World On Fire review: Not especially clever, but big and exciting
The BBC’s new Sunday night extravaganza is an expensive Second World War drama with a tremendous number of bells and not a few whistles
In case you didn’t know summer was over, the BBC has a new Sunday night extravaganza to fill the Poldark hole. World on Fire is an ambitious, expensive Second World War drama with a tremendous number of bells and not a few whistles. Its creator is Peter Bowker, who most recently gave us Occupied, the Bafta-winning drama about Iraq.
World on Fire’s stated aim is to tell the stories of “ordinary people”. Isn’t the point of world wars that most of the people involved are ordinary people? Anyway. There are bombed-out streets, firefights, heartless Nazis, smoky jazz clubs, tank columns and abundant strapping young men in uniform. If these ingredients have not put you off already, you are unlikely to be disappointed.
There’s one strapping middle-aged man in uniform, too, in the form of Sean Bean as Douglas Bennett. The difference is that he relinquishes his usual martial clobber for a bus conductor’s blues. Even more shockingly, he has become a pacifist, traumatised by what he saw the first time around and worried by what he’s reading in the Manchester Guardian.
He has reason to be concerned. His daughter Lois (Julia Brown) has a boyfriend, Harry (Jonah Hauer-King), working in Warsaw as a translator. She hasn’t heard from him in a while, mainly because he has taken up with winsome waitress Kasia (Zofia Wiclacz). An American journalist called Nancy (Helen Hunt, on strident form) advises Harry to help his beau and her family flee the coming invasion. “Make sure you do what’s right, not what’s British,” she urges, an admonishment I must remember next time I’m served something cold in a restaurant.
Perhaps inevitably, the effort to cover so many bases comes at the expense of characterisation. From the doomed soldiers defending Danzig to the smouldering gay, black saxophonist in Paris, via the snobbish old English mother with sympathies for Mr Mosley, we hardly get to know anyone before we are whisked off to the next location.
It’s not especially clever, but it is big, exciting, and packed with watchable actors. What’s more, in a TV world where too often we are encouraged to see the Nazis as warm and cuddly real people with emotions, it’s refreshing that they are here relegated back to pure baddies, strafing cafes, shooting surrendering fathers and generally being Nazi-ish about things. When the world’s on fire, it’s nice to take refuge in the old certainties.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/world-on-fire-review-bbc-world-war-two-sean-bean-helen-hunt-a9122976.htmlWorld on Fire, BBC One review - more melodrama than drama
For his new drama series for BBC One, writer Peter Bowker (The A Word, Monroe etc) has taken as his canvas no less than a panorama of Europe in 1939, just as World War Two is breaking out. His principal characters include Harry Chase, a young man from a wealthy family who’s in love with Manchester factory girl Lois Bennett, the Polish Tomaszeski family whose lives are upended by Germany’s invasion of their country, and Berlin-based American journalist Nancy Campbell, who’s trying to interpret the European turmoil for her listeners on American Radio International.
Developing all these different strands across a mere seven episodes looks like a tall order (novelists like Dumas and Tolstoy could handle challenges on this scale, but they’d allot themselves 1200 pages to do it). This opening episode included plenty of action and rapid changes of scenery, but the characterisations have a cardboard cutout quality about them, as if it’s faster and easier to give viewers a familiar stereotype than try to build complex individuals from scratch.
Thus, we have Sean Bean (pictured right) playing Lois’s father Douglas – a Manchester bus conductor – as an almost Pythonesque caricature of working class stoicism, wearily trying to cope with his criminally-inclined son Tom (Ewan Mitchell) while doting on his daughter Lois (Julia Brown). “You’re just like yer mam y’know… the way you are, the fight in you,” he tells her rheumily. Bowker’s message is that war is hell and the less well-off suffer most, and Douglas knows this, since he suffers debilitating flashbacks to his experiences on the Western Front in the Great War. “Shellshock,” says Lois. “It’s nowt to be ashamed of.” Douglas is now a pacifist who sells Peace News outside the local factory gates, and the looming spectre of another war is filling him with dread.
