In the 1980s, a BBC drama series exposed the story of Percy Topliss,

a working-class anti-hero who was supposedly at the heart of the Etapple mutiny in 1917.

But what was the real story of the monocled mutineer?

Last weekend, I was kindly invited onto the Modern Military History podcast presented by Andy Wheeler.

Andy and I were discussing the film 1917, something that we've talked about on this podcast on many occasions and there is indeed an entire episode about what I think about 1917 and how that relates to the history.

And it was a very popular episode which led me on to do one about all quiet on the Western Front.

And I've had quite a few others planned talking about the cinematic or film or drama

presentation of history and how that ties into what we know of the facts of the real story

of the Great War and about a month ago I managed to pick up a DVD copy of the monocalled Mutineer, which is a 1980s

production, and that's what we're going to talk about in this podcast. But in that chat with

Andy Wheeler, we were talking about the importance and the veracity and the believability of

film and drama in the way it does present the Great War.

And it fits into, for me, anyway, a few different kind of categories, really.

One of which is the depiction of landscape.

It has to be believable, the landscape of the First World War,

the Western Front or the Eastern Front or Gallipoli.

The uniforms, now I'm not a kind of a button counter, but uniforms have to look right. You can't be wearing World War II battle dress

and carrying number four rifles widely distributed in 1943 in a production about the Somme.

So you need to have believable uniforms.

But more importantly, the men wearing them,

they need to look as if they have lived in those uniforms

as real soldiers do and not just taking them out of a costume cupboard that morning.

...