WORLD WAR I IN COLOUR
Episode 1 TX UK Channel 5
9.00 p.m. Wednesday 23 July 2003
We first learned about this series at the IAMHist Conference at Leicester University 16-19 July. As confirmed by the end-credits of the first episode, it is not a new series, but composed of the archive material dealing with the First World War from the 1995 series that went straight to home video Century of Warfare. The colourisation process was done in India at a cost of $10,000 a minute. The idea, as stressed at the conference, was to attract a larger television audience, and the success or failure of colourisation will be determined largely on that basis.
The end-credits give the scriptwriter as Simon Berthon, one of the two series executive producers. The following information is readily available about him: founding editor of ITV’s current affairs series The Big Story (1993-1996), previously deputy editor of ITV’s World in Action Series, Producer of the BBC series Allies at War and author of the accompanying book (Harper Collins, 2001), Producer of the Channel Four special Churchill v Hitler: The Duel. Obviously Simon Berthon is an experienced producer of historical documentaries, but not a First World War specialist.
Episode one began with a brief overview of notable events in the war, largely in order to showcase the colourisation technique, and then settled down to a narrative starting with the last days of Queen Victoria (died 1901) up to the start of the war and the end of 1914. The script was narrated (rather well, I thought) by Kenneth Branagh.
The end-credits list Charles Messenger as historical consultant. Charles (who is a prolific writer but also not a First World War specialist) was the consultant on the original Century of Warfare and wrote the accompanying book. It is not clear if any historical consultant was used for World War I in Colour as such. Interviews from three historians were used in the first episode: Professor Norman Stone (formerly of Oxford and author of The Eastern Front 1914-1917), Malcolm Brown, and Dr Gary Sheffield, all of them experienced First World War specialists. Interviews were also used with a few remaining First World War veterans, and quotations from the memoirs of participants in the war, some of them very well-known such as Cecil Lewis and Vera Brittain.
The main selling-point of the series is its use of colourisation as a more accurate way of conveying the actual experience of the war, ‘faithfully and with complete attention to detail’ as the script puts it. The only critical comment that I have found came from the reviewer of The Times of London (note to all foreigners: it is incorrect to call this newspaper the London Times) next day, 24 July:
- In World War I in Colour (Five), in which black-and-white footage has been 'colourised', narrator Kenneth Branagh explains the darkroom trickery by telling us that the First World War actually happened in colour?; as if we might not have noticed how bloody the slaughter was, or how brave and selfless our soldiers had been, when we saw the images only in monochrome.
There were primitive colour processes in 1914-1918, and a small amount of colour film does exist, although none was used in the series. We know, of course, that the original monochrome film was always shown tinted, sometimes tinted and toned, and that the fashion for ‘black and white’ film only dates from the 1920s. We also know that the original film manufacturers were very commercially minded and would have been quite happy with any means of earning more money or reaching a mass audience with their films. Interestingly, there was also a debate while the war was being fought as to whether British official photographs should be shown at exhibitions with colour tinting or not, and frequently they were. In short, there is nothing about colourisation or the arguments surrounding it that the 1914-1918 generation would not have understood.
The issue now, as it was then, is the skill with which material is colourised, the impact on audiences, and how good the resulting programme is. The series may pick up a larger audience for its novelty value or not. I have to say that I found some of the colourised film showing scenes in peacetime and shot in cities under optimum conditions quite attractive and effective. But most of the colourised archive was either of an original quality that was less than good, or no trouble had been taken to try and enhance it or to obtain a better quality copy. The advantage of black and white (and of tinting) is that it enhances the contrast on the picture and brings out the detail. In almost all the archive used the colourisation meant that the sky and clouds were lost, even for events when the weather is known to have been good and a bright blue sky would have added much. In several scenes the colourisation made the picture fuzzy and unclear, and harder rather than easier to watch.
