World on Fire episode 1, review: Europe in flames in BBC1’s striking new drama
For you, my friend, the war is over. The camp commandant’s stock greeting to Allied POWs has entered the language. It hasn’t quite come true for the rest of us.
Even if those with any meaningful memory of dogfights over Sussex are now well into their eighties, the Second World War has never been in ruder health.
It has become our culture’s own Trojan War, a bottomless well of myths and tales. The spirit of Dunkirk and D-Day is the lead in the pencil of Brexit’s more shameless rhetoricians. Spine-stiffening British films about the war effort still cause tills to ring at the multiplex (Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, The Imitation Game, Their Finest etc).
But only so much ground can be covered in two hours. In World on Fire (BBC One), the scriptwriter Peter Bowker paints the story of the war in Europe onto the broadest imaginable canvas.
He has seven hours at his disposal in this first series, and in the opening episode the story made giant leaps between Warsaw and Gdansk, Manchester, Paris and finally Berlin. Its goal was to convey an intimate sense of how it must have been to live through those days of dread in the late summer of 1939 when our past was still their unknowable future.
From the start, Bowker laid down a marker that he intended to mess with settled narratives. It’s not just the two black characters – a female pianist in Manchester based on a figure in Bowker’s own family history; a male saxophonist in Paris who also happens to be homosexual.
Our first shot of England was at a fiery rally of Blackshirts, which working-class firebrand Lois Bennett (Julie Brown) and her well-to-do boyfriend Harry Chase (Jonah Hauer-King) infiltrated to chant anti-Fascist slogans. Lois’s father Douglas (Sean Bean) is a scarred veteran of the trenches and a campaigner for peace, while her brother is a common thief.
When 3 September came round, they were in the throes of a family barney and Chamberlain’s broadcast, its famous phrases long since chiselled into the national memory, was a barely audible background hum.
That residual sense of British decency was subject to further inquisition with the Chase family. Harry’s toxic mother Robina (Lesley Manville) thought Oswald Mosley dashing in a rollneck and styled herself “an elitist” (which is nothing if not a loaded term 80 years on).
As for her son, he became the embodiment of perfidious Albion when he took up a translator’s job in the embassy in Warsaw and, after a tearful farewell to Lois, took on a second girlfriend.
The focus now swung across to Kasia Tomaszeski (Zofia Wich?acz). Harry was sucked into the life of her stricken family, torn asunder by the invasion and driven to desperate acts.
Kasia’s father waved a white flag at German rifles, unsuccessfully. Kasia, pledging to flee Poland with Harry, suddenly shoved her little brother onto the moving train instead. This was the episode’s boldest dramatic stroke, designed to sink its hooks in and lure you back for more.
Not ever story is as gripping yet. A lot of introductions were crammed into the hour, and one or two characters came up a bit sketchy. While Bean’s presence seems to earth the English scenes, Robina’s brittle certainties await prodding and poking by Manville.
Bowker has opted for a loose web of interconnections. At the threat of Nazi expansionism, some dumbly insisted that they intended to stay put.
“Paris is safe, I love my work,” said American medic Webster O’Connor (Brian J Smith). Others migrated across the map of Europe like busy bees pollinating the plot.
Chief among these was fearless US journalist Nancy Campbell (Helen Hunt). She observed the arrival of Wehrmacht on the Polish border before attending the hasty wedding of Harry and Kasia, then dashed back to Berlin where her neighbour turned out to be the mother of the soldier who encountered Kasia’s brother Grzegorz (Mateusz Wi?c?awek) on the streets of Gdansk. Got all that?
Daisy-chaining every plot strand gives rise to some coincidences worthy of a Victorian potboiler, but that’s no bad model to go by.
The scale of the drama’s ambition is laudable, especially given the absence of Netflix megabucks. Ordnance was detonated, the Luftwaffe screamed overhead, windows were shattered. Prague attractively stood in for various Polish backdrops and provided splendid interiors.
But the real meat is in the human stories. The result can feel a little woozy: the foreground is painted with a fine brush, the background with a roller. That said, roll on the next instalment.