Television Drama and the People's War: David Hare's Licking Hitler, Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game, and Trevor Griffiths' s Country

Abstract

But as the sixties themselves began, with hindsight, to take on those very qualities "of manoeuvre, concession, and studied betrayal" of which Calder speaks, so his view of the Second World War achieved a wider currency, not least through its influence on some of the best of recent television drama. In David Hare's Licking Hitler (first broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1978), Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game (i980), and Trevor Griffiths's Country (1981), we have attempts by three writers, themselves children of the forties, to deal with what, largely as the result of Calder's work, they have come to see as the true historical significance of the War - an historical significance that lies beneath the familiar iconography of Spitfires and buzz-bombs, of fishing boats off the coast of Dunkirk, of sleeping figures on the platforms of the underground. It was as a direct result of reading Calder's book in 1978 that Ian McEwan "resolved to write something one day about the war." For David Hare, "reading Angus Calder's The People's War changed all my thinking as a writer; an account of the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people, it attempts a complete alternative history to the phoney and corrupting history I was taught at school.” What caught these writers' imaginations, and seemed to strike them as true, was the paradox that Calder deliberately emphasizes in everything he has to say about the War: that a national experience which seemed, despite the suffering, to offer new beginnings, new roles, which seemed to point the way to an exciting and fulfilling future, was in fact a dead end.