 --> 00:55:41,000
The other thing was that by getting
to know people over a longer period

854
00:55:41,080 --> 00:55:43,120
and speaking to them several times,

855
00:55:43,200 --> 00:55:46,520
you did actually get
a very broad picture

856
00:55:46,600 --> 00:55:51,160
of what their experience had been,

857
00:55:51,240 --> 00:55:54,240
so that you were able then perhaps

858
00:55:54,320 --> 00:56:00,920
to pick out the most representative
or most relevant part from that.

859
00:56:01,000 --> 00:56:03,760
It was very important
that we had that amount of time

860
00:56:03,840 --> 00:56:07,760
to build up the picture
of each episode

861
00:56:07,840 --> 00:56:12,320
so that we could feed that in.

862
00:56:12,400 --> 00:56:15,880
The process of editing then started,

863
00:56:15,960 --> 00:56:19,800
of assembling the material

864
00:56:19,880 --> 00:56:25,320
into a kind of manageable format

865
00:56:25,400 --> 00:56:29,480
in some kind of predetermined order.

866
00:56:29,560 --> 00:56:31,400
There would be a lot of repetition,

867
00:56:31,480 --> 00:56:34,560
a lot of interviews where people
were saying the same thing.

868
00:56:34,640 --> 00:56:37,840
Sometimes people were saying it
better than others.

869
00:56:37,920 --> 00:56:40,920
A lot of people
were covering the same ground.

870
00:56:41,000 --> 00:56:48,280
And a lot of the archive material
was, again, quite repetitious.

871
00:56:48,360 --> 00:56:51,600
But the initial long process

872
00:56:51,680 --> 00:56:55,160
was going through the material
to start with

873
00:56:55,240 --> 00:57:00,000
and getting it into a programme

874
00:57:00,080 --> 00:57:03,360
which might have run
five or six hours, probably.

875
00:57:03,440 --> 00:57:08,040
I would think a first assembly
might well have run five or six hours,

876
00:57:08,120 --> 00:57:14,560
probably out of about
12, 14, 15 hours of material, maybe.

877
00:57:14,640 --> 00:57:18,600
So you were already whittling down
at that early stage,

878
00:57:18,680 --> 00:57:22,120
getting rid of any duplication
of coverage,

879
00:57:22,200 --> 00:57:28,080
looking for the best archive material,

880
00:57:28,160 --> 00:57:30,640
leaving more of the interviewing in.

881
00:57:30,720 --> 00:57:33,640
Although people
were saying the same thing,

882
00:57:33,720 --> 00:57:37,440
it depended how it was put together
who you might use.

883
00:57:37,520 --> 00:57:40,680
If you wanted to cross-cut
two people saying the same thing,

884
00:57:40,760 --> 00:57:42,880
you might use
more of one than another.

885
00:57:42,960 --> 00:57:47,560
You'd have quite a lot of repetition
of interview in that first assembly.

886
00:57:47,640 --> 00:57:49,880
But then from that first assembly

887
00:57:49,960 --> 00:57:54,120
you would gradually whittle it down

888
00:57:54,200 --> 00:57:58,680
to the final running time
of 52 minutes.

889
00:57:58,760 --> 00:58:04,080
The way these things were made
was perhaps unusual.

890
00:58:04,160 --> 00:58:09,080
There are cases
in which somebody is invited

891
00:58:09,160 --> 00:58:11,400
to write a script, a commentary

892
00:58:11,480 --> 00:58:14,200
and then a reverent producer appears

893
00:58:14,280 --> 00:58:16,000
who then films it, as it were,

894
00:58:16,080 --> 00:58:17,720
provides pictures for it.

895
00:58:17,800 --> 00:58:20,200
The World At War
was completely unlike that.

896
00:58:20,280 --> 00:58:23,800
As I've said, this was a period
when there was this messianic faith

897
00:58:23,880 --> 00:58:26,600
in the power of the moving image,

898
00:58:26,680 --> 00:58:31,320
and so the producer was the boss.

899
00:58:31,400 --> 00:58:33,920
And as a commentary writer...

900
00:58:35,520 --> 00:58:39,720
...and I learned this trade,
I'd never done this before,

901
00:58:39,800 --> 00:58:44,800
you were completely the...
not exactly the slave,

902
00:58:44,880 --> 00:58:47,840
but the junior collaborator
of the producer,

903
00:58:47,920 --> 00:58:53,080
who told you what he or she wanted
and then you did it.

904
00:58:53,160 --> 00:58:56,400
You could fight
for your point of view.

905
00:58:56,480 --> 00:59:00,080
What I do remember
about the ones that I worked on,

906
00:59:00,160 --> 00:59:05,240
and I worked on some about Germany,
pre-war and during the war,

907
00:59:05,320 --> 00:59:10,760
and I worked on some about
the Soviet Union at war, for example,

908
00:59:10,840 --> 00:59:15,800
I remember arguments about content
with the producers

909
00:59:15,880 --> 00:59:17,920
and the producers were, in fact,

910
00:59:18,000 --> 00:59:22,200
acting as political commissars
as well,

911
00:59:22,280 --> 00:59:24,600
or historians
or however you like to put it.

912
00:59:24,680 --> 00:59:26,840
They said,
"Well, this is what happened."

913
00:59:26,920 --> 00:59:29,880
I could at times say,
"I don't think that is what happened."

914
00:59:29,960 --> 00:59:31,440
"It happened differently."

915
00:59:31,520 --> 00:59:34,200
Then we would have an argument
and sometimes I'd win

916
00:59:34,280 --> 00:59:36,280
and sometimes the producer would win,

917
00:59:36,360 --> 00:59:38,600
but the producer
was absolutely the boss

918
00:59:38,680 --> 00:59:46,400
and the commentary writer was, in
the last analysis, his or her servant.

919
00:59:46,480 --> 00:59:48,280
I quite liked that, I admired it

920
00:59:48,360 --> 00:59:52,400
because I was impressed by this faith
in the power of the image.

921
00:59:52,480 --> 00:59:57,240
The film researchers,
who would spend weeks in an archive...

922
00:59:57,320 --> 01:00:00,440
John Rowe would turn up
on the doorstep

923
01:00:00,520 --> 01:00:02,880
of the National Film Archive
in Washington

924
01:00:02,960 --> 01:00:04,800
before it opened in the morning

925
01:00:04,880 --> 01:00:08,520
and not leave until they threw him out
at night, day after day.

926
01:00:08,600 --> 01:00:12,520
They'd never seen researchers
like the researchers that we had,

927
01:00:12,600 --> 01:00:16,520
John in Washington, Raye Farr
in Koblenz and so on and so forth.

928
01:00:16,600 --> 01:00:20,080
There are a lot of challenges
as an editor doing something like this

929
01:00:20,160 --> 01:00:21,920
because were trying very hard,

930
01:00:22,000 --> 01:00:24,720
and this is one of the things
we talked about a lot

931
01:00:24,800 --> 01:00:26,080
when making the series,

932
01:00:26,160 --> 01:00:29,240
we were trying very hard
to get something really authentic.

933
01:00:29,320 --> 01:00:32,360
We didn't want to have
a lot of fake material etcetera.

934
01:00:32,440 --> 01:00:38,280
We'd have endless discussions about
"Is this genuine? Is it training?"

935
01:00:38,360 --> 01:00:41,640
"Was it shot after the action?"

936
01:00:41,720 --> 01:00:45,560
"Is it actually a newsreel cameraman
out there at the front shooting?"

937
01:00:45,640 --> 01:00:52,120
A lot of the British material
was all re-enacted afterwards.

938
01:00:52,200 --> 01:00:55,840
They'd get soldiers
trotting through the sand,

939
01:00:55,920 --> 01:01:00,360
firing off Bren guns
and artillery pieces etcetera.

940
01:01:00,440 --> 01:01:04,960
A lot of the Russian stuff
was again set up,

941
01:01:05,040 --> 01:01:08,720
but very much more elaborately set up.

942
01:01:08,800 --> 01:01:12,520
Some of it was very hard to spot
that it was set up.

943
01:01:12,600 --> 01:01:15,880
A lot of the German stuff
was much more genuine,

944
01:01:15,960 --> 01:01:19,320
and the American stuff
was much more genuine.

945
01:01:19,400 --> 01:01:25,240
But of course you're then
cutting all this material together

946
01:01:25,320 --> 01:01:30,160
and you might have a lot of film

947
01:01:30,240 --> 01:01:35,320
which you know came
from that particular battle

948
01:01:35,400 --> 01:01:36,800
at that particular time.

949
01:01:38,160 --> 01:01:41,680
You don't know
whether it's day one of the battle

950
01:01:41,760 --> 01:01:45,720
and it was ten miles
down the front this way.

951
01:01:45,800 --> 01:01:48,920
You don't know whether
it was day three of the battle

952
01:01:49,000 --> 01:01:53,960
and it was 15 miles away
in the other direction.

953
01:01:54,040 --> 01:01:56,160
So you're cutting material together,

954
01:01:56,240 --> 01:02:01,080
you're trying to make a sequence
which is reasonably fast-moving

955
01:02:01,160 --> 01:02:06,040
because you want the programme to move

956
01:02:06,120 --> 01:02:09,920
and you're trying to be honest

957
01:02:10,000 --> 01:02:15,880
but a lot of the material,
although it's absolutely genuine...

958
01:02:17,640 --> 01:02:23,600
...it's... it might be less honest
than if you'd faked the whole thing,

959
01:02:23,680 --> 01:02:25,160
if you see what I mean.

960
01:02:25,240 --> 01:02:28,320
So you're always
weighing up these problems

961
01:02:28,400 --> 01:02:35,040
of how to use the material
in an honest way

962
01:02:35,120 --> 01:02:37,320
without making a really boring story.

963
01:02:38,280 --> 01:02:41,960
You've no idea how intense
the action is of what you're using.

964
01:02:42,040 --> 01:02:45,760
There are a number of people
I spoke to during the research trip,

965
01:02:45,840 --> 01:02:47,760
or trips,

966
01:02:49,160 --> 01:02:51,440
Obviously
we didn't interview everybody

967
01:02:51,520 --> 01:02:55,080
There were a variety of reasons
why we didn't interview everybody.

968
01:02:55,160 --> 01:02:57,240
Some were better interviewees.

969
01:02:57,320 --> 01:03:02,120
One particular person
who I had interviewed,

970
01:03:02,200 --> 01:03:06,520
who I spoke to,
who I then discussed in some...

971
01:03:06,600 --> 01:03:09,960
And who was very difficult to find
and very unwilling to talk to me,

972
01:03:10,040 --> 01:03:11,280
but he did eventually,

973
01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:14,760
he was somebody who Mike Darlow met

974
01:03:14,840 --> 01:03:19,120
and we then decided,
Michael decided really,

975
01:03:19,200 --> 01:03:26,320
that he didn't feel
he was being honest with himself

976
01:03:26,400 --> 01:03:30,920
and therefore that it would...

977
01:03:31,000 --> 01:03:34,480
It was not achieving what we
were hoping to achieve in that series

978
01:03:34,560 --> 01:03:36,000
and in that programme,

979
01:03:36,080 --> 01:03:39,800
that people should be being
as honest as possible with themselves

980
01:03:39,880 --> 01:03:44,080
and not making excuses

981
01:03:44,160 --> 01:03:49,720
or... telling a...

982
01:03:53,560 --> 01:03:57,280
...shifted story
with a shifted emphasis.

983
01:03:57,360 --> 01:04:00,200
Almost imperceptible reasons.

984
01:04:00,280 --> 01:04:05,680
There are other problems, you see,
like when you're editing interviews.

985
01:04:08,120 --> 01:04:13,880
Some people talk very slowly and
have a lot of ums and ahs in between.

