WW2Wimb. {Esp P, Sir C and all going on about Enigma and World At War doc.}

[Peter]

There's plenty of material on both wars. The point is about popular culture. When I was a kid, we'd watch war film Films on a Sunday afternoon and read Owen in English literature at school. And I know which one gives a true impression of what the war was like.

Some Septic on a motorbike trying to jump over barbed wire, with the three Nordics who actually made it to freedom written out of the entire story? Or that Owen poem: "..... And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; / If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, ....."

You know he really has had nightmares about the dying man plunging at him. He had a complete breakdown. That is the reality of walk. Not Septic on motorbikes or playing in goal in a team that contains Pele. And how many war Films deal with the social realities of pressure to enlist and then conscription? {Yes, you do have the 1939 Four Feathers - but that is just boy's own fiction and set in Colonial Africa.} While Sassoon wrote this:

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby’s Scheme). I died in hell—
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare:
For, though low down upon the list, I’m there;
‘In proud and glorious memory’… that’s my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he’s never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west…
What greater glory could a man desire?

You see, poetry contains both of the investigative insight and factual realities of the best documentaries while also having the artistic and creative genius of the best Films. And more to the point, they were created in their entirety by someone who was actually there.

I wasn't actually joking when I said about World War I having the poetry. I was being deadly serious.

The public today may not read the poetry as they used to. But likewise, these younger generations won't have watched the two documentary series we've been talking about, or the old war films we used to watch on a Sunday afternoon, or Humphrey Jennings' amazing World War II propaganda documentaries {such as "London can take it"* and "Listen to Britain."}

I take it you know about Humphrey Jennings, the co-founder of Mass Observation? The UK led the world in documentary film 1930-50. And Jennings was the finest exponent.

London Can Take it was a 10 minute film made in 1940. The words were written by Jennings but they got the most famous Cinema news American war correspondent {who was a complete Anglophile} to persuade the Yanks we were still up for the fight.

Bollox, I haven't got time to finish this now. The original was 10 minutes long. Here's the band PSB {who made Spitfire} cutting it up with their music into a three minute version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4R...&start_radio=1

But you are comparing weekend movies with English literature class at school. Hardly a fair comparison.

Although those classes put me off English literature. Thomas Hardy bored the arse off me. They gave us one of the ****ter Dickens, and I don't even recall studying poetry.

When I say I find that war boring, I'm not knocking your interest in it. Some of my interests are disgustingly dull. You won't find too many people interested in Scottish and Welsh devolution in the 70s. I spent a year on it and thoroughly enjoyed it

Then there is the great hunger. Orgreave. Hillsborough....

I'm great fun on a night out

[Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult]

But you are comparing weekend movies with English literature class at school. Hardly a fair comparison.

Although those classes put me off English literature. Thomas Hardy bored the arse off me. They gave us one of the ****ter Dickens, and I don't even recall studying poetry.

When I say I find that war boring, I'm not knocking your interest in it. Some of my interests are disgustingly dull. You won't find too many people interested in Scottish and Welsh devolution in the 70s. I spent a year on it and thoroughly enjoyed it

Then there is the great hunger. Orgreave. Hillsborough....

I'm great fun on a night out

That's basically the point I've been trying to make {when I've been being serious.} We had the poetry, but not the war films, so if you were a kid in the early '80s {pre-Blackadder}, if you knew of WW1 it was because of Owen and Sassoon and blew your mind.

But your '80s kid had WW2 films every Sunday but no poetry, written by people with the talent of Shelly, Coleridge and Keats but who'd also won MCs while writing their poems.

The fact that it's not a fair comparison is why it's a fair comparison, if you get my drift.

And it was the Gunners firing the kit built by the Royal Arsenal wot won it. Like today.