Thursday 24 December 2015

Merry Christmas to all the Deighton Dossier readers ...

Not much fun on Christmas Eve
Thank you to everyone who has visited the Deighton Dossier blog and website in 2015 - I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

For fans of Len Deighton's fiction, 2016 should be an exciting year with the completion of the BBC adaptation of SS-GB. Fingers crossed it proves to be a smash-hit.

I hope that your Christmas is a lot better than Bernard Samson's in London Match:
"And so it was that, on Christmas Eve, when Gloria was with my children, preparing them for early bed so that Santa Claus could operate undisturbed, I was standing watching the Berlin police trying to winch a wrecked car out of the water."

Sunday 20 December 2015

Did Oh! What a Lovely War shape our view of WWI - the BBC investigates ....

Very interesting piece up on the BBC's iWonder section of its website, linked to a piece about great British war films and their influence, which considers how the OWALW narrative has shaped our collective view of the Great War.

This article with short audio pieces by journalist Joan Bakewell is an interactive look at the original stage production of the play and the film produced by Len Deighton in 1969, which adapted the original theatre production from the London stage to the English coast at Brighton, and their continued influence on our understanding of the war.

Joan Bakewell explores a number of familiar tropes that are linked to the play and film, such as the controversy associated with both version at the time of their release, the influence of Charles Chilton's The Long, Long Tail on the film production, and the boost the film gave to reviving numerous stage productions of the original play.

Even 101 years after its start, the Great War still plays upon our understanding of the nature of war and its impact on all our lives.