986
01:04:13,960 --> 01:04:19,280
Sometimes the camera cuts
and you have to reload

987
01:04:19,360 --> 01:04:26,600
and the question's been asked in the
previous magazine, the previous roll,

988
01:04:26,680 --> 01:04:31,160
and you're tightening
the way people speak up,

989
01:04:31,240 --> 01:04:35,640
editing it to make everything
come through clearly

990
01:04:35,720 --> 01:04:40,400
and coherently,

991
01:04:40,480 --> 01:04:41,960
which again is...

992
01:04:42,040 --> 01:04:45,480
Sometimes you're actually,
without intending to,

993
01:04:45,560 --> 01:04:48,000
you're distorting slightly
what people say

994
01:04:48,080 --> 01:04:50,800
because they weren't that positive.

995
01:04:50,880 --> 01:04:54,600
When you've finished
editing what they're saying

996
01:04:54,680 --> 01:04:58,800
they've come over
as very articulate and positive,

997
01:04:58,880 --> 01:05:02,760
and if you actually listen
to the interview

998
01:05:02,840 --> 01:05:04,640
as it was originally recorded,

999
01:05:04,720 --> 01:05:07,880
they weren't nearly as positive
or articulate

1000
01:05:07,960 --> 01:05:11,240
as they appear to be
in the final film.

1001
01:05:11,320 --> 01:05:14,760
I was helped in judging
what we could do...

1002
01:05:14,840 --> 01:05:18,600
"Yes, wait on a bit longer
to see if you can get that chap,"

1003
01:05:18,680 --> 01:05:22,800
"Yes, go back to that archive and
see if they've got anything in colour,"

1004
01:05:22,880 --> 01:05:24,120
or whatever

1005
01:05:24,200 --> 01:05:26,560
because I knew that my bosses

1006
01:05:26,640 --> 01:05:29,160
wanted the thing to be
as perfect as it could be.

1007
01:05:29,240 --> 01:05:32,200
The way we worked,
because we had a lot of time...

1008
01:05:32,960 --> 01:05:38,280
I had months,
or over a year in some cases.

1009
01:05:38,360 --> 01:05:44,920
For instance, Traudl Junge,
who was Hitler's secretary,

1010
01:05:45,000 --> 01:05:47,760
I came across entirely by chance.

1011
01:05:47,840 --> 01:05:52,560
I was talking to Ursula von Kardorff,
who was a journalist in Munich,

1012
01:05:52,640 --> 01:05:55,960
and she said, "I don't know
whether I can really remember much..."

1013
01:05:56,040 --> 01:05:58,840
She was of the generation
who'd lived through the war.

1014
01:05:58,920 --> 01:06:01,240
She said, "I don't know
that I can be much help."

1015
01:06:01,320 --> 01:06:03,200
"The person you really need to talk to

1016
01:06:03,280 --> 01:06:06,760
is the woman who lives upstairs
from me in my block of flats."

1017
01:06:06,840 --> 01:06:10,640
"But I don't think she'll talk to you
because she never talks to anybody

1018
01:06:10,720 --> 01:06:14,600
and she won't talk about the war,
she doesn't."

1019
01:06:14,680 --> 01:06:19,520
She was then working as a secretary.

1020
01:06:19,600 --> 01:06:21,760
So I said, "Fine, what's her address?"

1021
01:06:21,840 --> 01:06:29,240
And... I was living round the corner
with some friends.

1022
01:06:31,200 --> 01:06:37,320
And so I bought a bunch of flowers

1023
01:06:37,400 --> 01:06:39,400
and went round to the block of flats

1024
01:06:39,480 --> 01:06:43,600
at a sort of late afternoon,
teatime time.

1025
01:06:44,920 --> 01:06:48,760
And I arrived on her doorstep
with a bunch of flowers

1026
01:06:48,840 --> 01:06:53,400
and said
that Ursula von Kardorff had suggested

1027
01:06:53,480 --> 01:06:57,680
that I might come and see her,
she lived downstairs,

1028
01:06:57,760 --> 01:07:01,120
and I explained what I was doing

1029
01:07:01,200 --> 01:07:03,600
and that I would very much...

1030
01:07:03,680 --> 01:07:05,480
Would she talk to me?

1031
01:07:05,560 --> 01:07:08,040
At first she didn't want to know

1032
01:07:08,120 --> 01:07:11,840
but I just chatted to her
on the doorstep

1033
01:07:11,920 --> 01:07:15,520
and I was fairly unthreatening

1034
01:07:15,600 --> 01:07:19,800
and she eventually said,
"Well, you might as well come in."

1035
01:07:20,920 --> 01:07:25,200
And that was the beginning
of a very long...

1036
01:07:25,280 --> 01:07:28,600
She began to talk
the very first evening

1037
01:07:28,680 --> 01:07:31,880
about her experiences
in the bunker at the very end

1038
01:07:31,960 --> 01:07:38,280
and it was one of
those quite amazing experiences.

1039
01:07:38,360 --> 01:07:42,960
And she... We chatted and we just...
We got on.

1040
01:07:43,040 --> 01:07:47,440
And so we talked and then I left

1041
01:07:47,520 --> 01:07:53,720
and said could I come back and see her
again when I was in Munich next time

1042
01:07:53,800 --> 01:07:56,320
and, "Yes," she said, "Fine."

1043
01:07:56,400 --> 01:08:01,640
And I then went... That's what I mean
about having a lot of time.

1044
01:08:01,720 --> 01:08:04,320
I was backwards and forwards
to Munich,

1045
01:08:04,400 --> 01:08:11,200
which was quite an important base
during the research, a lot.

1046
01:08:12,160 --> 01:08:15,880
And every time I was there
I would go and see her and build up...

1047
01:08:15,960 --> 01:08:19,480
And I never mentioned the possibility
of her doing an interview

1048
01:08:19,560 --> 01:08:22,560
but I spoke to her.

1049
01:08:22,640 --> 01:08:26,040
I told her how we were getting on
with the series,

1050
01:08:26,120 --> 01:08:31,080
what it was all about,
what we were hoping to do...

1051
01:08:33,640 --> 01:08:37,720
...and I'd built up
a great deal of knowledge

1052
01:08:37,800 --> 01:08:40,080
of what her experience had been

1053
01:08:40,160 --> 01:08:48,000
and we also got to know
and like each other on a personal level

1054
01:08:48,080 --> 01:08:55,400
and established a trust
so that in the end I took...

1055
01:08:55,480 --> 01:08:58,200
I said to her would she think
about doing an interview

1056
01:08:58,280 --> 01:08:59,920
and she was very unsure about it

1057
01:09:00,000 --> 01:09:03,840
and I then suggested
that she should meet Michael Darlow,

1058
01:09:03,920 --> 01:09:06,840
who was the producer
I was working with very closely

1059
01:09:06,920 --> 01:09:13,680
on all the German interviews,
or one of the producers,

1060
01:09:13,760 --> 01:09:18,400
and I took him along to meet her

1061
01:09:18,480 --> 01:09:23,280
and he was able to explain to her
what it would involve.

1062
01:09:25,800 --> 01:09:28,560
She liked him as well

1063
01:09:28,640 --> 01:09:33,280
and we eventually persuaded her

1064
01:09:33,360 --> 01:09:37,840
that her testimony was so unique -

1065
01:09:39,120 --> 01:09:44,720
she had also
thought a lot about it since the war -

1066
01:09:44,800 --> 01:09:46,920
that her testimony was so unique

1067
01:09:47,000 --> 01:09:49,920
that it was something
that in a personal history,

1068
01:09:50,000 --> 01:09:53,520
in a people's history of the war
as we were doing,

1069
01:09:53,600 --> 01:09:58,160
that it was of enormous importance,

1070
01:09:58,240 --> 01:10:03,880
if she felt able to do it,
that she should be part of the series

1071
01:10:03,960 --> 01:10:09,640
because we were trying to understand
how the Third Reich had worked

1072
01:10:09,720 --> 01:10:12,800
and she had been very close
to the centre of it.

1073
01:10:13,880 --> 01:10:16,480
And she finally agreed

1074
01:10:16,560 --> 01:10:20,720
and she came to... She agreed...

1075
01:10:20,800 --> 01:10:22,840
Her flat was very small

1076
01:10:22,920 --> 01:10:26,920
and we were working
in the days of very large crews

1077
01:10:27,000 --> 01:10:31,240
and the thought of a large crew
in her small flat was pretty daunting.

1078
01:10:31,320 --> 01:10:34,760
She also agreed,
which was quite remarkable,

1079
01:10:34,840 --> 01:10:37,520
to do the interview in English for us.

1080
01:10:37,600 --> 01:10:40,520
So she agreed
that she would come over to London

1081
01:10:40,600 --> 01:10:43,640
and that she would do the interview
for us in London

1082
01:10:43,720 --> 01:10:48,160
and that she would stay with me
for a day or so beforehand

1083
01:10:48,240 --> 01:10:51,720
in order to get her English
really going.

1084
01:10:51,800 --> 01:10:53,080
And that's what we did,

1085
01:10:53,160 --> 01:10:57,040
and we interviewed her
at Thames for...

1086
01:10:57,120 --> 01:10:58,680
I think we did two sessions

1087
01:10:58,760 --> 01:11:01,960
and Michael and I
interviewed her side by side.

1088
01:11:02,040 --> 01:11:06,360
But that was based
on having known her for 13 months

1089
01:11:06,440 --> 01:11:10,200
and having had the time
and the resources

1090
01:11:10,280 --> 01:11:12,720
to be able to go back again and again

1091
01:11:12,800 --> 01:11:14,520
and to get to know somebody

1092
01:11:14,600 --> 01:11:18,400
and to work out the kind of
contribution that they could make

1093
01:11:18,480 --> 01:11:21,960
without there being
any pressure on them...

1094
01:11:22,040 --> 01:11:26,480
To meet them once and then
ask them if they'd do an interview.

1095
01:11:26,560 --> 01:11:28,400
And it was...

1096
01:11:28,480 --> 01:11:33,440
We worked very hard at the content

1097
01:11:33,520 --> 01:11:37,760
of what she felt able to tell us
and what she was able...

1098
01:11:37,840 --> 01:11:40,600
Which was fantastic,
what she was able to...

1099
01:11:40,680 --> 01:11:47,640
The light she was able to shed
on the more ordinary side of Hitler

1100
01:11:47,720 --> 01:11:54,480
and life in the centre
and life in the central command

1101
01:11:54,560 --> 01:11:57,800
and her own personal experience
of having married somebody

1102
01:11:57,880 --> 01:11:59,440
who was in central command

1103
01:11:59,520 --> 01:12:02,960
and then went off
and was killed on the Eastern Front.

1104
01:12:05,520 --> 01:12:08,120
And also, because I'd got to know her,

1105
01:12:08,200 --> 01:12:10,880
I stayed friends with her
until she died

1106
01:12:10,960 --> 01:12:13,680
and she came and stayed with me
and met my children.

1107
01:12:13,760 --> 01:12:19,880
He was very friendly and pleasant...

1108
01:12:19,960 --> 01:12:21,960
When they asked her
what Hitler was like

1109
01:12:22,040 --> 01:12:25,240
and she said, "Actually he was
a very nice man," the two young...

1110
01:12:25,320 --> 01:12:28,480
I can't remember how old they were,
they were quite young boys,

1111
01:12:28,560 --> 01:12:31,800
they kind of shrunk back
and looked completely horrified.

1112
01:12:31,880 --> 01:12:35,960
She came out afterwards and said,
"I think I've upset your children."

1113
01:12:36,040 --> 01:12:40,040
"They can't understand
that I seem fine

1114
01:12:40,120 --> 01:12:47,040
but that I found Hitler to be OK."

