It took just nine months for the BBC to conceive and produce one of the most significant documentary series in the Corporation’s history – The Great War. Running for twenty-six, forty-minute editions, the BBC Handbook for 1965 claimed that ‘the series will ultimately be seen by every television country in the world’. The Great War was highly acclaimed at the time, and set the standard for subsequent documentaries on the subject, most notably Thames Television’s The World at War of 1973 which approached World War II on a similar scale.
