Thursday, September 12, 2013
The Wipers Times, BBC Two, review
An enraged staff officer brandished a copy of The Wipers Times, the jokey paper produced in the trenches of the First World War, and said to the General (played by Michael Palin): "The war is not funny, Sir." To which the General replied: "I've a feeling that may be the point."
A few minutes into The Wipers Times (BBC Two), a 90-minute drama by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (both veterans of Private Eye), I was worried that it would simply prove a self-indulgent jape to tinkling music. Thank heaven, it did not. The surface story was of a periodical (which, like Private Eye, resembled a school magazine produced without official sanction) printed under bombardment from Fritz (not to mention the General Staff). The strong sub-text was the courage displayed by officers and men, month after month. In one issue of the paper, a line from a poem parodying Kipling said: "Through dread of crying you will laugh instead." That was the theme of the drama.
Historically, the trenches of Ypres and the Somme were an unreal world blown featureless. The TV camera portrayed this landscape (recreated, as it happens, in Northern Ireland) with a subdued palette, as if a sepia photograph had been touched up by hand with pastel colours. At one moment, so black was the image, I wondered if my television had gone on the blink.
Another artificiality of the trench-world was its exclusive masculinity. We know that whole battalions of volunteers were formed with names such as "The Grimsby Chums". In one scene last night, a soldier read out an amateurish poem called "To my chum". It ended: "Together we had fought and fed. / Our hearts were light. / But now you're dead; / And I'm mateless."
I shed a tear at that. Yet the drama was the opposite of a moaning misery memoir. Despite countless species of exploding shells (crumps, pipsqueaks, whizz-bangs and so on), the mud, the rats, gas and death, we saw reflected in the pages of The Wipers Times a heroic habit of resolute cheerfulness.
Dominating the story was Captain Fred Roberts (later Lieutenant-Colonel), editor of the paper, masterfully played by Ben Chaplin with a morning-after croak and an air of incipient insubordination fearless of consequences. His assistant editor, Lt Jack Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt) was the quiet Watson to his Holmes.
The occasional fantasy music-hall scenes at which Roberts presided, in the ruins of a church or the Cloth Hall at Ypres, though reminiscent of Oh! What a Lovely War, had the opposite function. In Richard Attenborough's film, tragi-comic songs of the trenches had pointed up war's futility; here they brought out the astonishingly resilient humanity of a British sense of humour literally under fire. The director, Andy de Emmony, has pulled off a subtly counter-cultural triumph.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/311fe1d3/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0C10A30A32820CThe0EWipers0ETimes0EBBC0ETwo0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
