Peter Bowker’s second world war drama is a beautifully turned ensemble piece starring Lesley Manville and Sean Bean ... and far from standard wartime fare
The subject is war and the pity of it, and it is rendered freshly and exquisitely painful in the new seven-part drama series World on Fire (BBC One). Created by Peter Bowker (The A Word, Capital, Eric and Ernie), it tracks the declaration and first year of the second world war via the intertwining stories of ordinary families trying to go about their ordinary lives in Britain and various European cities that are soon to become flashpoints.
In Manchester, bright, young, middle-class Harry Chase (Jonah Hauer-King) and his bright, young, working-class girlfriend Lois Bennett (Julia Brown) protest at Blackshirt rallies until he must head to Warsaw as a translator for the British embassy. She will be kept busy with her factory work and with running the motherless Bennett household. This includes her wayward brother Tom (Ewan Mitchell) and – bringing home how precipitous the journey was from the great war to another, worse one – her father Douglas (Sean Bean, in stoic, not swashbuckling, mode) who is still suffering from the shellshock he acquired in the trenches. He is a pacifist now.
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