The First World War From Above

BBC - BBC TV blog: The First World War From Above

I was approached to direct The First World War From Above earlier this year. Back then, my fantastic production team at the BBC had put together a dazzling array of stories and elements.

These included a piece of extraordinary archive footage, filmed from a camera strapped to a French airship in summer 1919, following the route of the Western Front and capturing the devastation in amazingly graphic detail. There was also the Imperial War Museum's collection of 150,000 First World War aerial photographs, a fascinating set of images giving a birds eye view of the battlefields.



The programme is on this Sunday at 9pm

 

Shame they are claiming it is 'new' and all the aerial photos are 'new' when they have been in widespread use by authors (such as myself) and also BBC made television programmes for some time.

But... am sure it will be interesting.

 

Hi Paul,

Did you see the film clip tonight on BBC News at 6pm. It was footage filmed from an airship in 1919 over Ypres that they were claiming as never seen before. Has that been in circulation for a while?

A

 

If it was taken by a French airship then there is a possibility that British audiences were not able to see it before now or at least until someone had the motivation and interest to use the present day media systems to broadcast it.

To see it post Great War,the British general public,if the documentary was available to the British media would have had to seen it at the cinema.This was the only media conduit for the general public to gain access to what was happening elsewhere.During the Second World War, apart from the BBC wireless news which people listened to every day with the general summing up being done on the Home Service each night at 9 PM,there was no visualnews regarding what was happening in the progress of the war.The only visual information was available via the cinema official newsreels which was often up to a fortnight and more after the actual events.I think we tend to forget how far we have come to the present time to see history being made in "realtime"

Media technology appears to know no bounds.It is now common to see historical newsreels that are found,identified and edited and shown to a mass public audience.There is no doubt that historians will have had access to the documentary before but its use appears to have been restricted to the use of frames in support of their particular work.I must say I have oftened wondered where these frames have been extracted from.

Looking forward to seeing the documentary on Sunday.VCR on standby

 

Harry, you are confusing two different sources here. The aerial photos are drawn from the IWM archives and have been available for many, many years. The film footage is of French origin but I am sure I once saw it in the IWM cinema in the 1980s, unless it is a different film. If it's the one I'm think of extracts have been used for at least two programmes I've worked on.

 

I am looking forward to seeing this, thanks for the heads up Andy.
Seen quite a few WW1 aerial photos and always found them interesting. Many of the more commonly seen ones cover the major battles, Somme, Verdun, Passchendael etc but I would like to see pics of some of the 'quieter' areas as well to get a sense of the entire situation.

Mike

 

Yes, the directors blog indicates that have woven them into stories on the ground, which should indeed make it an interesting programme.

 

Here's an example from my archives of what we are talking about. This is an area where Third Ypres was fought over in 1917.

 

Yes Paul, exactly the sort of photo I was referring to. Utter devaststion.
But there must be some that show trench patterns in other areas where perhaps buildings and field sytems are (almost) intact allowing easier identification of the geography (and perhaps allowing 'then and now' photos).

Mike

 

Absolutely. I'll post some more tomorrow.

 

Cheers Paul and Owen. Not WW2 I know but perhaps it might merit it's own little thread?

Mike

 

Teriffic Owen, just the sort of photo I was thinking of. Someone who knows how to work in Google Earth better than I could probably do a 'then and now' from those.
Note to self - have a fiddle in GE this weekend!

Mike

 

It is claimed that the French footage of 1919 has not been seen before (by British audiences?).The other element to the documentary is that it is said there is film footage taken by Great War pilots,perhaps from all sides.We shall see.

I think that frame "fill in"appears to be quite common in Second World War documentaries and as I have said one can recognise these frames which appear frequently used in the production of Great War documentaries.

 

I thought it was a very powerful programme, the daughter who saw her father for the first time ...... at the controls of an airship before she was born , he shot by the Gestapo when she was an infant.
The images of the exploded mines and the small scattered WW1 cemeteries not to mention Tyne Cot..... I am ashamed I don't know more about WW1, I really am.

 

That was pretty crap TV wasn't it?
Yep. Certainly not what was trailed.