1115
01:12:47,120 --> 01:12:54,400
And that, in a way, shows how lasting
the horror of people is

1116
01:12:54,480 --> 01:12:59,640
towards what Hitler was and represented
and the inability still to understand

1117
01:12:59,720 --> 01:13:05,280
that anybody could have thought
that he was a nice man.

1118
01:13:05,360 --> 01:13:09,800
Towards the end she did a very big
interview with a company in America

1119
01:13:09,880 --> 01:13:12,840
and they have sold it
as the first time she's ever spoken,

1120
01:13:12,920 --> 01:13:16,160
which actually is not true.

1121
01:13:16,240 --> 01:13:19,680
The tensions that people suffered
in the making of a series

1122
01:13:19,760 --> 01:13:23,280
in which
at least one marriage broke up

1123
01:13:23,360 --> 01:13:29,640
and people became...
had babies and you know...

1124
01:13:29,720 --> 01:13:32,600
We were together for three years.

1125
01:13:32,680 --> 01:13:38,480
The tensions were more experienced
by researchers

1126
01:13:38,560 --> 01:13:41,720
who, frankly, had nightmares

1127
01:13:41,800 --> 01:13:48,360
over the horrors
of which they'd become witnesses.

1128
01:13:48,440 --> 01:13:50,880
I saw people lying there
with no head

1129
01:13:50,960 --> 01:13:53,960
and some with their arms blown off...

1130
01:13:54,040 --> 01:13:58,080
Researching the footage
and the interviews

1131
01:13:58,160 --> 01:14:04,640
for Michael Darlow's film
on Auschwitz, for example, Genocide,

1132
01:14:04,720 --> 01:14:07,200
it was harrowing beyond belief.

1133
01:14:07,280 --> 01:14:10,600
Particularly
when I came to talk to people

1134
01:14:10,680 --> 01:14:16,200
who had been very involved
in the final solution

1135
01:14:16,280 --> 01:14:23,840
and I had to sit there and listen

1136
01:14:23,920 --> 01:14:29,200
and encourage people to explain to me

1137
01:14:29,280 --> 01:14:36,040
what it had been like for them
as young men or women at the time...

1138
01:14:38,240 --> 01:14:41,200
...caught up by the ideal,

1139
01:14:41,280 --> 01:14:44,720
and I would then go from
that kind of thing, talking to them,

1140
01:14:44,800 --> 01:14:50,680
I would then go to talking to people
who'd been involved in the resistance

1141
01:14:50,760 --> 01:14:58,120
or who had been in some way or another
unacceptable to the regime

1142
01:14:58,200 --> 01:15:01,760
and who suffered as a result of that.

1143
01:15:04,120 --> 01:15:09,320
But it was very important
not to judge people

1144
01:15:09,400 --> 01:15:12,680
but to try and keep it

1145
01:15:12,760 --> 01:15:20,440
on a factual and honest level

1146
01:15:20,520 --> 01:15:22,520
from both sides.

1147
01:15:25,240 --> 01:15:28,520
And to represent them fairly,

1148
01:15:28,600 --> 01:15:33,960
not to cut the film in such a way

1149
01:15:34,040 --> 01:15:39,960
that they looked
like traditional baddies.

1150
01:15:41,120 --> 01:15:43,520
Finding, as Sue McConachy did,

1151
01:15:43,600 --> 01:15:51,160
the SS people who would talk
about killing as a routine,

1152
01:15:51,240 --> 01:15:57,120
or Michael Darlow's chap
who drove the train

1153
01:15:57,200 --> 01:16:00,760
right up to the door
of the gas chamber...

1154
01:16:02,720 --> 01:16:07,960
...those things, people dreamed,
they slept The World At War

1155
01:16:08,040 --> 01:16:12,400
and dreamed The World At War
while they were working on it

1156
01:16:12,480 --> 01:16:15,000
and for quite a while
after they finished it.

1157
01:16:15,080 --> 01:16:20,720
It took over our lives,
as history sometimes does.

1158
01:16:20,800 --> 01:16:24,720
The big interview in terms of SS
was Karl Wolff.

1159
01:16:25,800 --> 01:16:30,720
Karl Wolff was at the end
of a very long trail

1160
01:16:30,800 --> 01:16:35,800
which started, again,
in Michael Darlow's filming...

1161
01:16:35,880 --> 01:16:38,000
It was through a contact in Holland.

1162
01:16:39,360 --> 01:16:46,280
And again it was
a long, drawn-out process

1163
01:16:46,360 --> 01:16:50,840
where we met various people
and were clearly being vetted.

1164
01:16:50,920 --> 01:16:54,520
When I was on the trail
for Karl Wolff,

1165
01:16:54,600 --> 01:17:02,480
the initial contacts had to be done
through a series of intermediaries

1166
01:17:02,560 --> 01:17:06,520
and we then had to write a letter
to an ex-wife...

1167
01:17:06,600 --> 01:17:10,480
It was a very complicated trail
because he was clearly somebody

1168
01:17:10,560 --> 01:17:14,920
who they didn't want
to be exposed to anybody

1169
01:17:15,000 --> 01:17:17,920
and they needed to find out
what our intentions were.

1170
01:17:19,880 --> 01:17:25,000
That was an area where we felt

1171
01:17:25,080 --> 01:17:28,560
that he was going to be
a very important person

1172
01:17:28,640 --> 01:17:30,360
if we could get to him.

1173
01:17:30,440 --> 01:17:32,440
When I finally got to meet him,

1174
01:17:32,520 --> 01:17:38,400
he was, on the face of it,
a lonely old man

1175
01:17:38,480 --> 01:17:44,440
living in a nice flat on his own...

1176
01:17:45,680 --> 01:17:50,080
...with his medals behind him

1177
01:17:50,160 --> 01:17:57,640
and he was very...
actually very interested

1178
01:17:57,720 --> 01:18:00,120
to have somebody to talk to.

1179
01:18:00,200 --> 01:18:03,520
Because we really wanted to understand

1180
01:18:03,600 --> 01:18:09,760
how it was that as a young man
he had come to the SS

1181
01:18:09,840 --> 01:18:11,520
and what it was about the SS

1182
01:18:11,600 --> 01:18:19,320
that had captured his imagination
and his loyalty.

1183
01:18:22,160 --> 01:18:25,760
He would inspire
a new awakening of the Germanic race

1184
01:18:25,840 --> 01:18:28,360
within the German people.

1185
01:18:31,200 --> 01:18:37,800
I asked him to explain
what the SS had meant to him

1186
01:18:37,880 --> 01:18:40,440
and he'd been...

1187
01:18:40,520 --> 01:18:45,600
He was an older person,
he'd been in the Guards Regiment,

1188
01:18:45,680 --> 01:18:51,160
and he was in the SS
because it was the elite.

1189
01:18:51,240 --> 01:18:54,120
And there was a tremendous amount
of vanity.

1190
01:18:54,200 --> 01:18:55,840
The man in charge

1191
01:18:55,920 --> 01:18:57,600
asked me, "Were you a soldier?"

1192
01:18:57,680 --> 01:18:58,960
I said, "Yes, indeed."

1193
01:18:59,040 --> 01:19:00,520
"In the First World War?"

1194
01:19:00,600 --> 01:19:01,720
"Yes, indeed."

1195
01:19:01,800 --> 01:19:04,360
"Do you have awards for bravery?"

1196
01:19:04,440 --> 01:19:06,080
"Yes, indeed."

1197
01:19:06,160 --> 01:19:07,480
"What do you have?"

1198
01:19:07,560 --> 01:19:10,200
Then I said, "Iron Cross,
first and second class,

1199
01:19:10,280 --> 01:19:12,800
and I served
in the Hessian Life Guard Regiment."

1200
01:19:12,880 --> 01:19:18,080
The vanity was one of the things,
I think,

1201
01:19:18,160 --> 01:19:23,560
that made him
more ready to talk to me.

1202
01:19:23,640 --> 01:19:29,800
And also he had believed passionately
in what he was doing

1203
01:19:29,880 --> 01:19:35,920
and he'd been involved in working...

1204
01:19:36,000 --> 01:19:40,120
He'd been to Wewelsburg, the SS school

1205
01:19:40,200 --> 01:19:44,960
where each room was devoted

1206
01:19:45,040 --> 01:19:51,720
to a different myth
from German legend.

1207
01:19:51,800 --> 01:19:55,760
And in explaining it to me,

1208
01:19:55,840 --> 01:20:00,360
I did understand what it had been

1209
01:20:00,440 --> 01:20:05,600
that had made him
want to be a part of it.

1210
01:20:05,680 --> 01:20:11,640
And it was quite diff cult

1211
01:20:11,720 --> 01:20:14,720
to stand there, or to sit there

1212
01:20:14,800 --> 01:20:18,880
for long periods of time
talking to him reminiscing.

1213
01:20:18,960 --> 01:20:21,440
He hadn't had the opportunity much

1214
01:20:21,520 --> 01:20:24,120
to reminisce
with somebody of my generation

1215
01:20:24,200 --> 01:20:28,960
because with hindsight
the people within Germany and outside

1216
01:20:29,040 --> 01:20:33,320
didn't particularly want
to sit and talk at length

1217
01:20:33,400 --> 01:20:37,600
about the good things about the SS.

1218
01:20:37,680 --> 01:20:40,800
And what was really important for us
and for the series

1219
01:20:40,880 --> 01:20:43,800
was to understand
what the motivation had been

1220
01:20:43,880 --> 01:20:45,800
and what the attraction had been.

1221
01:20:45,880 --> 01:20:50,560
And that was what made him
a very valuable witness.

1222
01:20:52,320 --> 01:20:56,960
And again, as with Traudl,
I got to know him very well

1223
01:20:57,040 --> 01:20:59,880
and spent a lot of time talking to him

1224
01:20:59,960 --> 01:21:03,720
and I did find, particularly
talking to him, that I needed...

1225
01:21:03,800 --> 01:21:06,600
I had a lot of good friends,
having worked in Germany.

1226
01:21:06,680 --> 01:21:08,400
...that I did need to come up for air

1227
01:21:08,480 --> 01:21:13,200
and get a grip on reality
as we now knew it

1228
01:21:13,280 --> 01:21:16,680
and in a way not to live...

1229
01:21:16,760 --> 01:21:21,640
Because I was living in the war
when I was talking to these people.

1230
01:21:21,720 --> 01:21:25,520
And so I needed to come back
and live in the present day.

1231
01:21:25,600 --> 01:21:30,240
In a way it was like our war
when we were researching it

1232
01:21:30,320 --> 01:21:35,400
because we were listening
to people's memories.

1233
01:21:35,480 --> 01:21:39,480
There was a structure
of a kind of assembly order...

1234
01:21:41,840 --> 01:21:45,800
...largely based on the interviews,

1235
01:21:45,880 --> 01:21:51,080
so one tended
to slot the archive sequences...

1236
01:21:51,160 --> 01:21:53,720
It was a little bit arbitrary

1237
01:21:53,800 --> 01:21:56,720
because after you'd seen it
a few times you'd decide,

1238
01:21:56,800 --> 01:21:59,760
"That ought to go before that,
that ought to go after that."

1239
01:21:59,840 --> 01:22:03,320
You wouldn't have them
in the right order to start with.

1240
01:22:03,400 --> 01:22:06,240
You'd be looking for transitions

1241
01:22:06,320 --> 01:22:10,880
so that you would get a bang
into the next sequence

1242
01:22:10,960 --> 01:22:13,960
rather than a whimper,
if you see what I mean.

