Land Girls
BBC 1
Tonight: We Know What’s In Your Bin
ITV 1
How best to celebrate the contribution of British women to the war effort on the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War? A lively, well-researched docudrama, perhaps, with recollections from survivors of the ATS, WAF, WRNS, munitions factories and the Women’s Land Army? A thoughtful look at attitudes to women in the forces, comparing then and now? Not a bit of it – not so far, anyway.
For now, the anxious, ratings-crazed executives at the BBC have given us Land Girls – a costumed soap opera just shown over five days and hidden away at 5.15pm in the daytime schedule. It all looked expensively nostalgic in the BBC tradition, but the tone was puzzling. Who exactly was it aimed at – children, teens, adult women who’d just fed the kids at teatime? As with so much of the current crop of television dramas, it was pretty hard to tell.
Anyway, after a brief newsreel clip of the sort which assured our grandmothers that their vital contribution to preventing mass starvation “would never be forgotten”, we plunged straight into the sex and soap suds. These land girls were not about to exhaust themselves with back-breaking toil planting cabbages or digging ditches. Most of their energy went into bunk-ups in the hay barn (Nancy beds the lord of the manor; Joyce gets conjugal with her deserter hubby) or getting pregnant (teenage Bea is seduced by a dastardly Yank).
There was even a fantasy moment straight from the wartime Jane cartoon strip where glamorous Nancy (Summer Strallen) is caught starkers in the bathtub. Along the way, various “issues” were ticked off just to show the writers had done some research – discrimination against black GIs, blatant class conflict, persecution of bombed-out “vagrants” and Italian prisoners of war.
From time to time, modern slang crept into the dialogue to undermine these efforts. This is always the Achilles heel of historical drama. “What are you like?” chuckled one land girl to her pal, while their supervisor laid down the law by telling them all about “the bottom line”.
The male characters were scarcely more convincing. Mark Benton was lumbered with jolly farmer Finch, always getting into comical scrapes on the black market. There was Danny Webb’s poisonous Home Guard sergeant, trying to arrest everyone as enemy spies (not very Dad’s Army) and an ambivalent, hen-pecked toff from Nathaniel Parker. Of the girls, Sophie Ward, played Lady Hoxley as a pantomime witch, while Becca Gemmell’s performance as Joyce was the most down-to-earth and authentic.
It was all watchable fluff and nobody expects grim scenes of bleeding knuckles in the potato fields in the style of Soviet era propaganda. But a fitting tribute to a generation of wartime women who might not see many more anniversaries? Hardly. Those who missed can judge for themselves as the series is now getting a repeat run, with an episode every Sunday.
If there’s one everyday niggle guaranteed to annoy most of us, it’s rubbish. Why do the dustmen sprinkle it artistically down the street? Why do our neighbours try to recycle wire coat-hangers? Who left the lid off the bin and let the foxes in? For We Know What’s In Your Bin, the Tonight team peered into the vexed question of wheelie bins – how often are they collected, should they be bigger or smaller, should they recycle, do we need them at all?
Needless to say, no one could come up with satisfactory answers. Some of us will always fill our recycling bins with half-chewed hamburgers and house bricks, while others go mad washing out every last jam jar. Councils will either fine us £225 if our bin lid doesn’t close or force us to live with maggot-ridden sacks in tiny apartments. At least we know we’re saving the environment. Or not, as the case may be.
Helen Chappell
