Made more than five decades ago, the musical film, Oh What a Lovely War,

depicts the conflict of 1914-18 through the music and the men and women of that generation.

But what does it really tell us about the Great War?

One of the things that's been important to me with this podcast

is to look at the Great War from a number of different angles,

from different perspectives.

It's not just a podcast about bombs, bullets and baynets

and the battles and the battlefields,

and not just regiments and divisions,

and not even just the human experience of war.

I'm interested in how the war is portrayed

in lots of different mediums, from war art to graphic novels to fiction and to cinema as well.

And we've looked in this podcast previously at films like 1917 and the new version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

And you can go back through the podcast catalogue to find those episodes.

But in this one, in this episode, I wanted to return to film once more and look at a film that had a massive effect on me

in my early years of studying the Great War. And that film is Oh What a Lovely War. Oh, what a

lovely war. Oh, what a lovely war is not a war film. It's not the saving private Ryan of the First World War.

It's a musical. And for many, that's exactly what puts them off this film, that it is a musical. A musical from the late 1960s,

set in an unfamiliar environment connected to the First World War, as we'll discuss.

So what is this film? Oh, What a Lovely War and how did it come about?

Oh What a Lovely War was the work of playwright and writer Joan Littlewood.

She was born in London in 1914, obviously a key year for the history of the Great

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