1243
01:22:14,040 --> 01:22:20,120
So maybe there's a sequence
which was about the same date

1244
01:22:20,200 --> 01:22:25,120
and took on another theme which could
follow quite well after that theme

1245
01:22:25,200 --> 01:22:29,920
and it started with a steam engine
or something hooting,

1246
01:22:30,000 --> 01:22:32,640
and so you get
quite a nice transition,

1247
01:22:32,720 --> 01:22:34,680
you suddenly get a whistle blast

1248
01:22:34,760 --> 01:22:37,360
coming through
the end of the previous sequence.

1249
01:22:37,440 --> 01:22:42,520
There were things which just felt that
that was the way that it could go.

1250
01:22:42,600 --> 01:22:46,560
Some things, it was quite arbitrary
which order the sequence could go in.

1251
01:22:46,640 --> 01:22:52,080
There was a visual variety
that you could put,

1252
01:22:52,160 --> 01:22:56,600
but on The New Germany,
on the first programme

1253
01:22:56,680 --> 01:23:01,760
there were things that could have gone
in more or less any order, really.

1254
01:23:01,840 --> 01:23:06,480
It wouldn't matter whether that
sequence went before or after that.

1255
01:23:06,560 --> 01:23:12,440
But you looked
for a variety of contrasts

1256
01:23:12,520 --> 01:23:17,560
and of getting good transitions
from one thing to the next.

1257
01:23:17,640 --> 01:23:21,840
There were other things,
sometimes you were using newsreels...

1258
01:23:21,920 --> 01:23:25,320
The material you were using,
sometimes it was newsreels

1259
01:23:25,400 --> 01:23:28,560
which had been edited
by the newsreel editor.

1260
01:23:28,640 --> 01:23:30,840
Sometimes you were using uncut footage

1261
01:23:30,920 --> 01:23:35,240
which was original source material
which you'd got,

1262
01:23:35,320 --> 01:23:40,080
rushes which hadn't been used
that had been shot at the time.

1263
01:23:40,160 --> 01:23:43,920
Sometimes you were working
from compilation films,

1264
01:23:44,000 --> 01:23:50,920
so there were sequences
that were already edited by somebody,

1265
01:23:51,000 --> 01:23:54,680
not in the way that we would
necessarily want to use them.

1266
01:23:54,760 --> 01:23:58,120
Sometimes you would want to mix
all different sorts of material.

1267
01:23:58,200 --> 01:24:00,760
You'd want to use some original shots

1268
01:24:00,840 --> 01:24:03,440
and you'd want to use
a bit of compilation

1269
01:24:03,520 --> 01:24:06,440
and you'd want to use
a bit of a newsreel story

1270
01:24:06,520 --> 01:24:08,520
on that particular event.

1271
01:24:08,600 --> 01:24:12,720
They didn't necessarily
gel together very well

1272
01:24:12,800 --> 01:24:16,520
because they would have been shot
with different contrast films,

1273
01:24:16,600 --> 01:24:19,960
some would be flat,
some would be contrasty.

1274
01:24:20,040 --> 01:24:22,600
You didn't want it
to look too jagged, you see,

1275
01:24:22,680 --> 01:24:25,640
so sometimes you had to throw out
quite good shots

1276
01:24:25,720 --> 01:24:28,720
because they were so contrasty,
they wouldn't blend in.

1277
01:24:29,440 --> 01:24:31,600
Well, I'll tell you
one of the drawbacks.

1278
01:24:31,680 --> 01:24:36,000
This sounds technical but as
a matter of fact it's very important.

1279
01:24:38,320 --> 01:24:41,440
One of the things about history
is that it's uncertain.

1280
01:24:41,520 --> 01:24:43,400
There are contested versions

1281
01:24:43,480 --> 01:24:47,760
and you can never be quite sure
what really happened.

1282
01:24:47,840 --> 01:24:51,280
Historical documentaries
have to face that.

1283
01:24:51,360 --> 01:24:56,400
They face the fact that you can't hold
up the flow of a film indefinitely

1284
01:24:56,480 --> 01:25:02,600
to say, "Well, we don't really know
why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union."

1285
01:25:02,680 --> 01:25:07,000
"There are two versions, maybe three,
but we don't really know which is true."

1286
01:25:07,080 --> 01:25:11,280
"The evidence... This is still being
argued out," and so on and so forth.

1287
01:25:11,360 --> 01:25:14,320
Now, the difficulty
about The World At War

1288
01:25:14,400 --> 01:25:16,400
is that it came at a moment

1289
01:25:16,480 --> 01:25:20,760
when the television
and filmmaking profession in Britain

1290
01:25:20,840 --> 01:25:24,720
was also at the height of its craft.

1291
01:25:25,760 --> 01:25:32,040
Filmmaking in Britain became a craft
of quite extraordinary achievement.

1292
01:25:32,120 --> 01:25:36,520
They were like wonderful,
wonderful cabinet-makers, you know,

1293
01:25:36,600 --> 01:25:41,480
and they could craft
these beautiful artefacts

1294
01:25:41,560 --> 01:25:44,560
which shone and gleamed
and were lovingly polished

1295
01:25:44,640 --> 01:25:47,080
and above all
they were lovingly polished

1296
01:25:47,160 --> 01:25:50,280
so that they flowed
and you couldn't see the joins.

1297
01:25:50,360 --> 01:25:54,640
You couldn't see the joins,
so these picture-led episodes,

1298
01:25:54,720 --> 01:25:58,720
in which one sequence
flowed easily, movingly,

1299
01:25:58,800 --> 01:26:03,160
helped on by these few lapidary words
of commentary, into the next,

1300
01:26:03,240 --> 01:26:05,240
it was exquisite, you couldn't...

1301
01:26:05,320 --> 01:26:07,440
Everything was dramatically done,

1302
01:26:07,520 --> 01:26:10,960
dramatic sequences would slow down
a little and then start up again,

1303
01:26:11,040 --> 01:26:13,640
all paced and timed and...

1304
01:26:13,720 --> 01:26:17,280
You see,
history isn't really like that.

1305
01:26:17,360 --> 01:26:18,840
History is a mess.

1306
01:26:18,920 --> 01:26:21,920
It's got a horrible,
grainy, battered surface,

1307
01:26:22,000 --> 01:26:27,120
there are cracks and potholes,
spaces of gravel, darkness,

1308
01:26:27,200 --> 01:26:29,880
and that's what history is like.

1309
01:26:29,960 --> 01:26:31,680
And that way of making...

1310
01:26:31,760 --> 01:26:36,600
that sheer incredible craftsmanship
of the British film industry

1311
01:26:36,680 --> 01:26:38,400
in the end became, I thought,

1312
01:26:38,480 --> 01:26:42,920
a major enemy
to making a historical documentary.

1313
01:26:43,000 --> 01:26:46,600
And the fact that it was so good,
so moving,

1314
01:26:46,680 --> 01:26:48,400
that it flowed so beautifully,

1315
01:26:48,480 --> 01:26:53,000
it sang, as people often said,
looking at what they'd just done,

1316
01:26:53,080 --> 01:26:55,640
was, although I thought
it was wonderful,

1317
01:26:55,720 --> 01:26:58,120
was often so moved by the end product,

1318
01:26:58,200 --> 01:27:02,000
yet it was false to the way
that history really is

1319
01:27:02,080 --> 01:27:07,760
and sooner or later some of us knew
that making historical documentaries

1320
01:27:07,840 --> 01:27:11,160
would have to come to terms
with what history's really like.

1321
01:27:11,240 --> 01:27:14,760
It would have to stop
being so exquisitely crafted,

1322
01:27:14,840 --> 01:27:17,280
it would have to show the joins

1323
01:27:17,360 --> 01:27:20,080
and indeed make something of them
and point them out,

1324
01:27:20,160 --> 01:27:23,160
and that of course
is what has now come to happen.

1325
01:27:23,240 --> 01:27:26,200
Where there was a specific writer,
which was in most cases,

1326
01:27:26,280 --> 01:27:29,320
the writer would have come along
right from the beginning

1327
01:27:29,400 --> 01:27:33,200
to most major viewings.
So when you started off

1328
01:27:33,280 --> 01:27:37,760
you would have had a rough cut
running five or six hours.

1329
01:27:37,840 --> 01:27:42,000
So you would then
be shaping it from that.

1330
01:27:42,080 --> 01:27:46,760
So the writer and the producer
were aware

1331
01:27:46,840 --> 01:27:50,160
of what material was there.

1332
01:27:50,240 --> 01:27:55,920
Now, it may be that there was
some material needed that wasn't there.

1333
01:27:56,000 --> 01:27:59,760
It may be that
more material was required.

1334
01:27:59,840 --> 01:28:01,760
It may be that there was some material

1335
01:28:01,840 --> 01:28:05,720
which hadn't gone into that assembly
because it didn't particularly fit,

1336
01:28:05,800 --> 01:28:09,760
or the editors hadn't thought it was
particularly relevant at that time,

1337
01:28:09,840 --> 01:28:12,640
but maybe it would have
been better to include it.

1338
01:28:12,720 --> 01:28:17,000
So there would be,
from this very long opening assembly,

1339
01:28:17,080 --> 01:28:21,720
there would be a compressing down,

1340
01:28:21,800 --> 01:28:27,000
reordering and clarifying
operations going on.

1341
01:28:27,080 --> 01:28:29,800
The second great task that I had

1342
01:28:29,880 --> 01:28:34,560
was to intervene very near
the completion of the process

1343
01:28:34,640 --> 01:28:39,120
of finalising each programme
and make absolutely certain,

1344
01:28:39,200 --> 01:28:43,600
frame by frame
and split second by split second,

1345
01:28:43,680 --> 01:28:46,760
that we had got it dead right,

1346
01:28:46,840 --> 01:28:50,200
that there was clarity,

1347
01:28:50,280 --> 01:28:54,320
that the thing flowed,

1348
01:28:54,400 --> 01:29:00,800
that the balance between voice
and picture was the way it should be.

1349
01:29:00,880 --> 01:29:05,960
And so I went with a fine-tooth comb
over every single episode

1350
01:29:06,040 --> 01:29:08,160
as it got to the fine cut

1351
01:29:08,240 --> 01:29:14,240
and as it got, more critical
even than that, to the dub.

1352
01:29:14,320 --> 01:29:19,920
We used to try to make certain
that there wasn't too much commentary,

1353
01:29:20,000 --> 01:29:22,360
that the ear could always breathe,

1354
01:29:22,440 --> 01:29:24,880
that commentary didn't clash
with voiceover,

1355
01:29:24,960 --> 01:29:28,040
that voiceover didn't clash
with sound effects,

1356
01:29:28,120 --> 01:29:30,480
that sound effects
didn't clash with music.

1357
01:29:30,560 --> 01:29:37,000
Each of those had to have a kind of
limpidity, a kind of lucidity about it

1358
01:29:37,080 --> 01:29:39,080
with a tiny bit of space between

1359
01:29:39,160 --> 01:29:42,400
so that the ear could cope
as well as the eye.

1360
01:29:42,480 --> 01:29:45,600
Jeremy Isaacs
would often come in quite late,

1361
01:29:45,680 --> 01:29:49,520
when everybody else thought they'd
done something really quite good,

1362
01:29:49,600 --> 01:29:53,200
and we'd find that we were
more or less back at square one

1363
01:29:53,280 --> 01:29:54,680
and reshaping it

1364
01:29:54,760 --> 01:29:59,080
because he has a very good knack
of coming in

1365
01:29:59,160 --> 01:30:05,520
with great clarity and incisiveness...

1366
01:30:07,440 --> 01:30:14,480
...which can change the direction
of a programme quite radically

1367
01:30:14,560 --> 01:30:21,720
after you've already gone quite a long
way along the production process.

