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from The
Guardian Monday 25 June 2001
 BBC
offers fortnight in the trenches
Horror of life on western front
latest challenge for reality TV
by Tania Branigan
Wanted:
25 young men for a fortnight’s trip to the continent. Must be willing to
wade through mud, live with rats and maggots, and be gassed, deprived of
sleep and subjected to simulated shelling.
If
that sounds like hell, the programme-makers have almost got it right. The BBC
is trying to simulate life In a first world war trench for the most ambitious
"reality TV" show yet
produced: a recreation of life on
the western front in November 1916.
Volunteers
will spend two weeks in a trench dug along the
old French lines and will be exposed to tear gas, woken at all
hours, and will have to wear heavy
tin helmets night and day. Each will play a real-life soldier
and will have no idea when he is
going to "die" — until producers remove him.
"It
is conceived as a serious documentary
with a serious message and
educational purpose, rather than as reality TV," a BBC spokesman said
yesterday.
The
aim was to bring home the horrors of the war to a generation that knew little
of the conflict. "It is being
meticulously researched ... There will be
interviews with people who were
directly involved."
But
some historians argue that the show will offer little insight into the war. "If it
reminds people of
how bloody horrible it was, fine. The majority of my students probably wouldn’t
know the difference between Hitler and the kaiser," said
Julian Putkowski, who lectures at King’s College London, and has written
extensively on the first world war.
"But
it doesn’t do much more than
reinforce the existing stereotype that the war was about lads volunteering for the trenches. "It’s a male,
Eurocentric view. We had nearly 100,000 Chinese soldiers on the western
front."
People tended not to consider the "many
Asian, African and
West Indian men who took part, the soldiers who were not on the front line or
the role of women.
"It
becomes theatre ... If viewers come away thinking 'God, that was horrible’,
they are getting 0.5% of the
horror.
"In purely physical terms,
these people will be taller and stronger — really you would have
to take people who were prone to disease. They should be traumatised, having
seen a third of their schoolfriends killed in the previous six months. And I
hope they include a 16 or 17-year-old; by their own estimate, 15% of the British army was under age.
"You
would need at least one person with venereal disease, and another would need
to get the news that his wife had run off
with someone else. They would have
no sleep for three or four days on
end. They would suffer hypothermia, ice and lice-borne infections."
Kevin
Smith, who has tried life in the
trenches as a member of the Association of Military Remembrance, also
expressed doubts about the
project. "We don’t attempt
to recreate battle," he said. "It borders on bad taste,
and you cannot simulate that fear
or danger."
Life
in the trenches was "90% tedium, and the authenticity will suffer
because they will have to provide entertainment or people won’t watch
it".
The
programme-makers say they are keen
to reproduce the experience as wholly as possible, health and safety
guidelines permitting. David Colthurst,
the executive producer told the Sunday Telegraph: "We will be recreating
every detail of the whole miserable experience. It will seem pretty damn
real."
The
BBC’s factual programmes department has had dozens of calls from people
keen to take part. "They will have their work cut out," said Mr Smith,
describing his attempt to recreate the Christmas truce of 1914 in Flanders by
redigging the original trench two years ago.
During
the seven days "it flooded, and one chap went down with hypothermia, You
are never clean, never comfortable, always tired. You put things down and they
disappear in the mud. The hardest thing was the cold. You were out there with
no prospect of getting dry, but at least we knew that at the end of the week we were going home"
Fewer
than 200 first world war soldiers survive, all aged between
100 and 107. Dennis Goodwin, chairman of the World War One Veterans
Association,
said: "The show will give people some idea of what it was like, because a
lot of young kids today don’t have a clue."
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