We don’t yet know how Lois came to be having a romantic liaison with Harry (Jonah Hauer-King), but the episode opened with them heckling Oswald Mosley at a Blackshirt rally and being thrown into the street for their pains (in his search for “relevance”, another of Bowker’s not-very-subtle messages is that fascism is on the march again). To bang home the yawning class gulf between them, Harry’s widowed mother Robina is played by Lesley Manville as a repressed, buttoned-up ice-maiden, contemptuous of the lower orders and an enthusiastic Mosley supporter (“it’s a rare man indeed who can look that handsome in a polo neck,” she smirks). Robina is determined that the bus conductor’s daughter will not be leading her son and heir astray. “You’re a bloody snob!” Lois tells her. “I’m an elitist, certainly,” declares Robina haughtily.
The Polish connection arose when Harry was sent to work in the British Embassy in Warsaw as a translator. Here, he soon became enamoured of waitress Kasia, but with the Germans sending their panzers into Danzig and the Luftwaffe blackening the skies over Warsaw, it was time to get the hell out. Harry likes Kasia so much that he has already married her, but this was only because Nancy the broadcaster (played by a gaunt-looking Helen Hunt, pictured above) told him that was the only way he could get Kasia out of Poland. Meanwhile, Nancy’s worried about her nephew Webster, who’s a doctor in Paris, but he’s more preoccupied by a handsome jazz saxophonist than with any prospect of German tanks on the Champs-Elysées.
At least World on Fire goes by so fast that it’s difficult to get bored, but it’s more melodrama than drama. More depth and less breadth might have been advisable
https://www.theartsdesk.com/tv/world-fire-bbc-one-review-more-melodrama-dramaWorld on Fire episode 1, review: Europe in flames in BBC1’s striking new drama
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2019/09/29/world-fire-episode-1-review-europe-flames-bbc1s-striking-new/World on Fire, review: a striking, witty wartime drama that feels startlingly new
New BBC World War II drama World on Fire is just what we need as Autumn ambles in and makes huddling on the sofa appealing once again.
Written by Peter Bowker, responsible for the immensely heartfelt but also irreverent dramas The A Word and Marvellous, World On Fire showed the impending war and threat of the Nazi regime as experienced by various ordinary people in Britain, Poland, France and Germany.
Award-winning women were out in full force: Helen Hunt played Nancy, a defiant American war correspondent in Berlin reporting on Hitler’s advances, and Lesley Manville was an outrageously snobby but damaged mother of a young translator named Harry (Jonah Hauer-King) who got caught up in negotiations with the Nazis in Warsaw.
While this was an ideal, cosy Sunday night watch with beautiful costumes and a soundtrack of 1930s jazz standards, it was no paint-by-numbers, predictable re-telling of history. The writing was witty, the characters spoke like real people, and the tear-jerking moments weren’t where you expected.
It was also striking that the characters were from all walks of life; the Mancunian conscientious objector worried about his daughter’s heartbreak, the gay American doctor pursuing romance with a black jazz musician in Paris, the jazz singer and factory worker waiting for her boyfriend to come home
World on Fire showed beautifully that the threat of war didn’t stop people eating their breakfast, squabbling with their parents, fancying the boy down the road.
While war upended these characters’ lives, it was also an irritation that got in the way of what they cared about. Bowker’s love of surprising details and unlikely heroes made this oft-depicted period of history seem startlingly new.
https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/world-on-fire-review-bbc1-episode-1-cast-peter-bowker-lesley-manville-sean-bean-638357World on Fire review – ordinary lives caught up in extraordinary times
Peter Bowker’s second world war drama is a beautifully turned ensemble piece starring Lesley Manville and Sean Bean ... and far from standard wartime fare
The subject is war and the pity of it, and it is rendered freshly and exquisitely painful in the new seven-part drama series World on Fire (BBC One). Created by Peter Bowker (The A Word, Capital, Eric and Ernie), it tracks the declaration and first year of the second world war via the intertwining stories of ordinary families trying to go about their ordinary lives in Britain and various European cities that are soon to become flashpoints.
