War and Peace: Play for Today’s Home Front Quintet

Although Play for Today is a strongly contemporary series, for many of its dramas the Second World War and the immediate aftermath are years of considerable significance. Numerous plays refer explicitly to aspects of the war, and nine productions are set wholly or primarily between 1940 and 1945. This article focuses on five of these, all of which were made on film for the later seasons of Play for Today: Licking Hitler (1978), Blue Remembered Hills (1979), The Imitation Game (1980), Country (1980) and Rainy Day Women (1984). Each film aims to offer a revisionist understanding of the conflict, setting out to de-mythologise established myths about the war at home. This article argues that this ‘home front quintet’ forms a significant and, in part at least, a coherent group of dramas within the series. It seeks to identify connections across these dramas, and to understand their politics as engagements with the war and its aftermath during a period that the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher were consolidating power. My argument is that concerns with landscape, heritage and home, game-playing and simulation, and ideas of self-reflexivity are combined with generic aspects of the war film in ways that challenge understandings of the war at home but also fail to link their re-imaginings of the conflict to credible and progressive presentations of the post-war peace.