The Wipers Times
Sep. 17th, 2013 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThe Wipers Times (a 90 minute drama about a true life satirical newspaper produced on the front line during the first world war) was entertaining and sobering. It wasn’t perfect, the script was a little too on the nose at times (the scene where Churchill was a fan) and occasionally the lack of budget told. But what the drama was about and how the people behind the show clearly felt about the material made it hard to criticise.
Fred Roberts (Ben Chaplin who is increasingly looking like Robert Lindsay, good) and his deputy officer Jack Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt, very good) of the 24th Division faced the privations and horrors of trench warfare in the first world war with wisecracks. It was very much a case of gallows humour. When foraging in Ypres (pronounced Wipers by soldiers who’d never learned French or been abroad before), they found a printing press and found out that their sergeant had been a printer before the war. Suddenly, they had an outlet, something that didn’t matter that mattered. Indeed, it came to matter a great deal to them, although because of classic manly upperclass English understatement, they never said that. It also began selling like hot cakes.
The show did an excellent job of letting the newspaper speak for itself - dramatising some the features as sorts of sketches, with Chaplin dressing up as an almost gruesome master of ceremonies for ‘the European theatre’. Of course, there were also scenes where they came up with the stories in conversation or Fred and Jack coming up with limericks together. Period clips were also used in these sketches. These non-realistic devices were pretty effective.
The jokes are still funny – I laughed along with the General who had the sense of humour (Palin). Ben Daniels had the job of playing a one-note Lieutenant-Colonel who had none and hated what he saw as subversion. Our heroes mocked him, we booed.
Still, there was enough to mull over about war (that one in particular, which I am underinformed about, I admit and in general).
Orphan Black is airing here on Friday, I'll try to catch it.
Fred Roberts (Ben Chaplin who is increasingly looking like Robert Lindsay, good) and his deputy officer Jack Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt, very good) of the 24th Division faced the privations and horrors of trench warfare in the first world war with wisecracks. It was very much a case of gallows humour. When foraging in Ypres (pronounced Wipers by soldiers who’d never learned French or been abroad before), they found a printing press and found out that their sergeant had been a printer before the war. Suddenly, they had an outlet, something that didn’t matter that mattered. Indeed, it came to matter a great deal to them, although because of classic manly upperclass English understatement, they never said that. It also began selling like hot cakes.
The show did an excellent job of letting the newspaper speak for itself - dramatising some the features as sorts of sketches, with Chaplin dressing up as an almost gruesome master of ceremonies for ‘the European theatre’. Of course, there were also scenes where they came up with the stories in conversation or Fred and Jack coming up with limericks together. Period clips were also used in these sketches. These non-realistic devices were pretty effective.
The jokes are still funny – I laughed along with the General who had the sense of humour (Palin). Ben Daniels had the job of playing a one-note Lieutenant-Colonel who had none and hated what he saw as subversion. Our heroes mocked him, we booed.
Still, there was enough to mull over about war (that one in particular, which I am underinformed about, I admit and in general).
Orphan Black is airing here on Friday, I'll try to catch it.
