BBC programme Blitz Spirit wow

[Anna12345678910]

On tonight.
The lives of 6 people who lived through the Blitz... the suffering 😫😢 awful

12,000 diaries of people during the Blitz kept
Made me feel humble

I found this programme very moving, I was in tears watching it.

What these people went through, the unimaginable terror they faced.

I saw the 'Housewife, 49' programme too.

@spongedog
What I mind about her is that she has this incredibly important and demanding full time job in the heritage sector, yet is always making TV programmes. I just do not understand how she can do that job justice - she can hardly ever be there. If she wants a TV and presenting role then she should give up the day job - Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

It’s quite likely doing tv shows is part of her day job as a form of historical ambassadorship.

I only caught the last 30 mins but was absolutely riveted. I too had a little cry at the end. Little cry - more like big sobs

Thank you OP for starting a thread about this and for all the contributions since. I gave it a miss because of Lucy Worsley's recent other programmes and will watch it on IPlayer.

@NiceGerbil I have like you been to Berlin and would recommend it too, including the museum you mention and the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust near Potsdamer Platz.

WWII pet cull

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24478532

I love Lucy Worsley's programs generally, and last night's was excellent.

I didn't let my yr7 (11yo or 10yo) watch it though, and I'm glad.
Some of the accounts were extremely harrowing - and my eldest has nightmares about fires and me and DH dying a lot.

@peak2021

Thank you OP for starting a thread about this and for all the contributions since. I gave it a miss because of Lucy Worsley's recent other programmes and will watch it on IPlayer.

@NiceGerbil I have like you been to Berlin and would recommend it too, including the museum you mention and the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust near Potsdamer Platz.

Do. Far better than her run of the mill stuff, largely because her interventions are short and unobtrusive, and mostly limited to going in and out of Senate House in mildly 1940s costume and looking at documents in the IWM archive. I’m sure her brief is to produce dumbed-down stuff, it’s not LW’s own idea to dash about in mob caps, but I think key to this programme was her being in distractingly factual, and some very good actors speaking and performing the diary sections. I thought the women who played the nurse and the air raid warden were particularly good.

I found this fascinating - a nuanced view of how 'Blitz spirit' was invented by the government propaganda machine. A really interesting choice of diarists too.

Re. the pet cull - I can report that this wasn't always the case. My gran lived through the air raids in Birmingham, and talked about how their pet dog was always the first one into their street's communal shelter when the air raid sirens went off!

@SuburbanCrofter

Re. the pet cull - I can report that this wasn't always the case. My gran lived through the air raids in Birmingham, and talked about how their pet dog was always the first one into their street's communal shelter when the air raid sirens went off!

This a really good point. Diary/letter based history is incredibly powerful for giving a human voice to statistics and for cutting through myths and propaganda around events/people but we shouldn't turn a handful of accounts into ' the truth' either. There will always be someone whose experience was slightly different (Just like 2020 ad reported by someone in London will be different from someone in the Highlands, both will be different from the official guidance/reporting, and both will give a human voice to the statistics).

Still think this programme was great and that diaries are so incredibly important (Mass Observation still do a day in May when you can send in your diary for that day and they will preserve it for future researchers).

When archives open again, I recommend reading some of the papers from back then. Really very interesting. No TV so haven’t watched programme.

didn't know this was on, will watch it now.

I love lucy worsley, she is so good at the details, and giving a slightly different perspective.

I haven’t watched this yet and I was going to watch it with the dc (aged 10 and 8) - sounds like I probably should watch it myself first to check they’d be ok with it.

I met an old lady recently whilst volunteering, who was telling me about her childhood during the blitz. She was playing out on top of a small hill near her home when a bomb fell very close by. She hadn’t heard the air raid siren because she was deaf as a result of measles, although nobody realised at that point - they thought she was ‘just simple’. She came round to find herself lying at the bottom of the hill, staring up at her coat which was hanging from a branch at the top of a tree, and wondered “how did my coat get up there?”

She went home to find her house bombed and her mother crying in the rubble.