Ordinary People, Extraordinary War: A Review of BBC Radio 4’s 'Home Front'
BBC Radio 4’s The Home Front was the most ambitious radio drama project the BBC had embarked upon for more than half a century. Spanning four years, six-hundred episodes and sixty-eight characters, The Home Front brought to life the stories, events and emotions of everyday life on the First World War British home front.
The first episode opens with a reminder of the series’ purpose: to commemorate the centenary of the Great War. Starting with an episode set on 4th August 1914, and published on the 4th August 2014, the show would plot, practically day-by-day for the majority of the next four centenary years. With a classic, Radio 4, cut-glass English voice, the episode opens: ‘A hundred years ago today, Britain waited to see whether Germany would agree to respect the neutrality of Belgium and British/German negotiations took a new turn for Kitty Wilson of Folkestone…’ Immediately, the listener is contextualised into the situation. First, the macro, present context of the centenaries, then the invoked temporal context of 1914, and finally the micro context of Kitty Wilson and her life in Folkestone. It acts as a door into the world, making it less necessary for the characters to have long monologues of exposition and world-building. It draws the listener in, telling them why it matters and links to them in the present, where they are going to be taken, and who they are going to meet.
Accompanied with a short jingle that is entirely sentimental (and not necessarily in a negative way) and screams of other period pieces like The Archers, All Creatures Great and Small, and Agatha Christies’ TV adaptations, the listener is embraced in the warm and cosy arms of classic, quintessentially British nostalgia. This is a pattern continued in every episode of the show, with a brief, scene-setting introduction followed by a personal greeting from the voice of the main character.
This introduction also illustrates the place of the show as a whole. It stands somewhere between history and memory, telling the overarching story of the First World War through the fictitious lives of ordinary people. The listener is invited into the world of 1914-18, and is met with a cast of people that feel as though they could have actually existed. It is a show that straddles fact and fiction, authenticity and realism. More than anything, to borrow the words of Kate Lacey, a professor of Media History and Theory, the show endeavours to reproduce an ‘“original” listening experience’, constituting ‘a new form of public experience’. It wants to pull the listener into the world of 1914, with all the fears, concerns, emotions and anxiety of a British public waiting for a declaration of war. It does this exceedingly well. By not bogging down the story attempting to explain the complicated political situation that led to the outbreak of the First World War, and by focussing primarily on the newly-taut relationship between a young Kentish girl and a German waiter; the first episode illustrates the whirlwind concoction of fear, anxiety, wariness, excitement and optimism that gripped Britain in August 1914. The relationship between Kitty and Dieter acts as a micro reflection of the wider British public. Everyone was surprised, a few were excited, many were fearful.
As described by Richard Brooks for The Conversation, ‘In order to address the vastness of the shared experience, while also keeping a sense of the personal, the production uses the clever trick of telling each episode from a different viewpoint.’ This collection of individual, parallel, overlapping stories work together to present a transportive listening experience that rekindles the world of 1914, reanimating the stories of those people that lived and experienced the War to End All Wars. It is effective, visceral and engaging.
There are flaws, however, in this otherwise beautifully woven ‘tapestry’ of a series. The tendency of the show to be entirely dialogue-led might be one of my only critiques. While it works, as it is a radio drama, it can sometimes be detrimental to the experience they are trying to create. Sometimes, the consistent dialogue can disrupt the ‘atmosphere’ of the world, overshadowing the incredibly well-produced soundscapes and textures in the background. In the real world, there are moments of silence, moments of hesitation, moments where the noise of the outside world overtakes our voices. If more of these instances were present in the show, it might serve to create an even more immersive and engaging drama.
On the whole The Home Front, in all its grand scale and vast scope, is a very well-made, incredibly engaging, at points intimate, and, it must be said, rather addictive radio drama. Targeting the ordinary British public with unknown, personal stories of our counterparts one hundred years ago, the show does a good job of transporting the modern listener back to the world of World War One. And, in the words of Paul Simon for the Guardian, ‘Like those artists, the writers, producers and actors of Home Front have produced a magnificent, lasting memorial to lost voices of the First World War that they can be proud of.’ As an act of commemoration, it’s powerful, and makes a rather indelible mark on the landscape of historical radio dramas, and might go down in history as a landmark in the public history of the First World War in Britain.
Bibliography and Further Reading:
Lacey, Kate, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, (Polity Press: 2013)
Brooks, Richard, ‘Home Front: 100 years on, BBC’s groundbreaking four-year experiment brought real people to life’, The Conversation
Series Editor Jessica Dromgoole quoted in Chisholm, Kate, ‘Tapestry of war’, The Spectator
Simon, Paul, ‘Home Front and Tommies: epic radio dramas of the first world war’, The Guardian
