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from Manchester Evening News 14 March 2002
 A phoney war
by Flic Everett
THE imagination is officially dead. We're no longer able to empathise with
others' suffering by reading, or even simply thinking about what they went
through. Hearing about pain and envisaging the misery for ourselves is no longer
a valid way to explore humanity or learn the lessons of history.
Because now, it appears we're incapable of understanding horror unless it is re-enacted by
Real People, who are pretending to be other Real People who actually did undergo
agony.
The latest bid to "recreate" history -in the wake of Channel 4's The
1900 House and the 1940s House - is The Trench, a BBC "real-life documentary",
which features volunteers - clearly as eternally hopeful as the original, doomed
volunteers of 88 years ago — attempting to relive the conditions of trench
warfare on the Somme during the First World War
So for them that means mud, rats, rain and sleep deprivation due to loud bangs. Those, howevez will be courtesy of the BBC sound effects department - not the volleys of sniper fire
that would have greeted the real soldiers. These TV volunteers will also miss
out on another crucial aspect of trench warfare - the knowledge that they may
never see their families again, the gut-clenching terror of their own imminent
death, and the realisation that most of their friends and colleagues
would almost certainly be decimated by bullets before their 20th
birthdays.
Suggesting that the reality of trench warfare can be recreated
with a little timed discomfort and a few rats is like attempting to recreate the
slaughter of 6m Jews 30 years later by asking eager volunteers to wander the
streets of Vienna wearing a Star of David.
It proves nothing, because the
threat no longer exists. This flawed enterprise is simply a ratings-hungry
repackaging of History Lite; the past for the gnat's-attention-span MTV
generation. The documentary apparently includes testimonials from the remaining
survivors of the trenches; and commentary from historians - but this isn't
considered interesting enough. These people were actually there, they know
exactly how it was — but sod it, they're old!
We evidently want
funky soundbites, and brief insights into what mud feels like to a guy who's
never fought in a war and never will, or how a bloke, who thought being on TV
would be a laugh, got scared when he saw a BBC prop-department rat 6ft
away.
This doesn't bring history to life, it devalues humanity. This stupid
attempt to "recreate" an experience that, by defmition, never can, and never
should, be recreated, is as tasteless and pointless as attempting to "recreate"
Belsen, by refusing a group of volunteers food for a week (with a qualified TV
nutritionist on hand, of course) and making them wear Camp-issue pyjamas. The
soldiers of the trenches — some as young as 14- died horrifically, in the naive
belief that their deaths would count towards making the world a better
place.
If they'd known that less than a century later their poignant
sacrifices would be repackaged as real-life entertainment for idiots, who are so
immune to terror they have to be spoonfed televisual slop, perhaps they might
not have been so determined to exchange their tomorrows for our
today
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