A Family At War - Series 1 [DVD]

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At that time we recorded on videotape the whole piece from opening titles to closing captions, playing in the film inserts and stopping only for the advertising breaks. The series follows the lives of the various members of a single family, the Ashtons, of approximately lower-middle-class status (although their class position is actually more complex and piebald than this label might suggest), mostly based in their Liverpool home but with narrative excursions to other locations as various family members were drafted into the armed forces, mobilised or evacuated. The latter is a hard businessman who appoints his son Tony as the new manager of the workplace, rather than the experienced Edwin. A point which was brought out (I wish I could remember the title of the book) is that British and American troops related far better to the defeated Germans, and fraternised more with them, than they related to the vast numbers of bedraggled, starving released Jews, slave labourers, Russian prisoners-of-war and other displaced persons. The war it refers to is both external force, the global struggle that defines the historical moment the Ashtons inhabit, and an internal schism, their own private combat zone which is affected by but by no means entirely due to the exigencies of that larger conflict.

I live in the US and our region is different so under ordinary circumstances DVDs produced in England were unplayable in the US. It is the story of eight siblings, each of them in their own way "doing their bit" while remaining at the heart of the social life of the town. But as its title suggests, A Family at War pays equal attention to private and domestic politics as it does to the public political sphere and its female characters are at least as complex and intriguing as its men, from the matriarchal Jean, to her eldest daughter Margaret (Leslie Nunnerley) who endures a fraught relationship with her jealous mother-in-law Celia Porter (Margery Mason), to David’s long-suffering wife Sheila (Coral Atkins), through to the skittish youngest Ashton daughter Freda (Barbara Flynn). This entry was posted in Drama, Reviews and tagged a family at war (tv series), adrienne corri, barbara flynn, catherine schell, colin campbell, colin douglas, coral atkins, david bradley, david dixon, diana davies, ian thompson, john mckelvey, john nettles, keith drinkel, kenneth cranham, lesley nunnerley, margery mason, patrick troughton, richard easton, shelagh fraser, t. To put it in perspective, in spite of being the main role, Edwin appears in only 44 out of the 52 episodes.

Alexander Baron was the novelist who wrote From The City From The Plough (1948) and The Lowlife (1963). These took place in a large room where the ground plan of the sets was marked out in adhesive tape, a different colour for each set.

There’s a really young Barbara Flynn as Freda Ashton who eventually married a really young John Nettles as Ian Mackenzie. I also know there was a considerable amount of nit picking regarding accuracy of items on the set, for example packets in the kitchen, month of Frank Sinatra song played on the radio while the family waits for Churchill speeches, etc. The programme opening titles show a scene of a beach with a child's sand castle, with Union Flag flying, slowly being approached by the encroaching tide, symbolic of a beleaguered Britain standing alone in 1940–1941.This was primary work for the medium, the first of the television novels and one on a Dickensian scale. After all, Philip was shown away at war in a few early episodes where the storyline centered around him.

Over 100 years have passed since the guns of the First World War fell silent over the battlefields of Europe.The character is supposed to be unpleasant and admires both General Franco and the German Afrika Korps. People generally waited until their old set gave up the ghost before switching, and in those days sets could last a long time. Shetland was an important naval port, and as many as 70 per cent of those serving from Shetland were at sea, either in the navy or merchant navy. One of the small pleasures of watching the DVDs is spotting actors who later became well-known or who haven’t been seen for a while; for instance, John Ronane and Tenniel Evans (sadly, many of the cast is no longer with us). It might be worth adding that the vast majority of the original audience will probably have first watched it in black and white.

This episode keeps cutting back to the intricate story of the shares in the printing works and who will control them, which I found distracting and dull compared to the romance.The theme is the First Movement (Allegro) from his 6th Symphony (I'm not being a smarty-pants, I looked on Wikipedia) This was, I remember, broadcast on weekday afternoons and as my mum used to watch it I would usually see a bit of it when I got home from school. It’s interesting that John Finch, the creator of A Family at War, was also a pioneer of all-film drama for television at around the same time. A Family at War is a British drama television series that aired on ITV for 3 seasons and 52 episodes.