1368
01:30:21,800 --> 01:30:24,200
Which was a good thing.
It was no bad thing.

1369
01:30:24,280 --> 01:30:26,760
A lot of programmes
were radically improved

1370
01:30:26,840 --> 01:30:31,200
because of an incisiveness coming in,

1371
01:30:31,280 --> 01:30:36,680
often at quite a late stage
in the process.

1372
01:30:36,760 --> 01:30:40,520
I had the huge happiness, and I don't
think I've ever done anything

1373
01:30:40,600 --> 01:30:43,400
that gave me more satisfaction
in my life,

1374
01:30:43,480 --> 01:30:47,320
of having a hand
in the architecture of the building

1375
01:30:47,400 --> 01:30:51,160
and also having a hand
in the final detail

1376
01:30:51,240 --> 01:30:54,320
of every single room of the building.

1377
01:30:54,400 --> 01:30:58,280
And that's
what the series producer does.

1378
01:30:58,360 --> 01:31:01,840
I didn't have to bother
about the budget.

1379
01:31:01,920 --> 01:31:06,560
Thames was going to back this
all the way.

1380
01:31:06,640 --> 01:31:09,640
If I were asked what is

1381
01:31:09,720 --> 01:31:15,600
the most salient, emotional, to me,

1382
01:31:15,680 --> 01:31:18,560
episode of the Second World War,

1383
01:31:18,640 --> 01:31:22,320
I would say it is
the Jewish Holocaust,

1384
01:31:22,400 --> 01:31:27,440
it is what was done
to the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.

1385
01:31:35,800 --> 01:31:37,600
What we went through

1386
01:31:37,680 --> 01:31:41,200
will be difficult to understand
even for our contemporaries

1387
01:31:41,280 --> 01:31:43,360
and much more difficult
for the generations

1388
01:31:43,440 --> 01:31:46,800
that have already no personal
experience from those days.

1389
01:31:46,880 --> 01:31:51,360
In the first post-war decades,
people thought about...

1390
01:31:51,440 --> 01:31:55,640
If you said, "What is
the most spectacular, important,

1391
01:31:55,720 --> 01:31:58,880
memorable event of World War Two?"

1392
01:31:58,960 --> 01:32:01,200
they would probably say
something else.

1393
01:32:01,280 --> 01:32:03,160
D-Day, they might say,

1394
01:32:03,240 --> 01:32:05,640
or maybe some British people would say

1395
01:32:05,720 --> 01:32:08,040
Battle of Britain
or whatever it might be,

1396
01:32:08,120 --> 01:32:12,080
or others would say
the liberation of occupied countries

1397
01:32:12,160 --> 01:32:15,920
and the restoration of independence
and freedom to peoples.

1398
01:32:16,000 --> 01:32:21,720
And the fate of the Jews wouldn't
have been salient in that way.

1399
01:32:21,800 --> 01:32:26,680
That changed really, I guess,
in the course of the 1960s,

1400
01:32:26,760 --> 01:32:29,160
and I think The World At War was made

1401
01:32:29,240 --> 01:32:34,800
at a point at which it had,
not all that long ago,

1402
01:32:34,880 --> 01:32:37,280
become a kind of consensus

1403
01:32:37,360 --> 01:32:42,040
that the final solution
and the murder of Europe's Jews

1404
01:32:42,120 --> 01:32:46,120
was an event which really towered over

1405
01:32:46,200 --> 01:32:50,520
almost everything else which had
happened in the Second World War.

1406
01:32:50,600 --> 01:32:53,680
It hadn't reached
its complete ascendancy

1407
01:32:53,760 --> 01:32:56,000
which it rather occupies today,

1408
01:32:56,080 --> 01:33:01,320
but you can see its importance
in The World At War,

1409
01:33:01,400 --> 01:33:04,680
but it doesn't yet absolutely dominate

1410
01:33:04,760 --> 01:33:07,840
the proposals
about what you should remember

1411
01:33:07,920 --> 01:33:10,200
which The World At War carried.

1412
01:33:10,280 --> 01:33:16,120
Because I'm a Jew I put in the series

1413
01:33:16,200 --> 01:33:20,360
the episode about the Nazi genocide
against the Jews

1414
01:33:20,440 --> 01:33:22,640
because I simply couldn't
leave it out.

1415
01:33:22,720 --> 01:33:26,440
It's not a military subject
but I felt it had to be done

1416
01:33:26,520 --> 01:33:30,520
and I think that Charles Bloomberg
and Michael Darlow again,

1417
01:33:30,600 --> 01:33:33,040
Michael Darlow did that marvellously,

1418
01:33:33,120 --> 01:33:39,320
and that has interviews in it
which rivet me

1419
01:33:39,400 --> 01:33:42,120
and are unforgettable.

1420
01:33:45,800 --> 01:33:48,600
They're shooting.

1421
01:33:52,760 --> 01:33:54,560
People are already lying dead.

1422
01:33:54,640 --> 01:33:56,080
My daughter was in my arms

1423
01:33:56,160 --> 01:33:57,280
the whole time.

1424
01:33:57,360 --> 01:33:58,840
Somehow I found the strength

1425
01:33:58,920 --> 01:33:59,920
to carry her.

1426
01:34:00,000 --> 01:34:01,040
She was so close to me

1427
01:34:01,120 --> 01:34:02,600
that I couldn't undress.

1428
01:34:02,680 --> 01:34:03,880
She wouldn't let me.

1429
01:34:03,960 --> 01:34:07,160
She said, "Let's run away.
They're killing us."

1430
01:34:07,240 --> 01:34:10,880
Obviously the most difficult one
was the final solution and the camps

1431
01:34:10,960 --> 01:34:13,760
and what we were to do with that.

1432
01:34:13,840 --> 01:34:17,200
All occupied Europe
had a concentration camp system

1433
01:34:17,280 --> 01:34:19,680
based on the model camp, Dachau.

1434
01:34:21,000 --> 01:34:23,800
The camps were not only
an instrument of terror,

1435
01:34:23,880 --> 01:34:26,720
they were an important factor
in war production,

1436
01:34:26,800 --> 01:34:29,920
each with its cluster of labour camps
attached.

1437
01:34:30,000 --> 01:34:34,480
Now they were also to be the means
of the final solution.

1438
01:34:34,560 --> 01:34:38,360
In the occupied East,
new camps were specially built

1439
01:34:38,440 --> 01:34:41,560
and old ones equipped
with new industrial capacity.

1440
01:34:41,640 --> 01:34:45,200
They were to be machines
to kill human beings by the million,

1441
01:34:45,280 --> 01:34:49,400
utilise the by-products,
dispose of the waste.

1442
01:34:49,480 --> 01:34:53,360
The camps were sited on railway routes
to facilitate transportation.

1443
01:34:53,440 --> 01:34:57,760
Eichmann chartered rolling stock
from the state railways.

1444
01:34:57,840 --> 01:34:59,480
The biggest camp of all was built

1445
01:34:59,560 --> 01:35:02,440
astride the main railway line
from Krakow to Vienna,

1446
01:35:02,520 --> 01:35:06,040
in the outskirts
of the Polish town of Oswiecim.

1447
01:35:06,120 --> 01:35:07,760
Auschwitz.

1448
01:35:07,840 --> 01:35:15,400
Hermann Langbein, who was the head
of the Auschwitz survivors group,

1449
01:35:15,480 --> 01:35:19,520
he led us to, in fact,
one of the perpetrators, Richard Böck,

1450
01:35:19,600 --> 01:35:25,200
who is a remarkable man,
who had been made...

1451
01:35:25,280 --> 01:35:28,520
He was a very ordinary man
who found himself in Auschwitz

1452
01:35:28,600 --> 01:35:32,960
and he went one day
with one of his friends

1453
01:35:33,040 --> 01:35:35,360
who worked down near the gas chambers.

1454
01:35:35,440 --> 01:35:41,560
He went one day, for whatever
reason, curiosity, whatever,

1455
01:35:41,640 --> 01:35:44,520
but he went
and saw what was happening,

1456
01:35:44,600 --> 01:35:49,360
but he was then made
an honorary member

1457
01:35:49,440 --> 01:35:51,480
of the Auschwitz survivors group

1458
01:35:51,560 --> 01:35:57,520
because he tried not to be drawn in

1459
01:35:57,600 --> 01:36:01,320
to the real horror...

1460
01:36:01,400 --> 01:36:05,000
He tried to maintain his own personal
integrity within that situation

1461
01:36:05,080 --> 01:36:08,160
although he found himself there.

1462
01:36:08,240 --> 01:36:13,360
So you had
very interesting characters like that.

1463
01:36:13,440 --> 01:36:20,200
Obviously Hermann Langbein led us
to a lot of the victims as well.

1464
01:36:21,160 --> 01:36:26,520
And that was then pursued in Israel

1465
01:36:26,600 --> 01:36:31,400
by an Israeli colleague researcher

1466
01:36:31,480 --> 01:36:34,440
who followed up a lot of the victims.

1467
01:36:34,520 --> 01:36:41,640
I'd found the names and addresses
but most people were in Israel,

1468
01:36:41,720 --> 01:36:44,720
so she followed that up.

1469
01:36:44,800 --> 01:36:47,760
I had a lot of help when working
on the Auschwitz programmes

1470
01:36:47,840 --> 01:36:55,360
from the two lawyers who ran the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in the '60s.

1471
01:36:57,240 --> 01:37:01,880
And they not only put me in touch
with quite a lot of the people

1472
01:37:01,960 --> 01:37:06,640
who had been convicted
or had served their time,

1473
01:37:06,720 --> 01:37:09,000
and with one person
who was still in jail,

1474
01:37:09,080 --> 01:37:10,680
and I went to see him in jail,

1475
01:37:10,760 --> 01:37:12,720
but other people who were out,

1476
01:37:12,800 --> 01:37:17,440
and I would go and speak to them
and then I would be able...

1477
01:37:17,520 --> 01:37:19,160
because of the court documents

1478
01:37:19,240 --> 01:37:23,640
I was able to check
and double-check the stories.

1479
01:37:23,720 --> 01:37:27,720
It was very important for us
that we made absolutely sure

1480
01:37:27,800 --> 01:37:35,800
that everything that we got from
those people was factually correct

1481
01:37:35,880 --> 01:37:39,920
and that they weren't spinning us
some tale

1482
01:37:40,000 --> 01:37:44,560
with extenuating reasons,
circumstances,

1483
01:37:44,640 --> 01:37:47,280
for why they'd done these things.

1484
01:37:47,360 --> 01:37:50,280
I would have liked to have worked,
I think,

1485
01:37:50,360 --> 01:37:52,160
in fact I would have liked to work

1486
01:37:52,240 --> 01:37:57,200
on the one about the final solution
in concentration camps.

1487
01:37:57,280 --> 01:37:58,680
And I didn't get to do that

1488
01:37:58,760 --> 01:38:05,920
because it was done by one of the
very strange and remarkable figures

1489
01:38:06,000 --> 01:38:11,000
who appeared in this little
constellation of people making it.

1490
01:38:11,080 --> 01:38:13,480
He was called Charlie Bloomberg.

1491
01:38:13,560 --> 01:38:20,800
And Charlie was a very elusive, very
secretive, charming South African.

1492
01:38:20,880 --> 01:38:23,840
He was a sort of clandestine figure.

1493
01:38:23,920 --> 01:38:28,880
He, I think,
became banned from South Africa

1494
01:38:28,960 --> 01:38:30,240
and then I met him there.

1495
01:38:30,320 --> 01:38:32,840
Extraordinary.
He wasn't supposed to be there.

1496
01:38:32,920 --> 01:38:35,680
He would have been subject
to instant arrest and so on.

1497
01:38:35,760 --> 01:38:38,280
I met him, he just appeared.

