BBC to mark first world war centenary with biggest TV season to date

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/oct/16/bbc-first-world-war-anniversary-season

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The BBC has unveiled its most ambitious television season ever – 130 programmes spanning 2,500 hours – that will air over four years to mark the centenary of the first world war.

The season is designed to match the timespan of the 1914-18 war, and include a daily BBC Radio 4 drama.

Programming will also include an exclusive interview with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who will talk about the role his father played reporting on the Gallipoli campaign.

There will also be documentaries from Jeremy Paxman and historians Max Hastings and Niall Ferguson, as well as a frontline medical drama featuring Oona Chaplin.

Thought to rival the BBC's Olympics coverage in its ambition, the BBC's first world war centenary season is an example of the vision of the BBC as "the place everyone goes to for the big events" that was outlined by new director general Tony Hall last week.

"This season is going to have a profound impact on the way we think about world war one," said Hall, speaking in the BBC's Radio Theatre at New Broadcasting House. "On television, on radio and on digital, we'll be exploring how this conflict, above all others, shaped our families, our communities, our world – and continues to influence us today.''

The BBC claims the scale of the season and its breadth are "unique" and it will "be much more than a chronological historical record" said its world war one centenary controller, Adrian Van Klaveren.

The coverage will echo the timeframe of the Great War, running until 2018.

While there will be documentaries such as Paxman's landmark BBC1 Britain's Great War on BBC1, there will also be unseen footage of interviews with veterans from seminal 1960s series The Great War.

There will also be programmes designed to be accessible to younger generations, such as a special editions of children's show Horrible Histories and BBC3's award-winning Our War.

Radio 4 will broadcast one of its biggest-ever drama commissions, Home Front.

From August 2014, each day it will follow characters in real time as they try to cope with the realities of wartime Britain, with every episode set 100 years to the day of broadcast.

BBC1 dramas include The Ark, which focuses on nurses and volunteers, starring Chaplin and Hermione Norris, and The Passing-Bells by Tony Jordan.

BBC2 will air a three-part factual drama about the lead-up to the war, 37 Days, featuring Ian McDiarmid and Tim Piggott-Smith.

The events leading to the outbreak of the war and its effect will also be debated by experts in programmes such as BBC2's The Necessary War, fronted by Max Hastings, and The Pity of War, presented by Niall Ferguson.

Meanwhile, the legacy of the first world war will be explored by historian David Reynolds in Long Shadow.

A documentary will present "a fresh look" at the botched Gallipoli campaign that claimed huge numbers of allied troops, and feature an interview with Murdoch about his father's role as a whistleblower.

The horrors of war will also be charted in Fergal Keane's Teenage Tommies for BBC2, and in Neil Oliver's The Machine Gun and Skye's Band of Brothers.

On radio, the BBC World Service and Radio 3 will partner the British Council in a look at the global perspective in a series presented from a different location each time by Amanda Vickery.

How the first world war affected music and the arts will also be examined in programmes on Radio 2, 3 and 4 and on BBC2 and BBC4.

"We are setting out to broaden people's understanding of the war and to commemorate and remember those who died," said Van Klaveren. "Through documentaries, drama, news coverage, children's programmes and arts and performance, we will tell well-known stories from fresh perspectives and original stories so far untold."

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