Wednesday 26 October 2011

JUST TO BE REMEMBERED...


FIRST LIGHT-BBC TWO DRAMA DOCUMENTARY.
Television Event looks back on one of the highlights of BBC Two's 70th anniversary of Battle of Britain season, drama doc First Light.

First Light, is a BBC documentary drama telling the story of 18 year old Geoffrey Wellum was one of the youngest Spitfire pilots to go into combat in the Battle of Britain. Which was shown as part of the Battle of Britain 70th anniversary last year.

It's a simply written, simply filmed and simply acted documentary drama taking us through the years of Battle of Britain through the eyes of Geoffrey and how he in his own words he became not a hero but a survivor. The simplest of this documentary drama, is what makes it ordinarily beautiful and it's exactly that which reminds the audience that these men fighting in the battle of Britain, weren't action heroes, nor were they just another number on a long list of pilots. They were simply ordinary men doing there bit, merely wanting to survive.


As the story unfolds there are , no dramatic deaths, no love triangles and no dramatic plot twists. What we do see is the story of their survival, the forming of a family, their struggle to cope with the horrors they face everyday and the knowledge that not all of them can survive weighing heavily on their shoulders.

One of the most moving scenes is simply portrayed with George's voiceover and a flying spitfire, when George talks about the freedom of flying the skies and how there is nothing quite like it,” flying alone nothing gives such a sense of mastery over mechanism, master indeed over space, time life itself, as this. Only the lonely threshers of the sky hidden from the earth have gazed on them. Only we who went up to the high places in the shadows of the wings."


This harrowing first hand account tells the tale of a survivor of Battle of Britain, in a way that makes us the audience realise and remember that these pilots weren't just a number of who fought in the Battle of Britain. They had lives before during and if they survived after the war. They were ordinary people, that went down to the pub for a drink after work, that laughed and cried with their friends and that these men that fought the battle of Britain could have been anyone of us today, from students, to bank managers, to the milkman, the bus driver dare it be said even politicians.

With it being an event that's 70 years in our past it's easy to forget now how easy we really do have it despite the world telling us that the economy is doomed, our grand children's children will be in debt and that essentially the world is quite literally falling apart around us. Ok so the last part may not be true just yet, but the point still stands, we've started to forget our history and our heritage. There were times so much darker and harder then we could possibly imagine.


We should remember that over 70 years ago now that these brave young men fought for the freedom of their country, they didn't ask or want to be heroes, they simply wanted to survive each day as it came. Sadly not all of them did and it's Geoffrey himself who puts it simply at the end of this truly moving piece of television "Nobody wants a medal, nobody wants a thank you, but it would be nice just to remembered because then you must think of all of us and not just those of us who survived."

 
First Light is currently available on BBC iplayer.


It is also available from both Play.com and Amazon.com.