EARLIER THIS YEAR, JEFF HARVEY bumped into an old friend, a man in late middle age. Knowing that Harvey had worked on The World at War, his acquaintance began telling the retired editor what the series meant to him. “He started talking about Oradour,” Harvey says, referencing the massacre that graphically introduces the programme’s first episode. Paraphrasing Laurence Olivier’s sonorous narration, Harvey’s friend continued, “Down this road, the soldiers came.” By the time they had gone, that summer’s day in 1944, over 600 French civilians were dead, burnt and shot by the Waffen-SS. But to Harvey’s friend, it was like the war had never ended. “He went to pieces,” Harvey recalls. “It was quite extraordinary — it was like he was there, and this is a 50-, 60-year-old guy.”
Listen to World at War alumni, and you’ll hear these stories again and again, of how this programme from another age can still affect and inform and inspire. But it didn’t just appear overnight. First aired 50 years ago, for just over six months from 31 October 1973, this epic documentary series on the Second World War was built on dedication and sweat, its young team of writers, directors, researchers and editors all sacrificing years of their lives to change filmmaking forever. And if it continues to affect viewers today, The World at War boasts a deeper legacy, forever shifting our perceptions of the conflict, even as it gives chintz-dappled glimpses of the vanished 1970s.
began in 1964. That year, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, the BBC broadcast . The programme was a success: Michael Redgrave was a dignified narrator, while interviews with rank-and-file veterans offset an earlier tendency to focus on statesmen and generals. But as James Chapman says, was far