1498
01:38:38,360 --> 01:38:43,200
He was a mysterious guy but he was
a brilliant, very, very gifted writer.

1499
01:38:43,280 --> 01:38:45,480
He's dead. He died very young.

1500
01:38:45,560 --> 01:38:49,200
And he did that particular one,

1501
01:38:49,280 --> 01:38:54,440
which was of course one of
the central items in the whole series,

1502
01:38:54,520 --> 01:38:57,840
about the Holocaust,
the concentration camps,

1503
01:38:57,920 --> 01:39:00,920
the deportations of the Dutch Jews
in particular,

1504
01:39:01,000 --> 01:39:04,560
which is where I think
Charles had roots of his own.

1505
01:39:04,640 --> 01:39:06,240
He certainly had Jewish roots

1506
01:39:06,320 --> 01:39:09,240
and I think they may have been
in the Netherlands.

1507
01:39:09,320 --> 01:39:12,800
But that's the one he did
and he did it quite wonderfully

1508
01:39:12,880 --> 01:39:16,120
and I of course couldn't not envy

1509
01:39:16,200 --> 01:39:19,120
having been involved
in writing commentary of that one.

1510
01:39:19,200 --> 01:39:23,920
Some episodes
I have always loved and enjoyed.

1511
01:39:24,000 --> 01:39:29,000
I love the sense of young men
going into battle for the first time

1512
01:39:29,080 --> 01:39:35,720
on D-Day to help liberate a continent

1513
01:39:35,800 --> 01:39:42,600
and I love the lad that says,
"I was 18 and I was afraid,"

1514
01:39:42,680 --> 01:39:47,400
as the parachutists go in the night
before the land and sea invasion.

1515
01:39:47,480 --> 01:39:51,000
I love the French woman
on the beach saying,

1516
01:39:51,080 --> 01:39:54,240
"We welcomed these people
who had come from so far

1517
01:39:54,320 --> 01:39:58,520
and we gave them calvados also,"
she says.

1518
01:39:58,600 --> 01:39:59,800
I remember that.

1519
01:39:59,880 --> 01:40:05,320
I love... I think Stalingrad
is a very fine, sombre film,

1520
01:40:05,400 --> 01:40:08,280
without a single interview in it,
by the way.

1521
01:40:09,040 --> 01:40:13,600
To me, two programmes
have a particular interest

1522
01:40:13,680 --> 01:40:15,480
because of their subject matter.

1523
01:40:15,560 --> 01:40:18,160
I very much admire the programme

1524
01:40:18,240 --> 01:40:22,480
that Michael Darlow and Charles
Bloomberg made about occupation

1525
01:40:22,560 --> 01:40:25,760
because I think that war
involves moral choices.

1526
01:40:25,840 --> 01:40:32,040
Indeed, I think that living in a world
in conflict involves moral choices

1527
01:40:32,120 --> 01:40:35,960
and I thought that programme
forced each of us to think,

1528
01:40:36,040 --> 01:40:40,240
"What would we do
if we lived under tyranny?"

1529
01:40:40,320 --> 01:40:45,560
Would we resist and risk our lives
and our families' lives?

1530
01:40:45,640 --> 01:40:49,600
Would we do nothing?
Would we perhaps collaborate?

1531
01:40:55,120 --> 01:40:59,480
Anne Frank in her diary,
June 6, 1944.

1532
01:41:00,840 --> 01:41:02,840
"Would the long-awaited liberation,

1533
01:41:02,920 --> 01:41:05,960
which still seems too wonderful,
too much like a fairy tale,

1534
01:41:06,040 --> 01:41:07,040
ever come true?"

1535
01:41:08,160 --> 01:41:11,800
"Could we be granted victory
this year, 1944?"

1536
01:41:11,880 --> 01:41:15,800
"We don't know yet,
but hope is revived within us."

1537
01:41:15,880 --> 01:41:20,600
"Now, more than ever, we must
clench our teeth and not cry out."

1538
01:41:21,760 --> 01:41:27,160
The people of Holland had lived under
Nazi occupation for four long years.

1539
01:41:27,240 --> 01:41:30,480
I decided that we should
do that programme in Holland

1540
01:41:30,560 --> 01:41:33,720
rather than in Poland or Yugoslavia

1541
01:41:33,800 --> 01:41:37,040
because I thought
that the Englishness of Holland

1542
01:41:37,120 --> 01:41:40,520
and the fact that some of the Dutch
would speak English

1543
01:41:40,600 --> 01:41:44,600
would invite British people
to consider...

1544
01:41:44,680 --> 01:41:48,160
If that could happen in
that small country not that far away,

1545
01:41:48,240 --> 01:41:50,080
what would life had been like here?

1546
01:41:50,160 --> 01:41:52,880
I think one of the things
that made a big impression on me

1547
01:41:52,960 --> 01:41:57,120
was that I'd done the home front
in Britain

1548
01:41:57,200 --> 01:42:00,680
and we then did the home front
in Germany

1549
01:42:00,760 --> 01:42:06,280
and we spoke to a woman

1550
01:42:06,360 --> 01:42:10,960
who was working
in a Red Cross hospital

1551
01:42:11,040 --> 01:42:14,120
in Cologne, I think it was,

1552
01:42:14,200 --> 01:42:19,440
and she was saying how terrifying
it was hearing the bombers coming.

1553
01:42:24,480 --> 01:42:28,240
And soon after
the first bombs fell around us.

1554
01:42:28,320 --> 01:42:30,320
We were all shaking with fear.

1555
01:42:30,400 --> 01:42:32,240
Some people nearly fainted.

1556
01:42:32,320 --> 01:42:34,800
Many of the patients were crying.

1557
01:42:34,880 --> 01:42:38,560
The roaring and crashing
came closer and closer.

1558
01:42:38,640 --> 01:42:41,280
We really thought
all hell was breaking loose.

1559
01:42:41,360 --> 01:42:44,400
We then had
a wonderful piece of newsreel

1560
01:42:44,480 --> 01:42:50,200
with the sort of gung-ho "Our brave
boys fly off to bomb the enemy."

1561
01:42:50,280 --> 01:42:58,000
So you were experiencing the other end
of our bombing and our brave boys.

1562
01:42:58,080 --> 01:43:02,560
You began to feel
the universal awfulness of it

1563
01:43:02,640 --> 01:43:04,240
for the ordinary people,

1564
01:43:04,320 --> 01:43:09,840
which is not a particularly big point
to make and it's fairly obvious,

1565
01:43:09,920 --> 01:43:14,160
but having done
the home front in Britain,

1566
01:43:14,240 --> 01:43:17,920
to then realise that the home front
in Germany, for most people,

1567
01:43:18,000 --> 01:43:22,960
at that level of being bombed,
was exactly the same.

1568
01:43:23,920 --> 01:43:27,600
And the... Because we did the bombings
in Coventry and Plymouth

1569
01:43:27,680 --> 01:43:30,960
and I'd spoken to people
who'd been under the bombs there,

1570
01:43:31,040 --> 01:43:33,480
and the experience was...

1571
01:43:33,560 --> 01:43:35,520
if people are dropping bombs on you,

1572
01:43:35,600 --> 01:43:38,680
the experience is the same
wherever you are.

1573
01:43:38,760 --> 01:43:43,520
I'm interested, as I say,
in this question of how people behave,

1574
01:43:43,600 --> 01:43:46,520
and in the episode
that Phillip Whitehead made

1575
01:43:46,600 --> 01:43:49,120
about inside The Feich,

1576
01:43:49,200 --> 01:43:53,240
there's a marvellous juxtaposition
of three people

1577
01:43:53,320 --> 01:44:01,240
talking about what they knew of what
was happening to the Jews in Germany.

1578
01:44:01,320 --> 01:44:04,840
And a great woman
called Christabel Bielenberg,

1579
01:44:04,920 --> 01:44:08,920
who was an English woman
married to a German doctor,

1580
01:44:09,000 --> 01:44:12,400
talks about how she tried
to save a couple of Jews

1581
01:44:12,480 --> 01:44:17,000
but was advised that she couldn't
keep them more than a couple of nights

1582
01:44:17,080 --> 01:44:21,360
because she was risking
her family's lives by having them.

1583
01:44:21,440 --> 01:44:26,880
And she tells them
they've got to be gone

1584
01:44:26,960 --> 01:44:30,800
and when she comes in the next morning
the bed is made up and they've gone

1585
01:44:30,880 --> 01:44:33,680
and she's wringing her hands
like this and saying,

1586
01:44:33,760 --> 01:44:41,360
"I knew then that Adolf Hitler...
Hitler had turned me into a murderer."

1587
01:44:42,360 --> 01:44:49,800
I knew later that they were caught
buying a ticket at a railway station

1588
01:44:49,880 --> 01:44:53,640
and were transported to Auschwitz.

1589
01:44:53,720 --> 01:44:57,880
And why I say this is
the most painful and terrible story

1590
01:44:57,960 --> 01:44:59,760
for me to have to tell

1591
01:44:59,840 --> 01:45:02,240
was because after they left

1592
01:45:02,320 --> 01:45:07,920
I realised that
Hitler had turned me into a murderer.

1593
01:45:10,200 --> 01:45:14,480
And then there's Albert Speer,
and Albert Speer says,

1594
01:45:14,560 --> 01:45:17,080
"I didn't really know
what was going on."

1595
01:45:17,160 --> 01:45:20,160
"I'd heard that terrible things
were happening in the East

1596
01:45:20,240 --> 01:45:27,800
and Gauleiter Hanke told me
not to ask, not to enquire,

1597
01:45:27,880 --> 01:45:30,480
to be careful not to turn that corner

1598
01:45:30,560 --> 01:45:33,480
and find out what was going on
in that camp."

1599
01:45:33,560 --> 01:45:37,000
"And I should have gone."

1600
01:45:37,080 --> 01:45:39,600
"I now think
that I should have gone to Hitler

1601
01:45:39,680 --> 01:45:43,520
and asked him what was going on
and I didn't do it,

1602
01:45:43,600 --> 01:45:48,520
and not doing it is, I think,
one of the worst mistakes of my life."

1603
01:45:48,600 --> 01:45:51,480
Together with other hints I got,

1604
01:45:51,560 --> 01:45:57,440
I should have made...
should have made my decision

1605
01:45:57,520 --> 01:46:00,640
to go to Hitler immediately,
or to Himmler,

1606
01:46:00,720 --> 01:46:03,080
and to ask them what is going on.

1607
01:46:03,960 --> 01:46:07,440
And then I follow that
with Emmi Bonhoeffer,

1608
01:46:07,520 --> 01:46:11,280
who talks about standing
in a greengrocery queue

1609
01:46:11,360 --> 01:46:14,440
and saying to the other people
in the queue,

1610
01:46:14,520 --> 01:46:17,760
"You know what they're doing
to the Jews, don't you?"

1611
01:46:17,840 --> 01:46:21,680
"They're gassing them
and making soap out of their body fat."

1612
01:46:21,760 --> 01:46:24,080
And they say,
"Frau Bonhoeffer, you're mad."

1613
01:46:24,160 --> 01:46:27,240
"You mustn't say things like that
or they'll lock you up too."

1614
01:46:27,320 --> 01:46:29,240
"You're crazy, you can't believe it."

1615
01:46:29,320 --> 01:46:32,720
And she said,
"No, I know and I know for sure."

1616
01:46:32,800 --> 01:46:35,520
"It's not true.
You shouldn't believe these things."

1617
01:46:35,600 --> 01:46:38,520
"You heard them
from the foreign broadcasts or so

1618
01:46:38,600 --> 01:46:42,640
and they tell these things
to make enemies against Germany."

