Slickness is not always a virtue in a television presenter, and Katherine Jenkins (The Week We Went To War, BBC1) has some way to go before she risks being accused of it. Her chief weapons are her blonde hair, cleavage and searchlight smile -- she isn't so much the new Vera Lynn as one of those pneumatic dream-babes that American aircrews used to paint on the noses of their B17s -- but even so she struggles to conquer a script that wallows like a torpedoed freighter.
Her dialogue with assistant-host Michael Aspel, as he reminisces about being a wartime evacuee or eating austerity-style prunes and custard, zings with the anarchic spontaneity of a set of actuarial tables. The dreary studio set dreamed up for this journey through the past would barely pass muster in the basement of the World Service.
Yet although the rickety packaging doesn't do it justice, The Week... contains some smart ideas and a solid percentage of human-interest moments. The daylight bombing of a school in Catford in 1943, where the Luftwaffe pilot waved to the children below just before releasing his bombs, was recalled by the sister of one of the victims, her grief still choking her after 66 years. Items about wartime fashion or home-made children's toys, and how to cope during a period when "less was the new more", induced a sneaking sense of guilt about our own incontinent consumerism. Student chef Ben Ellison tried to tickle the tastebuds armed only with what you could get with a wartime ration book (one egg perhaps, or 57 grammes of lard), and confessed that he now felt thoroughly unpatriotic if he found himself throwing food away. Tony Benn popped up to score a Class Warfare point, claiming that working class kids grew an extra two and a half inches thanks to a wartime diet that was healthier than anything they'd previously known.
Also running throughout this week is Land Girls (BBC1), a nifty little drama about four recruits to the Women's Land Army. "Just smell that country air!" exclaims Joyce, as they get off the train en route to their new posting on the sprawling Hoxley Estate. "Isn't it awful!" drawls posh and spoiled Nancy, reluctantly conscripted to a life of hoeing, digging and mucking out.
Cramming all five parts into a week means the narrative clatters along at breakneck speed, but the setup is a screen-writer's dream -- posh girls, poor girls, a fascistic Home Guard sergeant, The Street's Mark Benton as slippery black marketeer Fred Finch, and a bunch of American GIs throwing money around and provoking hysteria among the womenfolk. Up at the Big House, Lord Lawrence Hoxley (a cognac-quaffing Nathaniel Parker) is depressed by his disintegrating marriage to Lady Ellen, a woman so heartless she goads him into shooting his beloved horse. When the doleful Lawrence suggests that he might ask the maid "not to warm both beds tonight", the Missus snaps back with "is it our anniversary or something?". Before you can say "inheritance tax", Lawrence is driven into the arms of the ambitious Nancy.
It was a farcical anachronism to portray naive 17-year-old Bea pushing a NuLab diversity agenda by petitioning the US Army to end its policy of racial segregation, but punishment promptly swooped down in the shape of a slimy corporal from Idaho, who cynically seduced her while the band played Glenn Miller tunes. At this rate, by Friday the girls will be marching on Berlin.
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