The epic World War II drama series is back this weekend for its second run.
With a large ensemble cast which includes Lesley Manville, Jonah Hauer-King and Blake Harrison, World on Fire dramatizes the chaotic impact of the conflict on the lives of ordinary people.
As the series returns, creator and writer Peter Bowker (The A Word) has penned an introduction.
In November 2019 – the week of the final episode of World on Fire – the BBC asked me about plans for a second series. The intention was to begin immediately and to have series two ready to go out in early 2021. Then Covid happened. And happened again. And I found myself writing a drama about a global event where people became unmoored from what they understood to be normal life while living through a global event where people . . . well, you get the idea.
As well as delaying series two, these circumstances influenced its creation in many ways. not least by bringing to the team two brilliant writers – Matt Jones and Rachel Bennette – who ran with my original vision and created half of this new series with invention and heart and a ridiculous dedication. And that original vision – to tell personal stories of life during warfare from multiple national perspectives – has, I hope been both honoured and expanded.
In this second series we turn our eyes to North Africa, where Soldiers from the British Empire found themselves fighting for the Allies in a desert that had been carved up in the previous century by European powers. So alongside British Soldiers we tell the story of Indian fighters and Italian enemies – pulled together by battle on a landscape that was no more familiar to them than the surface of the moon – and possibly less hospitable. In Europe we dramatise the deteriorating situation in occupied France as the Nazi occupation hardens and resistance becomes increasingly dangerous . . . And in Germany we tell a story of how a warped and toxic nationalism can induce “ordinary people” to bend their morality to breaking point.
Back in England in late 1940 the war had come home in the form of soldiers returning from Europe, refugees fleeing warfare and persecution, and bombs being dropped by the Luftwaffe as the attacks on London extended to the great industrial conurbations including Manchester and Liverpool. It is in Manchester that we begin to tell the story of the murkier world of espionage as the Home Office sent some of its Whitehall men north, to set up crude spy networks amongst refugees to investigate potential sabotage and keep an eye on morale in industrial towns and cities that they didn’t entirely trust or understand.
As always, we tell stories which have an unforced and not always comfortable contemporary resonance, stories that demonstrate both human resilience and human folly and stories of ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Historical drama should not be about nostalgia and I hope this isn’t how this series is regarded. It is about asking questions of the present by interrogating stories from our past. And at the heart of these stories, amongst multiple perspectives, the single question remains – “If you had been there, what would you have done?”
For more information, including interviews with all the principal cast, you can check out the BBC Media Centre.
Mammoth Screen produce World on Fire for the BBC and MASTERPIECE. Series 2 begins on BBC One on Sunday 16th July at 9 pm. All episodes will be available immediately on iPlayer, alongside Series 1.