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By
FRANK BEHRENS
I very much doubt that any
one can watch the eight episodes of "Battlefield
Britain" and still claim that war is a wonderful
thing. This series, which has recently been
showing on Public Television, is available on a
3-DVD boxed set from BBC Video, and it has some
negative and many excellent aspects.
To touch upon the former, the narrators, father
and son Peter and Dan Snow, simply cannot stand
still during their on-camera moments. They are
either striding this way or that, driving cars, or
walking down crowded streets. The son is
especially prone to that intense, driving delivery
that John Cleese was so good at spoofing on Monty
Python.
That said, the big attraction to this series is
the use of computer animation in which we get a
very good idea of not only how the armies were
aligned but also how they moved before and during
the battles. (This certainly beats the old
fashioned use of arrows cartooned onto maps.) A
small group of the same actors is cast as
combatants all through history, the eternal
victims of their leaders' ambitions, and the
effect is a good one.
The battles included are Boudicca's revolt against
the Roman occupation of Britain (61 AD), Hastings
in which the English language was born (1066),
Wales (1403) in which Owen Glendower came within a
hair's breadth of winning independence, Spanish
Armada (1588) in which the smaller English ships
did what the RAF was going to do centuries later,
Naseby (1635) in which Charles I found that "the
divine right of kings" meant little in a fight,
the Boyne (1690) in which the Irish suffered for
the sake of the deposed James II (who "led his
regiment from behind"), Culloden (1746) in which
Scotland was defeated under the poor leadership of
Bonny Prince Charlie, and finally the Battle of
Britain in which all Goering's planes could not
wrest air mastery from the British.
The word used most often by narrators and soldiers
is "carnage." And the phrase most often used is
"We knew we had God on our side." Draw your own
conclusions!
There are also many sequences in which the
narrators subject themselves to the same pressures
felt by the fighters of old: rapid fire from a
long bow, facing an oncoming cavalry charge,
trying to sink a ship with non-explosive 3-inch
cannon balls, trying not to black out in a
spitfire. Physics teachers might want to take a
look at these points.
As a bonus, we have an episode of the War Walks
series, in which the story of Richard III at
Bosworth is told with the usual perpetual-motion
narrator, Richard Holmes, with less than high-tech
reproductions of medieval illustrations and
recreations of the battle by locals in costume. To
me, this works even better than all the computer
magic of the other series—and in half the time.
History departments will, I hope, purchase a copy
right quick. |
