The World at
War
BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
'Taylor Downing has constructed a fascinating story...The World at War was and remains a landmark, the significance of which we can better appreciate through this clear, incisive and readable book.' - Prof David Reynolds in The Guardian Review, 10 November 2012. See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/09/world-at-war-taylor-downing-review
The landmark documentary series The World at War remains
the most influential and renowned history programme ever produced
by British television, perhaps even more popular now than at the
time of its first broadcast in 1973. The 26 part series on the
Second World War mixes archive film with the testimony of
eye-witnesses, a powerful narration read by Laurence Olivier and
the haunting music of Carl Davis. Its production took nearly three
years, a team of fifty and a for-then huge budget of £900,000. But
the epic scale of its production was more than matched by its
impact and since its first broadcast it has never been off air
somewhere around the world.
Taylor Downing's book traces how the series came about and looks at
it in the context of the development of History programming on
Television in Britain. It tells of the intense competition between
the BBC and ITV in the early 1970s and of the corporate ambitions
of Thames Television where the series was produced. The book looks
at why the series became such an iconic piece of television and
draws on interviews with the series producer Sir Jeremy Isaacs and
other key members of the production team. Downing has consulted the
production records held at the Imperial War Museum and the press
response to the series. He discusses the key decisions
that shaped the series and its legacy: that is, to focus on
ordinary people caught up in the war, rather than on generals and
politicians; to represent war as a global catastrophe, beyond the
familiar story of the European conflict; to use archival film
accurately to shed new light on the war and its effect on ordinary
people, and the presentation, for the first time on British
television, of the unbearable reality of the Nazi
Holocaust.
Published as a TV Classic by BFI Palgrave Macmillan,
2012