One drawback of the colourisation was that it also highlighted weaknesses in the original choice of archive. It is well known (and a problem to film makers as early as 1917) that there is very little film before about 1905, and almost none of the fighting fronts of the war in 1914. The original Century of Warfare adopted the well-known and disreputable technique of using archive that looks vaguely appropriate to ‘suggest’ an episode, presumably letting the commentary carry the actual story. The use of colourisation and the series’ emphasis on the picture as important cruelly exposed this practice. When the narrative talked of ‘Queen Victoria’s Empire’ over stockshots of India, the colourisation drew attention to the red robes of King George V at his Durbah in 1911, visible to one side of the screen. The dashing ‘German’ cavalry supposedly charging the French in the Battle of the Frontiers in August 1914 were shown to be wearing unmistakably Austrian uniforms. A line about the war breaking out ‘in 1914’ ran with King Edward VII (died 1911) at a shooting party. German troops supposedly advancing into Belgium in 1914 moved past a shop-sign prominently highlighted in German rather than Flemish. Australian troops (from 5th Division) and New Zealand troops in 1916, both with their distinctive headgear, were shown among the supposed British volunteers of 1914. General Ferdinand Foch was shown when the commentary talked of General Joseph Joffre. And so on.
There were also many occasions on which the colourisers clearly lacked the knowledge to choose correctly or wisely which colour something should be. Queen Victoria’s black parasol with white lace, its oilskin glistening in the rain, appeared as violet trimmed with gold. British foot guards in dress uniforms wore brick red tunics rather than the true vivid pillar-box red (possibly because this would have swamped the rest of the picture). A marching kilted Scottish regiment defeated the colourisers altogether and ended up wearing a kind of mid-grey pleated skirt. The actual colour of all British Army kilts at this date was the familiar green-and-blue Black Watch tartan, with a thread of another colour – yellow, green or red – to differentiate the individual regiments (had this been real wartime footage they would also have worn apron-like khaki kilt covers). A captured French officer with his men in 1914 was shown wearing a blue(ish) tunic with khaki pantaloons rather than the real vivid red of the ‘pantelons rouges’. All artillery pieces were shown in a mid-grey, when contemporary colourised photographs exist of several of them (and there are even a few real examples in museums) in dark green or splatter camouflage.
Uniform colours for the First World War are not inherently complicated, although the details on close-up shots can be difficult, and there were some variations in all countries. Broadly, the position was as follows. The British (and British Empire) troops wore the same khaki throughout the war, replacing soft caps with steel helmets in 1916. American troops also wore a uniform of British khaki-colour, with a British-style steel helmet. Russian troops wore a brown that was almost the same as the British, but with more grey in it. The French began the war in dark blue, and changed to a light blue-grey (‘horizon blue’) in 1915, replacing the box kepi with a helmet. German troops wore field grey throughout, except for some parade uniforms, changing from the spiked pickelhaube helmet to the ‘coal scuttle’ helmet in later 1916; for war the pickelhaube was always worn with a cloth cover, which also covered the spike (alternatively the spike was removed). Austrian troops wore jaeger grey in battle, lighter than German field grey and with less green in it.
Sometimes the colourising was close enough to be plausible. But far too often, perhaps because of the quality of the original archive with which they were working, the colourisers adopted a uniform of washed out eau-de-nil for French, Austrian and even German troops. Alternatively, the Germans and the French (and on one occasion the parade dress of the British Royal Horse Guards) were shown as a midnight blue or black. For the French in particular, the use of this light blue for troops supposedly in 1914 only served to highlight the fact that the archive was incorrect.
There was actually one moment in the programme at which the ability to use the ‘wrong’ colour would have helped the story. An account of the battle of Tannenburg showed a still of Hindenburg and Ludendorff together in 1917, their uniforms colourised as German field grey (or, again, the neutral eau-de-nil). But there is a very famous story that Hindenburg, who had been recalled to active service, showed up wearing his old pre-war Prussian blue tunic, and the opportunity to ‘lie’ with colourisation could have provided a nice television moment – if anyone in the production had known the story.