In Manchester, bright, young, middle-class Harry Chase (Jonah Hauer-King) and his bright, young, working-class girlfriend Lois Bennett (Julia Brown) protest at Blackshirt rallies until he must head to Warsaw as a translator for the British embassy. She will be kept busy with her factory work and with running the motherless Bennett household. This includes her wayward brother Tom (Ewan Mitchell) and – bringing home how precipitous the journey was from the great war to another, worse one – her father Douglas (Sean Bean, in stoic, not swashbuckling, mode) who is still suffering from the shellshock he acquired in the trenches. He is a pacifist now.
Harry promises to write but soon finds himself immersed in his new life and with a Polish sweetheart, Kasia (Zofia Wichlacz), instead.
Helen Hunt plays US journalist Nancy Campbell, who is dedicated at increasing personal risk to broadcasting the truth about Nazi plans for invasion. She is also trying – so far in vain – to persuade her nephew Webster (Brian J Smith) to leave Paris, where he works as a doctor and is falling in love with a man who has been attacked – for his race or his homosexuality, we don’t know – by the Action Française
The Germans move on Poland and Kasia’s father heads off to defend Danzig. Her older brother, who insisted, as older brothers will, on fighting alongside him, is captured but escapes. Harry is urged by Nancy to do the right thing: marry Kasia, bring her to England and hope they will be able to bring the rest of the family later to keep them safe. “The game just got bigger,” she says. “Did you?” Lois is still awaiting a letter, but Harry cannot bring himself to write, any more than he can bring himself to tell his mother the news over the phone. Mrs Chase (Lesley Manville, whose recent surge in popularity among casting directors remains a long-overdue delight) is a ruthless snob who has advised Lois to curb her “masculine spirit” and set her sights more realistically on a bank clerk or thereabouts. She also has what she calls “a soft spot for Mr Mosley”, but Harry hopes things will turn out all right in the end. Harry is very young.
There is plenty of action, for those who want it, but this is far from the standard wartime miniseries. It is a beautifully turned ensemble piece, with everyone getting their time in the spotlight as we move between locations without anybody’s characters or storylines feeling underbaked: from dolorous Manchester, where Douglas looks with disbelief at the increasingly awful headlines charting the inexorable descent into war, to convulsing Poland and France, maintaining its facade for a last few precious days.
It manages to maintain a great intimacy with them all, while building outwards to give a sense of the global scale of events. Harry’s idealism is both credible and emblematic. The decisions, such as him and Kasia agreeing to marry, feel like those of people with their own personal motivations rather than a great sense of destiny unfolding. Tiny scenes compress much. When Kasia’s little brother Jan wants to go to school as the Germans invade and is told “not today”, it contains almost everything. The sense of impending cataclysm permeates every level of life. More and more rules and niceties are laid aside until suddenly there is nothing left to do but flee.
The protagonists’ vulnerabilities are all the more poignant for never being laboured. The emphasis is on all the characters’ very ordinariness, which in turn makes the parallels with modern times all the more powerful, frightening – and, particularly in the closing scenes of the first episode – heartbreaking. There is nothing that sets them apart from us except for circumstances beyond their control. Which means that we are, in fact, exactly the same. Although perhaps with more of a sense, however unwillingly, that we are living in history, and with less clarity about who our enemies are, and where they might invade next
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/29/world-on-fire-review-ordinary-lives-caught-up-in-extraordinary-timesWorld on Fire review — the kindling is lit and the drama’s hotting up
War dramas are often called out for historical inaccuracy, but World on Fire possibly set a record by being accused of a “blooper” 40 seconds in. Depicting a fascist rally in Manchester in 1939, the opening scene had the leaders dressed in Blackshirt uniform. But, historians told the Daily Mail, it had been banned under the 1936 Public Order Act, so — haha, gotcha. Fair enough, but it is rather joyless to watch drama with pedant’s pencil in hand, tick-ticking away. The point, I imagine, was to establish instantly that this was a fascist rally in Britain, which is easier with the shorthand of clothing. However, while we’re in pedantry corner I’ll say that I doubt two people singing “Bye bye…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/times2/world-on-fire-review-the-kindling-is-lit-and-the-dramas-hotting-up-zvhh6n30wTV Review / Review: "World on Fire": Convinced the new TVNOW series?
https://www.wunschliste.de/tvkritik/world-on-fire-ueberzeugt-die-neue-tvnow-serie