A Family At War - Series 1 [DVD]

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Alexander Baron was the novelist who wrote From The City From The Plough (1948) and The Lowlife (1963).

Although it was broadcast in colour (for the most part) and colour sets had been available since the late 1960s, at this time they were still very much a luxury item and didn’t really penetrate the mass market until much later. We cut to March (signalled too lightly, I thought … my wife missed the reference and was puzzled) and Margaret’s been to see the doctor. People generally waited until their old set gave up the ghost before switching, and in those days sets could last a long time. However, be sure your DVD player supports Region 2 (PAL) discs, as Region 1 (NTSC) machines will not be able to play them. Life at the Medical Hall was busy, filled with social events, concerts, fundraisers and the whirlwind of visitors, high days and holidays that you would expect from an influential and well-connected family in any Edwardian town.

However, putting aside the critical bias against media aimed at women evident in such remarks, my impression on watching A Family at War nearly forty years on was of a programme which managed very successfully to interweave the personal and the public and to suggest their inextricable interconnections, invoking both the broad canvas of unparalleled world war and political upheaval and what it meant to live through it for one particular Liverpool family. I wrote about my great grandmother here and shared a wartime recipe for Trench Cake – sent to the men in the trenches of the First World War and baked in the loving kitchens of home). It was to get worse … in the first week of May 1941, 681 bombers attacked Liverpool, levelling much of the city centre. Several brief scenes cut from the Acorn set do appear in the Netherlands set, such as the scene referenced above.

According to one contemporaneous report, the programme’s ‘opening episode was seen in 6,850,000 homes, probably representing some 20 million viewers’, taking it ‘straight into the top ten with its first programme’, only just below the well-established Coronation Street in the ratings ( Sun, 28 April 1970). And both, it is worth reiterating, were products of British commercial television, testimony to its ability to combine high seriousness and immense popularity. Because it was revived in 2017 on one of those many channels the TV keeps asking to add, we happened to read a review.I have a suspicion that those of you who are coming back to this series having enjoyed it first time around might be a touch disappointed now. Granada was noted for avoiding lavish costume drama, but liked the concept of a drama based around less expensive studio-based domestic interiors with a minimum of location shooting. Many of the cast of Coronation Street made early appearances in Family: Julie Goodyear, Bryan Mosley, Bill Waddington, Geoffrey Hinsliff and Barbara Knox among them. The episode looks at the terrible conditions for German kids and defeated civilians, most unusual from a 1970 viewpoint. After 30-odd years my memories are a bit hazy and I never kept a diary, so this is based on a very few documents, an understanding of the production method and some guesswork.

The Ashton family struggles to deal with the harsh realities of the Second World War as their sons are sent away to fight. I found it to be a well acted series that really brought home the harsh realities that those living through the times endured.This is a terrific series of 52 episodes, following the Ashton family of Liverpool through the war years, 1938-1945. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GFDL; additional terms may apply. We read war comics, watched war films, and made models of the most famous aeroplanes from the Battle of Britain, like the Spitfire and Hurricane.

Colin Douglas was magnificent in this series as was the rest of the cast which starred in this story of the Ashton family as they made their way through those difficult times of World War Two.

But the biggest cast member that got me excited about was Patrick Troughton as Harry Porter, John Porter’s dad.