A Family At War - Series 1 [DVD]

Product Information

They get through D-Day preparations, D-Day, the whole 1944-45 campaign and VE day with only David’s career in the RAF providing a link to the war. The 52 episodes of the series were broadcast on the ITV network between April 1970 and February 1972. When I read about the young Margaret Stout offering lectures on food economy, I wondered how well this would have gone down outside the bright lights of the well-heeled Lerwegians who made up the town’s middle and upper classes. By August that same year, one of Granada’s press releases was able to boast that A Family at War was now ‘top of the national TV ratings.

Yes, much of the domestic intrigue probably passed me by, but other issues hit home strongly – the various brothers away at war while life continued at home, the character of Sefton Briggs (played by John McKelvey), who struck me as being particularly sinister, and the lovely Sheila Ashton (played by Coral Atkins) who struck a young boy in a rather different way. A later pupil was Harold Pinter, and guesses have been made that Pinter took his stage name as an actor, David Baron, from the inspiration of Alexander Baron.

The programme lined up a nostalgic parade of programmes from Granada’s programming history: the television milestone Coronation Street –obviously – as well as pioneering factual series running the gamut from World in Action to This Morning. Made in a nearly continuous two-year production period, each episode begins on a specific date from August 1938 to December 1945, with the drama unfolding over the course of the entire war. The Ashtons have two daughters, Margaret (Mags) a schoolteacher, and Freda who is the chirpy independent one, and three sons. We protested that there were more of them, but as they pointed out, they all understood English almost perfectly. incidently, was the double nudity scene at the window, with Michael and his girl-friend, a “shocking” first for UK TV ?

The producer, the series planner and the designer needed all this knowledge in advance to organise their work. The second week was devoted to rehearsals for the studio scenes which made up the major portion of the show. Keith Barron bravely took the plunge but confessed: “I can feel people’s eyes on the back of my head.The series is about the Ashton family who live through the Second World War and struggle with the harsh realities that go on around it. As well as documenting a family at war, this book also demonstrates the rich tapestry of social events and concerts in Lerwick during this time of great social change. It was one of those series that kept you close to the screen and always in place as each hour episode was shown. Many of the cast of Coronation Street made early appearances in Family: Julie Goodyear, Bryan Mosley, Bill Waddington, Geoffrey Hinsliff and Barbara Knox among them. She is the author of David Lean (2014) and Female Stars of British Cinema (2017) and a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema’.

By series two, you can see how they were working the schedule to film so much so quickly by using different production units. I remember sitting down to watch AFaW with my mother, expecting somethjng along the lines of a war film or something similar to the Colditz series about prisoners of war from the same period. Being able to watch the whole of A Family at War had only been made possible because of its release on DVD box-set by Acorn Media UK, bringing another previously unobtainable television text back into the public domain.

Although the series was set in Liverpool most of the home front exteriors were shot in Manchester where Granada Television was based. I live in the US and our region is different so under ordinary circumstances DVDs produced in England were unplayable in the US. I am too young to remember it very well when it was televised, my mom used to put it on every week and was spellbound. Although sometimes working through such a marathon viewing task felt like a feat of endurance as much as a pleasure, on balance I think it was precisely because of the epic duration and stately pace of the series that I became so thoroughly enamoured with it. We’re very rarely offered any insights into the lives of Lerwick’s middle and upper-class families, and people may be mistaken in thinking that Shetland lacked any sort of cultural scene.

Critics at the time sometimes complained of ‘women’s magazine atmospherics’ ( Daily Mail, 21 January 1971), or that the show’s appeal replicated that of ‘the women’s magazines my mother used to read’ ( Daily Express, 12 November 1970) or even that its narrative catalysts were nothing more than ‘the puny domestic bombshells that trigger off all soap opera, in fact. And yet despite their obvious differences in genre and approach, the two series inadvertently have a lot in common, both being epic in length and driven by a desire to provide as comprehensive a chronicle of the war as possible but one achieving that end through microcosm and the other by macrocosm.In the North African Desert, seagrass sprouts from the dunes, the sky is grey, and in at least one shot the grey sea is seen in the distance. We decided to get a box set, and discovered that by far the cheapest option was the Dutch edition of the whole thing. I think this is grossly unfair, and it’s not a description that was applied to it at the time as far as I remember. Hazard also uses ‘Senoritas’ to describe the Spanish (probably inoffensive), Reds to describe the Spanish Republicans, and Jerries to describe the Germans.