By TANIA PHILLIPS
The Memorial,
History Channel,
Tuesdays, 7.30pm
SCOTTISH historian Neil Oliver has turned his attention to Australia – first with Coast last year and now The Memorial.
The Memorial has gone behind-the-scenes inside the Australia War Memorial – loosely following a year at the facility as it gears up to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I.
Oliver was given unprecedented access into the heart of the museum’s vault and stories.
The landmark five-part series also featured interviews with current Prime Ministers Tony Abbott, former Prime Ministers Paul Keating, John Howard, Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser as well as Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove and former Governor-General Quentin Bryce and VC recipients Mark Donaldson and Ben Roberts-Smith as well as the staff of the Memorial from director Dr Brendan Nelson through to the grounds keeper.
It looks inside the Memorial and then out to the battle fields of WWI.
It is an ambitious production to say the least and at times moving and touching and very informative. It seems a weird fit – Scottish historian and a very Australian story – but Oliver had two grandfathers serving with Australians in WWI including in Gallipoli and the journey is, at times, a very personal one.
Four episodes in – with the final screening next week – it has been a televisual feast but one gets the feeling it should have been a touch longer with so many ideas crammed into each episode that at the end of it all you head is spinning trying to keep up. It jumps between the personal story of a soldier back to what’s happening at the memorial and sometimes feels a touch disjointed – and maybe like the producers could have gone for a “less is more” style.
But it is still a not-to-be missed program for those interested in history.
Knowing pay TV, it will be repeated and hopefully it will find it’s way on to DVD too.
It is the sort of show that we would have previously seen on SBS and the ABC and one, with the budget cuts happening there, that we hope pay TV increasingly tries to produce.