It could be (and doubtless will be) argued that the exact colour of uniforms is pedantry – although for a series whose selling-point is accurate use of colour this is a difficult argument. But the same issue appeared in the use archive depicting views of the battlefields. Despite the commentary, grass is not always green (at least, a vivid green) and mud is not always brown. A red-brown mud was shown for British troops in the Ypres area, where the soil is very dark and sometimes black, and for the Somme, where it is a distinctive whitish-yellow. If this is forgivable, then there are much worse examples. A well-known shot of the Somme lowlands was used to depict the French terrain in the Battle of the Frontiers, which is comparable to using a scene from the Sussex downs to depict the Scottish highlands. Again, and so on…
The worst use of misleading archive was in a sequence that ended the programme, dealing with the First Battle of Ypres. Generic footage was used of the level of destruction in the town that was actually shot in 1917, which is rather like using film of Cologne in 1945 to represent RAF bombing in 1940. The colourisation showed the ruins of a large cathedral-like building as grey, presumably because all cathedrals are built of grey stone. In fact, Ypres Cloth Hall (about the most famous landmark in the town) is multi-coloured brick, yellow stone and slate. The commentary suggested Ypres as setting the pattern for all future Western Front battles, presumably to justify the use of archive of deep trenches with thick barbed-wire entanglements, neither of which existed in the battle, and of scenes of trench flooding that took place considerably further south and over a year later, under utterly different circumstances. This is comparable to showing footage of an orang-utan and a chimpanzee while talking about gorillas (well, they are all apes, aren’t they…).
Listing every abuse of the archive and shortcoming of colourisation in this episode would not be an impractically long task. But producers do what they can with the material available. It is unfortunate that a series based on the selling-point of colourised archive should get its visuals so wrong, but this might be redeemed in part by a good script. Unfortunately, the same relaxed attitude to accuracy that characterised the use of archive also appears in the commentary. The quotations from memoirs and the veteran interviewees were sometimes used, if not completely out of context, then not always completely in context either. The three historians spoke accurately, but in particular Malcolm Brown was apparently mis-cut to appear to say that Britain had a pre-war alliance with France and Russia (I am assuming that the fault was in the editing, as that is the sort of mistake I cannot believe Malcolm would ever make). Even more strange was the use of darkened archive to ‘suggest’ the 1914 Christmas Truce, on which Malcolm has written the definitive book, and of which several famous photographs do exist.
There were other factual errors in the script, all of them the sort of slip that anyone with any serious knowledge of the war and its context simply could never make. One was the retelling yet again of the ‘taxis of the Marne’ story. The pictures are nice, and it certainly happened, but if every Paris taxi had been used they could have transported no more than about 2,000 men (a brigade), and not Gallieni’s entire army as the script claimed. The script also had the ‘war of 1870’ rather than 1870-1871, that the British ‘literally collided with the Germans at the town of Mons’ in 1914, and Russian staff cars on parade mis-identified as ‘armoured cars’. Most significantly, in the kind of mistake that is a litmus test of people who have studied the war (as opposed to those who think they have studied it), General Erich Ludendorff appeared as ‘General Erich von Ludendorff’ – and since this was a quotation from his memoirs the producers might at least have looked at the title page.
Putting the use of archive and colourisation together with the script, this is about as low a standard in historical documentaries about the First World War as I ever hope to see. One sad thing is that I can see from it how colourisation could be used as a valuable tool to help documentary making. Is it unfair to ask whether all the money went into paying for the colourisation process and there was none left for attention to the quality of the programme afterwards?
No one disputes that a television documentary needs to be entertaining and attractive. But my own experience has been that the higher the quality, the bigger the audience – both this time and for the next programme you make. There is – as we know from the occasional success – an audience of 3-5 million viewers or more for good military history documentaries out there in Great Britain alone. The attitude that real history is somehow too good for them, and that they will be content with anything they are given, is bad business as well as bad programme making. Let’s chalk this one up to experience, look at the viewing figures, and see what the next decision is.
Stephen Badsey
