The series The Great War was created by the BBC in 1964 consciously to mark the 50th anniversary of the war’s start. One reason for commemorating this now is that not only are veterans of the First World War itself becoming more scarce, so are veterans of the series, and we wanted to acknowledge their achievement. It is no more than their due to recognise that between them they not only first showed how a large television historical documentary series could be made, but also made it to such a high standard as to establish television in Britain as a respectable format for history. It was really the fi rst time that anything like that had been done, and certainly never before on such a scale. By the time that the series had been made and transmitted, the production staff had worked through the conceptual and practical problems of how to undertake such a project.

Another reason is that 1964 marks as well as any other year the approximate start, in Britain and the rest of the developed Western world, of a cultural dominance in terms of both news and entertainment of television as a medium, and of a small handful of broadcast television stations over popular culture. The year 2000, if it does not mark the precise end of this era of television hegemony, at least marks a point at which it may be seen to have ended. Almost by defi nition, the kind of cultural experience represented by The Great War series, the nuclear family clustered together around the television set at a special time each week, is not expected to occur again. If, through some impossibility, war veterans in 1918 could have known that such a commemorative television series would be made in 1964 (or, indeed, known what television was), they would have understood the impulse, but probably mistaken its signifi cance. It was widely assumed in its aftermath that the ‘war to end wars’ would be remembered and commemorated only by those who had personally experienced it as adults. It was originally planned and expected by some of its founders that the Imperial War Museum would close down with the death of the last veteran of the war. Instead, something like the opposite has happened, and the last decades of the 20th century saw an increase both in scholarship and in public interest in the First World War.