The British

[sheyna]

I've been watching the series "The British" on Sky Atlantic. This one's about the 20th century. I'm not sure how I feel about 10minutes on the Chilwell munitions factory explosion, and two sentences on the entire suffragette movement

Comments

[d511kx]

To a certain extent, however, that's the point. History is as much about the unimportant. mundane and day event as it is about sweeping change - indeed, on a fundamental level small things can often be shown to have affected people's day to day lives far more than smaller ones.

Besides which, reports and accounts of the Suffrage movement are two a penny - stories about the Chilwell explosion less so - although in many ways similar incidents at similar places helped the campaign for votes for women, because they meant that nobody could claim that women hadn't risked themselves for the country.

[sheyna]

I do get that, and think it's nice, but the plugging for this series was "things that made the British what we are". The example of the Chilwell explosion is a point in case - it sets the tone, but that incident didn't have any huge effect on our society. If they were aiming for "this was a female tradegy that helped make them more acceptable", then why stick in a random male soldier?

Skimming over a period that fundamentally changed our society seems wrong. They didn't even give a summary of it, they just said "oh, and this happened".

[swiftblade]

I watched the first one, but after the tenth inaccurate "fact" I decided not to bother carrying on watching.If they can't get simple things right I don't trust the rest of the "facts" and would rather not pollute my brain with false information.

[sheyna]

One of the things that got me was things like naming the family responsible for the London Cholera outbreak. Yes, it was nice giving names to those who accidently polluted the water, but they didn't keep records of things like that back then. It was blatantly made up, especially as all three mentioned died before the chap who discovered the reason for the outbreak made the discovery.

So long as you take on board that it's based on fact and not actually factual, I can live with that. It's the plugging it as factual that gets me...