06 June 2014 – Anniversary of D-Day

Brian White

Just a small acknowledgement of the colossal debt we owe to that dedicated group who set sail from our shores to take on Hell Fire to rid Europe of a deranged dictator.

A percentage of our own merry band will recall these terrible events but the cost of freedom for all future generations was very high.

A suggestion that, as our group may be verging on the introspective at the moment, we could compile a list of any productions we were associated with that were linked to WW2.

To start it off with “Robert Oppenheimer” at the serious end to “Allo Allo” and “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum” at the lightweight end by way of “The White Rabbit”  and the series about women prisoners “Tenko” (Graeme Wall and others).

Albert Barber

Jeremy Swan told me that he was in the lift at the rehearsal Rooms at Acton and there were a couple of elderly actresses with him when one said to the other, “What are you working on dear?” to which the other replied, “It’s new and set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp”. The other lady asked, “What is it called“ the other replied, “I forget the title um….Oh yes, Wanko!”

Derek Martin, Graeme Wall, Dave Mundy, Gary Critcher, Len Shorey, Doug Puddifoot,  Dudley Darby

• “Colditz”
• “Secret War”
• “Dad’s Army”
• “Moonstrike” with the lovely old Lysander plane.
• “Fortunes Of War”  starring Ken and Em.
• “A Pyre To Private James” 1966. 
• “The July Plot” a “Wednesday Play” about the attempt to assassinate Hitler. 1964
• “Spycatcher” with Bernard Archard, exploits of Colonel Oreste Pinto I believe

Dave Jervis

• “Over Here”

(1996)  Written by John Sullivan, directed by Tony Dow.  It’s not often you get to go filming  with a B17 Bomber, two Me 109s and a BAE Hawk, but I wasn’t there the day they had five Spitfires!

John Howell, Patrick Heigham

• “Secret Army”

another Gerry Glaister masterpiece, starring, amongst others, Bernard Hepton and Peter Hammond’s daughter Juliet Hammond-Hill. Programmes directed by the likes of Vicktors Ritelis, Ken Ives, and Paul Annett.

“Secret Army” was the serious version of “’Allo ‘Allo”.

Roger Bunce, Patrick Heigham

There was an excellent series about Orde Wingate, starring Barry Foster, shot at TC with stylised scenery.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry:

“…In 1976 the BBC produced a three-part drama called Orde Wingate, based on his life, in which he was played by Barry Foster. The programme was made on a limited budget with reduced or stylized settings. It did not attempt to tell the complete story of his life, but presented key episodes in a non-linear way, mainly his time in Palestine but including Burma. Foster reprised his role as Wingate in a 1982 TV movie “A Woman Called Golda”…”

Roger Bunce

Then there was “Churchill and the Generals” (I think that was BBC). On the Home Front, “The Girls of Slender Means”, set between V.E. Day and V.J. Day, must count as a WWII serial, and “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” was a tale of wartime evacuee children – with a difference.

Dave Lawson

To add the Far East, there was “Naked Island” in Riverside 1964-5-ish. I looked in the various archive sites but the only reference I found had it in 1965 and shot in colour.

Geoff Fletcher, Derek Martin and John Smith

There were at least two WW2 dramas as single plays. One play I worked was “Hold My Hand” shot in TC3  on Wednesday 1 September (1200 – 2215) and Thursday 2 September  (1000 – 2230), and it was done by  Crew 16.  

The play had a cast of only 3 – Norman Rossington being one of them – and was about two squaddies carrying an officer around who had lost both feet after stepping on a mine somewhere in France post D-Day.

The sets consisted of a ruined church and I think a cottage, but most of the studio was taken up with an amazing set of a river complete with running water and a Bailey Bridge crossing it. There was a camera hoisted up onto the Bailey Bridge set.  John worked on that and vividly remembers swinging Ken Major on the Mole over the river water.

The final scene involved troops running over the bridge under fire – lots of lovely pyros! 

Geoff was tracking a creeper apparently. Only other details that his diary mentioned were “Chaos at canteen. Very good set” on Wednesday, and  “35 minute de-rig but managed to down 2 pints at TC Club afterwards” on the Thursday.

Geoff Fletcher

Also, wasn’t there a very interesting play about a sentry on duty at an airfield who fell asleep on duty on a freezing night and was sent by mistake to a an RAF psychiatric unit. Here he met up with various bomber aircrew with  post op stress. They thought he was also aircrew and to help one of them recover they formed chairs up in the ward in the appropriate positions for a Lancaster crew and re-flew his final op. They were a gunner short and he was roped in to fill the spot. He thought it was all a huge joke at first but then got taken into it. The lighting changed to typical WW2 movie aircraft interior style with appropriate sound and lighting effects, the voices were altered to sound like intercom, all the shots became MCUs at various appropriate angles – eg. bomb aimer from below –  and the viewer  also became totally absorbed – so much so that hen  a nurse burst into the ward and put the main lights on it was a shock to find them just sitting on chairs in the hospital ward. Brilliant! I think this was a BBC production but again I can’t recall the title. 

David Wagner

The 1970s play about the sentry was called “The Brylcreem Boys” and your description is accurate. I was one of the boom ops for this with Richard Partridge as the Sound Supervisor. A very emotional 3 days and I thought the play, particularly after the Dub, was brilliant.

(ed: tx 21 Nov. 1979)

Mike Cotton

My memory of “The Brylcreem Boys” is slightly different, it involves a fishing rod, a wheel chair and Chris Maurice.  The programme is available on YouTube.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3qQhxEYM-c)

Geoff Fletcher

So pleased someone else shares my appreciation for this drama. I watched it alone in the house with the lights dimmed down – got totally involved. I have a lifelong interest in aviation, especially as regards WW2. I knew an ex Lancaster radio op who also thought highly of it, and he should know as he’d been there – 32 ops on Lancasters! A gem!

