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<i>The Great War on the Small Screen</i> (review)

2010; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2010.0011

1548-9922

Robert Fyne,

Media Studies and Communication

Reviewed by: The Great War on the Small Screen Robert Fyne Emma Hanna . The Great War on the Small Screen. Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 190 pages; $75.00. Sometime around the early 1950s, the new medium of television—after some awkward growing pains—became a stable fixture in most American homes as small, nine-inch screens, housed in elaborate consoles and offering limited programming, enthralled viewers with motion pictures, sporting events, documentary features, and variety shows, all in glorious black-and-white format. Without missing a beat, a stateside cultural revolution—with the cathode-ray tube as a modern day Liberty-Leading-the-People beacon—changed everything. Now information became visual (at the expense of thought process) as a screen reality took hold. Certainly, television became truth and truth became television. And American audiences, sitting comfortably in their front rooms, loved every minute of it. Across the ocean, in faraway England a different story unfolded. Still in the throes of postwar rebuilding and economic instability—bread, eggs, meat, petrol, even shoes were still rationed into the early 1950s—popular television was a luxury as everyday people, struggling to put the Second World War behind them, dealt with daily pragmatic needs. By 1958, however, a peacetime stability emerged. For the first time, television households exceeded radio-only homes in London. By the early 1960s, British broadcasting, like its American cousins, captivated an audience, changing its customs, habits, and mores. Who could deny, as Marshall [End Page 104] McLuhan expostulated some 3,000 miles away, that the medium was the message? By all accounts, television—with its tactile-sensory precepts—offered English audiences a multifaceted understanding of past and current topics, but one event, the First World War, according to a university lecturer, has occupied a central position in English broadcasting for over fifty years. Once called the war to end all wars, this four-year conflagration that took the lives of over one million British and commonwealth soldiers created a lost generation that would never be replaced. As Emma Hanna explains in her wonderful study, The Great War on the Small Screen, English television programming, both public and private, continues to explain this 1914-1918 conflict as the most tragic episode in national life. In Great Britain, as Dr. Hanna acknowledges, the First World War was originally commemorated through shines, memorials, statues, parades, poppies, cenotaphs, and prayers but in 1964 the BBC produced the first documentary about this European disaster. Simply entitled The Great War this twenty-six-part series examined, in minute detail, every aspect of this global conflict and created, as one critic proffered, the end of radio with pictures. Finally, a new era emerged with these bold, dramatic, and graphic episodes and, now, some forty-six years later, this show still holds the record for the longest running nonfiction depiction about any war. With clarity and acumen, Dr. Hanna has detailed the thirty-one televised programs—produced between 1964 and 2008—about World War I. Diverse titles such as Battle of the Somme, Lions Led by Donkeys, and The Monocled Mutineer reiterated the prevailing mood that the Great War (the term "World War I," first appeared when Time magazine ran a June 1939 article about impending warfare) was, and still is, a national tragedy, while other productions, Timewatch—Haig: The Unknown Soldier, Shot at Dawn, and The Crucified Soldier, detailed military ignorance, incompetency, and insensitivity. Still other dramas, Britain's Boy Soldiers, The Trench, The Last Tommy, and Walter Tull: Forgotten Hero, reminded audiences that this long ago conflict remains a barely healed trauma. [End Page 105] In all, Dr Hanna's study elucidates the many reasons why young men died for king and country in a conflict that only served as the prologue for more catastrophic events a decade later. Clearly, the televised documentary offers greater credibility than popular memory and, in a visceral manner, became a remembrance ritual similar to a religious service. With their detailed images of mud, blood, and cemeteries, these programs left nothing to the imagination. Why would they? As a tactile medium, television massages viewers and fosters perspectives. By examining the making, broadcast, and reception of these many productions Dr Hanna places...