1619
01:46:42,720 --> 01:46:44,960
And I say,
"No, that's not from broadcasts."

1620
01:46:45,040 --> 01:46:49,440
"I know that directly from first hand,
you can be sure it is that way."

1621
01:46:49,520 --> 01:46:52,800
Now, that story
tells you several things.

1622
01:46:52,880 --> 01:46:56,160
One, that she knew
but that not everybody knew

1623
01:46:56,240 --> 01:46:58,840
because they didn't believe her
when she told them,

1624
01:46:58,920 --> 01:47:03,600
and it also shows you
that Speer is lying because...

1625
01:47:03,680 --> 01:47:05,080
We don't say he's lying

1626
01:47:05,160 --> 01:47:11,120
but we put him between two people
who weren't afraid to know,

1627
01:47:11,200 --> 01:47:15,400
and it's the people
who weren't afraid to know and tell

1628
01:47:15,480 --> 01:47:20,080
that make moments of the series
utterly remarkable.

1629
01:47:20,160 --> 01:47:23,360
Christabel Bielenberg, who was
one of the people we spoke to,

1630
01:47:23,440 --> 01:47:25,920
was saying that
when she was living in Berlin

1631
01:47:26,000 --> 01:47:28,680
in an area with Nazi neighbours,

1632
01:47:28,760 --> 01:47:30,920
she would find
that she was helping people

1633
01:47:31,000 --> 01:47:32,800
to rescue stuff from their house

1634
01:47:32,880 --> 01:47:35,000
and that she would be running
out of a house

1635
01:47:35,080 --> 01:47:37,520
with a bust of Göring
stuck under her arm,

1636
01:47:37,600 --> 01:47:40,040
which is not something
she would normally do,

1637
01:47:40,120 --> 01:47:43,640
but in that moment of trying to...

1638
01:47:43,720 --> 01:47:48,200
You were all in it together,
whatever your ideas or politics were,

1639
01:47:48,280 --> 01:47:53,800
and it was that sense of
the bonding nature of a shared danger.

1640
01:47:53,880 --> 01:47:59,360
I made myself, and it's the one
programme that I did do myself,

1641
01:47:59,440 --> 01:48:04,560
I indulgently, self-indulgently,
allowed myself

1642
01:48:04,640 --> 01:48:07,120
to do the last programme
of the series,

1643
01:48:07,200 --> 01:48:09,840
which I knew, for quite a long time,

1644
01:48:09,920 --> 01:48:15,880
I wanted to be a programme
not about the war, but about war,

1645
01:48:15,960 --> 01:48:20,680
and I would collect
all sorts of interviews

1646
01:48:20,760 --> 01:48:23,640
that reflected
on the experience of war,

1647
01:48:23,720 --> 01:48:27,000
some of the experience happy,
some of it mystifying,

1648
01:48:27,080 --> 01:48:31,880
some of it lugubrious and shattering.

1649
01:48:31,960 --> 01:48:38,720
I think one of the questions you
can ask about The World At War is

1650
01:48:38,800 --> 01:48:45,040
to what extent did it tackle really
difficult, contentious subjects?

1651
01:48:46,760 --> 01:48:53,760
At what point did it try to say,
"You have been sold a false image

1652
01:48:53,840 --> 01:48:56,560
and what happened
was something quite different,

1653
01:48:56,640 --> 01:48:58,360
you were being fooled"?

1654
01:48:58,440 --> 01:49:01,600
One example of The World At War

1655
01:49:01,680 --> 01:49:06,480
trying to do a job of going against
received public opinion

1656
01:49:06,560 --> 01:49:10,880
was about the aerial bombing
of Germany and Air Marshal Harris,

1657
01:49:10,960 --> 01:49:14,600
and at that point,
in those programmes,

1658
01:49:14,680 --> 01:49:17,400
the series did try to say,

1659
01:49:17,480 --> 01:49:22,320
"They told you at the time that
this was destroying German morale

1660
01:49:22,400 --> 01:49:26,840
and German civil wish
to resist and continue the war."

1661
01:49:26,920 --> 01:49:29,400
"In fact we can now tell you
this wasn't the case."

1662
01:49:29,480 --> 01:49:31,480
if anything, the great bombings

1663
01:49:31,560 --> 01:49:35,880
like Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin,
Darmstadt and so on, the Ruhr,

1664
01:49:35,960 --> 01:49:41,320
probably marginally stiffened
German civilian wish to resist

1665
01:49:41,400 --> 01:49:42,760
rather than the opposite

1666
01:49:42,840 --> 01:49:46,280
and it was a complete failure,
almost total failure,

1667
01:49:46,360 --> 01:49:51,080
and its impact on German industry
was quite slight,

1668
01:49:51,160 --> 01:49:53,360
although that was mostly
the Americans.

1669
01:49:53,440 --> 01:49:59,680
But anyway, the impact on
civilian morale was surprisingly slight

1670
01:49:59,760 --> 01:50:01,560
and it was a failure.

1671
01:50:01,640 --> 01:50:06,400
If I were making the series again
at the time that I made it,

1672
01:50:06,480 --> 01:50:08,720
there's nothing I would do differently.

1673
01:50:08,800 --> 01:50:12,160
If you thought about
making such a series today

1674
01:50:12,240 --> 01:50:15,800
and it hadn't been made
and one had to embark on it today,

1675
01:50:15,880 --> 01:50:19,920
there are one or two things that
would certainly be done differently.

1676
01:50:20,000 --> 01:50:25,080
First of all there are things that we
know now that we didn't know then.

1677
01:50:25,160 --> 01:50:30,800
We didn't know anything
about Ultra and Enigma.

1678
01:50:30,880 --> 01:50:35,080
The papers that showed how effectively

1679
01:50:35,160 --> 01:50:39,600
the British were cracking...
the West were cracking German codes

1680
01:50:39,680 --> 01:50:44,160
weren't published until July 1974

1681
01:50:44,240 --> 01:50:47,320
and The World At War
finished its first run

1682
01:50:47,400 --> 01:50:51,880
on ITV in Britain in May 1974,

1683
01:50:51,960 --> 01:50:56,840
so the series had been broadcast
before we knew.

1684
01:50:56,920 --> 01:51:02,320
We refer in the series to
"We had cracked the German codes"

1685
01:51:02,400 --> 01:51:07,400
but precisely how it was done
we didn't know.

1686
01:51:07,480 --> 01:51:11,400
And I suspect that if we had known

1687
01:51:11,480 --> 01:51:14,000
we'd pretty certainly
not just have been able

1688
01:51:14,080 --> 01:51:18,080
to inform different stories
with that knowledge,

1689
01:51:18,160 --> 01:51:22,120
but we might have made an episode
to codes and so on.

1690
01:51:22,200 --> 01:51:25,120
And Richard Overy points out

1691
01:51:25,200 --> 01:51:29,560
in work that he's done
on the Second World War recently,

1692
01:51:29,640 --> 01:51:31,480
and indeed on The World At War,

1693
01:51:31,560 --> 01:51:36,160
that we know a great deal more
about the conduct of the German army,

1694
01:51:36,240 --> 01:51:39,280
we know how widespread was

1695
01:51:39,360 --> 01:51:44,480
deliberate brutality, cruelty
and genocidal behaviour.

1696
01:51:44,560 --> 01:51:46,640
It wasn't just confined to the SS.

1697
01:51:46,720 --> 01:51:48,320
The Wehrmacht was involved

1698
01:51:48,400 --> 01:51:52,000
in a way that we simply
probably didn't appreciate then.

1699
01:51:52,760 --> 01:51:54,840
The single technical matter

1700
01:51:54,920 --> 01:52:00,400
where I would have tried to argue
for a different approach today,

1701
01:52:00,480 --> 01:52:03,200
but I don't know
that I would have been successful,

1702
01:52:03,280 --> 01:52:06,720
is I think now

1703
01:52:06,800 --> 01:52:11,480
that subtitles
are a more effective way

1704
01:52:11,560 --> 01:52:18,080
of portraying the personality
and the tenor of an interview

1705
01:52:18,160 --> 01:52:23,080
than dubbing someone else's voice
over a foreign language

1706
01:52:23,160 --> 01:52:26,360
in which he or she
is expressing themselves.

1707
01:52:26,440 --> 01:52:30,680
But in those days
it was simply taken for granted

1708
01:52:30,760 --> 01:52:35,920
that a programme that was going to try
to reach the widest possible audience

1709
01:52:36,000 --> 01:52:37,800
always in Britain,

1710
01:52:37,880 --> 01:52:41,880
because the ITV companies
made their money initially in Britain,

1711
01:52:41,960 --> 01:52:45,400
and in the United States when
they sold it to the United States,

1712
01:52:45,480 --> 01:52:48,280
it was taken for granted
that you didn't subtitle.

1713
01:52:48,360 --> 01:52:50,160
If you subtitled something

1714
01:52:50,240 --> 01:52:53,120
people thought it was foreign
and didn't watch it,

1715
01:52:53,200 --> 01:52:55,240
and so you dubbed.

1716
01:52:55,320 --> 01:52:58,200
So in addition
to having Olivier to narrate it

1717
01:52:58,280 --> 01:53:02,120
and Carl Davis to write music for it,
we dubbed the interviews.

1718
01:53:02,200 --> 01:53:07,320
I think there's a case for subtitling
them rather than dubbing them.

1719
01:53:07,400 --> 01:53:10,720
Looking at The World At War,

1720
01:53:10,800 --> 01:53:16,400
there is a great deal in it
about generals and armies

1721
01:53:16,480 --> 01:53:20,360
and strategic decisions
by presidents and prime ministers

1722
01:53:20,440 --> 01:53:22,920
and Führers and all the rest of it,

1723
01:53:23,000 --> 01:53:25,920
but one of its strengths
is that there's a great deal

1724
01:53:26,000 --> 01:53:30,040
about the civilian population
and what happened to them.

1725
01:53:30,120 --> 01:53:33,520
And of course
that really is important.

1726
01:53:33,600 --> 01:53:37,600
It was in the second half
of the 20th century

1727
01:53:37,680 --> 01:53:42,000
that war really did change its nature
quite rapidly.

1728
01:53:42,080 --> 01:53:46,320
In the First World War most of those
who were killed were combatants.

1729
01:53:46,400 --> 01:53:48,000
In the Second World War

1730
01:53:48,080 --> 01:53:52,440
the overwhelming majority of people
who were killed were civilians.

1731
01:53:54,200 --> 01:53:58,680
The Cold War wars, it was also true.

1732
01:53:58,760 --> 01:54:04,360
Most of the people killed in Korea
and Vietnam were probably civilians.

1733
01:54:04,440 --> 01:54:08,920
Now we're in a period of doubt
about this,

1734
01:54:09,000 --> 01:54:14,480
and for all the appalling things that
they do in other parts of the world...

1735
01:54:16,320 --> 01:54:19,600
...statesmen in charge
of colossal military force

1736
01:54:19,680 --> 01:54:24,120
are nervous about what they may do
to civilian populations,

1737
01:54:24,200 --> 01:54:29,760
and if you compare what has been
happening in Iraq, terrible as it is,

1738
01:54:29,840 --> 01:54:32,640
the way in which Baghdad
has been bombed

1739
01:54:32,720 --> 01:54:39,720
with at least an effort not to plaster
centres of civilian housing,

1740
01:54:39,800 --> 01:54:42,120
that compares with, say, the Americans

1741
01:54:42,200 --> 01:54:46,960
who dropped 15,000 tons of bombs,

1742
01:54:47,040 --> 01:54:50,480
really within a week or so, on Hanoi

1743
01:54:50,560 --> 01:54:54,000
back in the '60s and early '70s,

1744
01:54:54,080 --> 01:54:56,440
there is a change of mood

1745
01:54:56,520 --> 01:55:01,360
and even military commanders
would like to show mercy.