Pat Heigham

Ah! The Lancaster! I have a very sincere regard for the brave chaps who flew sorties over enemy territory, and helped our survival.

Some time ago I did a shoot for “Magpie” (the ITV answer to BP) and at Cardington was the last flying Lanc in this country.  I crawled along and sat in the tail gunner’s position and although the tarmac was but a few feet below, I tried to imagine what it must have been like in the dark with everybody downstairs trying to kill you. It was so far from the rest of the crew at the front end, that it really felt ‘out on a limb’.

A tale from the Film Industry – one of my Production Mixers with whom I worked whilst freelance, had been the Mixer on “Battle of Britain” and told me that the Sound Editor – Jimmy Shields – painstakingly replaced the film Lancasters’ engine sound (which were ‘restored’ or copy units), with library recordings of proper Merlin engines.

Peter Coombes

I don’t quite follow this – there is no Lancaster in the 1969 film “Battle of Britain” (or in the actual battle!) 

On the other hand, in that film,  Merlin-powered Spanish aircraft stand in for both the He111 and Bf109.

And the CASA 352 for the opening sequence…….

Geoff Fletcher

Group Captain Hamish Mahaddie DSO, DFC, AFC and bar spent three years getting together the aircraft for the film. I believe it was the 26th largest in the world and it included 50 He 111s, 28 Me 109s, a couple of squadrons of airworthy Spitfires and 3 or 4 Hurricanes, plus Spitfire runners for ground use, and the B-25 camera ship.

A truly amazing feat at the time.

                  (Click on the picture below to see a larger or clearer version of this picture:
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(Photos:  Geoff Fletcher)

Len Shorey

Eric Furze, a TVC camera man and TOM.  He was RAF bomber aircrew and was shot down over Germany.

Alasdair Lawrance

“Goodnight Sweetheart” with Nicholas Lyndhurst was good, certainly the first series.

Patrick Heigham

On another channel (!) I worked on “Enemy at the Door” on location in Jersey. The extras wandering around in German uniforms were not popular with the residents, and were getting vicious looks! A night scene involving a get-away in a small boat had SFX using live tracer rounds to get the splashes in the water. Scared the hell out of the crew!

David Brunt, Hugh Sheppard, Mike Cotton

“The Silver Sword” and “The Long Way Home”, from childrens’ television.

“The Long Way Home” circa 1960, a series produced and directed by Shaun Sutton – and believed to written by him too.  Starred Patrick Cargill as a ‘nasty’ (rather than a Nazi) who somehow when captured, stepped out of uniform and into a mac, then hailed a taxi, Hugh was cable-clearing on crew 6 and can see him in my mind’s eye now; a few years before I tracked Bill Millar (RIP) on “Hancock” with Cargill in “The Blood Donor”.

In his early days of Television Mike Cotton worked on “The Silver Sword” believed to be with Crew 6 and Kev White and Eddie Curzon.

David Brunt

The late 1950s also saw the pre-Colditz war camp series “Escape”. I think a few episodes survive of that.

Peter Hider

The late lamented Jim Atkinson was on a transatlantic crane on a production in TC1 that was set in a concentration camp. I think the principal actor was Ronnie Lacey who, I remember, finished up against the barbed wire fence between two huts at the end of a very long developing shot . The floor was covered in mud and thus the crane was required to reach right over the huts and across the studio. I’m sure that either or both Rodney Taylor and Geoff Clark would have been on it and the arm was probably swung by Dave Mutton who could lift a Transatlantic weight as if it were made of polystyene.

I worked on “Mr & Mrs Edgehill” for Drama Films in 1984, directed by Gavin Millar and produced by Alan Shallcross.  This was based on a Somerset Maugham story of an English couple who, during WWII, go to a deserted British island in the Pacific to represent Britain while the Americans build a seaplane base. It starred Judi Dench and Ian Holm and was shot in the Foreign Office and Sri Lanka. A great little film.

Another production I worked on was “The Machine Gunners”, a series set in Newcastle during the war about a group of kids who find a crashed German aircraft and set up a defence post on the coast using its machine gun. Colin Cant of Grange Hill Directed and Paul Stone Produced it for children’s drama.

Another WWII drama concerned the “Death of Anton Weburn”, the composer whose house was being guarded in 1945 at the end of the war by a cook from the American army. Weburn lit a cigar at night on the balcony of the house and the cook, who thought it was the click of a rifle of a potential assassin fired and shot Weburn. The cook was distraught with remorse and ultimately died of alcoholism in 1955. I can’t find any trace of the production. 

John Howell (2)

“Roads to Freedom”  –  Final episodes, French town besieged by the Nazis. Designer Spencer Chapman built a belfry in the studio complete with pigeons.

Attending the Tech Run at Acton we weren’t told that the rifles were loaded, only blanks,  but boy was it loud!

Michael Briant, Daniel Massey, Georgia Brown and many more stars.
PA: Ken Riddington,
Director: Jimmy Cellan-Jones (who referred to Sound as “The Wireless Department”)
TC4, September 1970

Peter Hider

In the mid-1960’s Michael Bakewell produced “Sword of Honour” based on the Evelyn Waugh novels about the futility of war. Donald McWhinnie directed and it starred Edward Woodward and Ronnie Fraser.

The director Rob Knights did a three episode series entitled “Long Voyage Out of War” in 1971 starring Mike Pratt, who was one of “Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)”. It was lit by Sam Barclay. Mark Shivas produced it and the writing credit goes to Ian Cuteis.