1746
01:55:01,440 --> 01:55:05,320
I think there's something else
which goes with that

1747
01:55:05,400 --> 01:55:13,400
and people who watch The World At War
might register this change as well.

1748
01:55:13,480 --> 01:55:18,440
The human race has grown, particularly
in Europe and North America again,

1749
01:55:18,520 --> 01:55:20,520
what you might call the West,

1750
01:55:20,600 --> 01:55:24,760
has grown considerably more squeamish.

1751
01:55:24,840 --> 01:55:26,400
This is wonderful.

1752
01:55:26,480 --> 01:55:28,960
People have grown also more cowardly.

1753
01:55:29,040 --> 01:55:30,840
This is also wonderful.

1754
01:55:30,920 --> 01:55:36,600
It means that, compared above all to
the soldiers of the First World War,

1755
01:55:36,680 --> 01:55:41,480
but also to some of the soldiers you
see in action in the Second World War,

1756
01:55:41,560 --> 01:55:45,520
soldiers now are very unwilling
to get their heads shot off

1757
01:55:45,600 --> 01:55:49,600
at the orders of some public-school
pipsqueak with a whistle.

1758
01:55:49,680 --> 01:55:52,400
They are serving under officers

1759
01:55:52,480 --> 01:55:56,960
who are deeply, deeply unwilling
to risk casualties

1760
01:55:57,040 --> 01:56:00,600
and will husband, indeed, be miserly

1761
01:56:00,680 --> 01:56:04,360
about the lives and safety
of their own men,

1762
01:56:04,440 --> 01:56:07,080
and there is a deep aversion

1763
01:56:07,160 --> 01:56:11,360
to exposing yourself to danger
among soldiers.

1764
01:56:11,440 --> 01:56:12,960
That is good news.

1765
01:56:13,040 --> 01:56:14,720
In one sense it's bad news

1766
01:56:14,800 --> 01:56:18,520
because the temptation
to plaster the hell out of some area

1767
01:56:18,600 --> 01:56:25,080
by bombing from 35,000 feet
is a temptation which exists.

1768
01:56:25,160 --> 01:56:28,360
But on the other hand
it is in other ways good.

1769
01:56:28,440 --> 01:56:32,240
There is a wish to try to reverse,
to start moving away,

1770
01:56:32,320 --> 01:56:34,840
to get this curve to turn at last

1771
01:56:34,920 --> 01:56:39,320
away from mounting proportions
of casualties which are civilian

1772
01:56:39,400 --> 01:56:41,920
back to professionalising war,
if you like,

1773
01:56:42,000 --> 01:56:45,560
trying to limit it
to soldiers shooting at soldiers.

1774
01:56:45,640 --> 01:56:47,360
So that's good.

1775
01:56:47,440 --> 01:56:49,280
There are wars in the world today.

1776
01:56:49,360 --> 01:56:53,640
One has to think about war and
what it's for and what it can achieve

1777
01:56:53,720 --> 01:56:58,720
and whether it's worth the cost
in life and suffering that it exacts.

1778
01:56:58,800 --> 01:57:01,080
I don't have any doubt at all

1779
01:57:01,160 --> 01:57:09,160
that the Second World War
was a just war.

1780
01:57:09,360 --> 01:57:13,240
A lovely historian
called Steve Ambrose,

1781
01:57:13,320 --> 01:57:16,960
one of the few historians
we interviewed in the series,

1782
01:57:17,040 --> 01:57:21,960
he has this great white woolly sweater
and his lovely hair,

1783
01:57:22,040 --> 01:57:25,240
and he says the right side won.

1784
01:57:25,320 --> 01:57:26,600
The Nazis were crushed,

1785
01:57:26,680 --> 01:57:28,800
the militarists in Japan were crushed,

1786
01:57:28,880 --> 01:57:30,720
the fascists in Italy were crushed

1787
01:57:30,800 --> 01:57:33,320
and surely justice
has never been better served.

1788
01:57:33,400 --> 01:57:38,480
We felt at the end that we'd told
the story that needed to be told

1789
01:57:38,560 --> 01:57:40,680
and we were glad to have told it,

1790
01:57:40,760 --> 01:57:46,040
even if we encountered horrors
along the way.

1791
01:57:46,120 --> 01:57:48,520
When you're working
on a series like that

1792
01:57:48,600 --> 01:57:53,440
you're much more conscious
of its drawbacks and failures...

1793
01:57:55,440 --> 01:57:59,520
...except in one sense.

1794
01:57:59,600 --> 01:58:03,960
We knew that some of the ones
that we'd done were certainly...

1795
01:58:04,040 --> 01:58:06,240
I didn't work on all that many,

1796
01:58:06,320 --> 01:58:11,320
I probably worked on four or five only
out of all those programmes.

1797
01:58:11,400 --> 01:58:14,840
One or two of those we really knew,
as we finished them,

1798
01:58:14,920 --> 01:58:17,680
that we'd done something wonderful.

1799
01:58:17,760 --> 01:58:21,680
Red Star, for example,
whose producer was Martin Smith.

1800
01:58:21,760 --> 01:58:24,760
Red Star still makes people cry.

1801
01:58:26,760 --> 01:58:28,920
And I feel proud of that.

1802
01:58:29,000 --> 01:58:32,520
I don't think, on the other hand,
that we knew

1803
01:58:32,600 --> 01:58:36,760
that The World At War would have
this great lasting success.

1804
01:58:36,840 --> 01:58:39,360
We were very excited
when it was completed

1805
01:58:39,440 --> 01:58:43,080
and I remember Jeremy
talking optimistically

1806
01:58:43,160 --> 01:58:46,920
about how it would become
a great educational aid

1807
01:58:47,000 --> 01:58:49,880
and it would be put on discs
and cassettes

1808
01:58:49,960 --> 01:58:51,760
and every school ought to have one

1809
01:58:51,840 --> 01:58:56,320
and it would be part of the national
resource of memory and so on,

1810
01:58:56,400 --> 01:58:59,720
which we thought
was an adventurous idea.

1811
01:58:59,800 --> 01:59:03,560
None of us realised
that it would go on and on and on.

1812
01:59:03,640 --> 01:59:05,960
It's become like The Mousetrap.

1813
01:59:06,040 --> 01:59:09,520
It gets repeated and repeated.

1814
01:59:09,600 --> 01:59:11,000
A base thought,

1815
01:59:11,080 --> 01:59:15,640
if only we'd all signed up to take a
percentage cut instead of a flat fee,

1816
01:59:15,720 --> 01:59:18,280
we'd be rolling in wealth.

1817
01:59:18,360 --> 01:59:20,040
Still, good luck.

1818
01:59:20,120 --> 01:59:24,320
It was a team like no other team
I've ever worked on

1819
01:59:24,400 --> 01:59:28,920
and we still have a very close...

1820
01:59:29,000 --> 01:59:33,040
If we all get together again
it's the most fantastic team.

1821
01:59:33,120 --> 01:59:36,400
And a lot of that was down to Jeremy,

1822
01:59:36,480 --> 01:59:40,320
who had pulled us all together

1823
01:59:40,400 --> 01:59:46,400
and who held the series
very much in his hand

1824
01:59:46,480 --> 01:59:53,640
in a way that got
the most fantastic work out of all...

1825
01:59:53,720 --> 01:59:59,440
I think we all worked better
than each of us individually could

1826
01:59:59,520 --> 02:00:02,600
or had perhaps ever worked before.

1827
02:00:02,680 --> 02:00:06,520
So it was a great team
to have been part of.

1828
02:00:06,600 --> 02:00:08,600
It was brilliant.

1829
02:00:08,680 --> 02:00:13,120
If making the series took a toll
on the people who worked on it,

1830
02:00:13,200 --> 02:00:19,160
it's partly because they worked very,
very, very hard, obsessively hard.

1831
02:00:19,240 --> 02:00:21,800
The people who worked
on all the programmes

1832
02:00:21,880 --> 02:00:25,960
worked seven days a week
or six days a week for three years.

1833
02:00:26,040 --> 02:00:30,120
And partly because what
they were dealing with was fraught,

1834
02:00:30,200 --> 02:00:34,800
but I think in the end we were
the masters of our subject matter

1835
02:00:34,880 --> 02:00:37,360
and we felt we were shaping it

1836
02:00:37,440 --> 02:00:42,880
and we were very proud and happy
with what we did in the end,

1837
02:00:42,960 --> 02:00:47,400
so it was something
that meant something in our lives.

1838
02:00:47,480 --> 02:00:49,760
And I think that one of the privileges

1839
02:00:49,840 --> 02:00:52,800
of working in television or in history

1840
02:00:52,880 --> 02:00:55,360
is to do something that you believe in

1841
02:00:55,440 --> 02:00:58,240
and I think the people who worked
on The World At War

1842
02:00:58,320 --> 02:01:02,000
felt at the end of it that
they'd done something worthwhile.

1843
02:01:02,080 --> 02:01:05,240
The series which is known
all over the world as The World At War

1844
02:01:05,320 --> 02:01:07,320
didn't start off like that.

1845
02:01:07,400 --> 02:01:10,880
We didn't settle on the title
for quite a long way down

1846
02:01:10,960 --> 02:01:14,640
and it started off known everywhere,

1847
02:01:14,720 --> 02:01:16,760
and for all intents and purposes,

1848
02:01:16,840 --> 02:01:21,840
and this is the sticky yellow tape
on which everything was bound,

1849
02:01:21,920 --> 02:01:23,840
as The Second World War.

1850
02:01:24,760 --> 02:01:28,000
And the paper heading has got

1851
02:01:28,080 --> 02:01:32,320
an embossed Second World War on it,
very elegant.

1852
02:01:32,400 --> 02:01:38,240
And really it was some...
a couple of years before the title...

1853
02:01:38,320 --> 02:01:41,840
and indeed, while debate
about the title was going on,

1854
02:01:41,920 --> 02:01:45,200
so the graphics department
were trying to devise,

1855
02:01:45,280 --> 02:01:48,280
and we had all sorts
of different versions of the titles,

1856
02:01:48,360 --> 02:01:51,320
including sort of Action Man things
and things of that kind,

1857
02:01:51,400 --> 02:01:53,840
and then eventually it became
The World At War

1858
02:01:53,920 --> 02:01:58,040
with the fabulously good titles
that everybody knows.

1859
02:01:58,120 --> 02:02:01,000
The first transmission of the series
in this country

1860
02:02:01,080 --> 02:02:04,840
was 31 October, 1973,

1861
02:02:04,920 --> 02:02:09,240
and we decided to have a party
on the following Friday, 2 November.

1862
02:02:09,320 --> 02:02:11,880
And the invitations
went out to everybody.

1863
02:02:11,960 --> 02:02:15,080
"Thames Television requests
the pleasure of your company

1864
02:02:15,160 --> 02:02:17,920
to celebrate the outbreak
of The World At War."

1865
02:02:18,000 --> 02:02:24,640
And there was also a press launch
and the lunch was of the period.

1866
02:02:24,720 --> 02:02:27,840
"Potato and leek soup,
summer supper dish,

1867
02:02:27,920 --> 02:02:29,920
jugged rabbit, corned beef fritters,

1868
02:02:30,000 --> 02:02:33,240
sliced spam, Lord Woolton pie,

1869
02:02:33,320 --> 02:02:35,920
bubble and squeak,
carrots in parsley sauce,

1870
02:02:36,000 --> 02:02:39,240
bread and butter pudding,
Bakewell tart with chocolate sauce,

1871
02:02:39,320 --> 02:02:42,640
tea and coffee and boiled sweets."