 They actually reached out to me before whilst the show was casting so that what it was like I did look quite a bit pressure to be honest with you because you know I had to I had to figure out like his mannerisms I had to know what he was known for and when the show came out I know that they've been watching so that was something that I had to to keep in my mind about the whole whole process but it was really helpful because you don't really get an opportunity get that much detail because like you said he was a prisoner of wards he was lucky enough to make it out a lot of other people were not that fortunate and he lived to tell the tales I had his memoirs had pictures of him and his crew um yes it was added added pressure but a blessing at the same time. That's great um Guy having heard that and kind of the experiences that some of the characters went through what did you make of the show generally and how would you think these kind of stories compared to the wider stories told in the genre of war film and tv that you look at in your research. I mean yes good question I mean in preparation for this I was asked to just do a little five minute take on the on the series so this is roughly five minutes I did make some notes so that I wouldn't ramble on for too long um so I think probably the first thing to say is I think that masters of the air follows the well-worn group of the sort of greatest generation interpretation of world war two and that's found in films like saving private rhyme which I wrote about in my book war cinema and also band and brothers but it's also there's also a small sort of publishing industry around the greatest generation and I think masters of the air is an example of that which obviously preceded the show and was form formative in its in its genesis and I thought the taglines of books like these sort of convey what the greatest generation interpretation of world war two is about really so the tagline of masters of the air is how the bomber bodies wrote down the nazi war machine and then here's one the monuments men you can see it's very similarly designed and the tagline for the monuments members is also adapted into a film allied heroes nazi thieves and the greatest treasure hunting history um so by this framework the war world war two is is basically conceived as a battle between good and evil the work of defeating evil is taken on by citizen soldiers who crucially volunteer and then display individual and group courage in the face of sort of industrialized violence of modern warfare and the men are shown to be stoical self-sacrificing and they have a sort moral rectitude and behavior in war and crucially afterwards that embodies a sort of small c conservative vision of us national life so here the war film is the world war two is conceived in a certain way but it also becomes a vision of what america is um you know um in the present time um so for this sense of all war two to cahia and and across popular history books on 250 million state-of-the-art tv shows requires a really tight focalization by essential characters that can embody this value system so in masters of the air we have the duo of gale book levin play boston butler and johnny bookie egan played by calin turner and their shared nicknames which is kind of confusing in the film but obviously was true to life um point to the kind of composite personality so book is steadfast and clear-eyed and constant to his girl back home he's a born leader but he's also pragmatic bookie is inspiring to his men his belly coast um he's a little lost through the film over the narrative narrative art bookie bends to book and as the all important what they did next title cards role at the end we see they both live a life lived a life that's consonant with the greatest generation expectation so they're upstanding citizens their careerists their family men and that's the kind of payload that's delivered at the end of these films actually at the start of the same in private rhyme but um yeah it's it's always delivered as the sort of culmination of the experience of these men on the stories harry crossby the other key character rolls down the same track he has a sort of literary air his voice every sort of prosaic a matter of fact take on the air war you can really i think you can really see the hand of tom hanks in that particular character who has a similar vibe to his star persona and also writes um his leadership is more motherly and caring he stepped away from the actual battles but he keenly filled the pain of the loss of his men crossby does conduct an extra marital affair so that's quite controversial in some ways but this is resolved into a committed family life by the series end and that's we have rosy rosenthal he's perhaps the most significant narrative terms though he arrives partway through uh rosenthal is a born leader he's brave he's selfless he issues the therapy offered by the air force um therefore sort of showing the historical self-reliance that so valued in the greatest generation he also extends his tour after his requisite 25 missions and so articulates that to step away from his duty would cost more lives of younger pilots and extend the war in the office the war information couldn't have written a kind of tighter scene there in terms of what duty means in the latter stages of the series rosin star rosenthal becomes the key person for mediating the viewer's experience of the nazi holocaust and this is the element of world war two on which the claim that the war is a fight between good and pure evil pivots rosenthal travels through russian territory and witnesses the aftermath of the posand concentration camp in poland um and the key line here appearing in the trailer that we've just seen is from him is the things these people are capable of and that means genocide they got it coming trust me and i think that kind of sums up some of the sort of narrative logic in playing and it's a sort of moral narrative logic so the series points there to rosenthal who going to become a lawyer who works at nuremberg and there's also a reference to to i suppose the imagining of the post war family in the state of israel so that's a clear sort of narrative um direction so the argument the film makes is that the air war strategy is predominantly driven driven by a desire for justice it's a humanitarian war fought by good men against the race racist genocidal policies of nazism and the last action of the film is a humanitarian air drop into the netherlands um so you might say okay repost him to what i'm saying might be these are not rhetorical constructions guy but these are a collection of stories of true real lived lives yes that's true but we need to acknowledge how the historiography including television utilizes emplotment and narrativization toward the past so whose stories are told how are they brought together what kinds of stories do they connect to and i'm to find i suppose my question would be where are the stories of the dead the disabled the insane the crews who refuse to fly whereas the acknowledgement that the air war was an experiment in which bomber crews were human guinea pigs which is a phrase taken from miller's book in which the men themselves used what about the fire bombing of camberg and dresden what the war in the pacific arguably the dropping of the atomic bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki are and the start of a cold war would be the logical end point of the series focused on air power in world war two not the parachuting of citrus fruit into war torn holland so i think it's interesting to me that masters of the air share the same cultural moment as oppenheimer um and for me it's positive i suppose that the latter oppenheimer which in my view is more nuanced and dialectical than this one appears to be more successful with audiences and also potentially critically so that's my barely trying to put the series into a broader context of the representation of world war two especially in the us context um there's lots to celebrate and like about the series but i thought i'd start with a fairly robust statement about it so thank you thank you for that diplomatic overview um james i wondered we were chatting a bit before about kind of the historical accurate accuracy of the show i wondered if you could talk a bit about that yeah when it comes to accuracy we can be um i mean i'm a self-confessed nerd i will look at the aircraft and go that that's not quite right that should have a turret there the chin turret was missing on the v17s at the end but uh i'm going to rewind i'm not going to bore you with my long list um although that is available if you do choose to talk to me um yeah it's really the wider message and i think there are some really good points raised there about the the greatest generation message in the american memory is an american uh production uh i don't want to sound like a disgruntled brit but i felt that the royal air force didn't get a good um wrap in it and i thought some of the cliches of the officer uh well-spoken pilots was yeah just uh awkward to say the least to watch um but yeah it is fitting into this new generation and there's a lot of comparison with band of brothers which i think actually is a little bit unfair because that was 20 years ago and america's gone through a lot in the last 20 years something of an identity crisis perhaps i can't say much because i'm british uh i consider what we've been doing the last 20 years but we won't go down that road um yeah that there's there's a lot to take from it i mean um in terms of accuracy the overall message yeah i could in point that's the wrong cap badge or something um but do you see this sometimes with video games and some productions you see the nitpicking on the very very small details and it's actually going oh the germans weren't all that bad you know the nazis weren't all that bad and you go whoa hang on a minute that's the thing to really look at what is the overall message and the overall message is respectful it is um continuing the memory i think it is targeted to a new generation um and i think there's there's a lot to take from it in in that respect yeah and you mentioned video games i know you study depictions of the second world war in kind of different forms of media like video games and literature how do you think kind of depictions of the world do change depending on the format that they're being presented to the audience well video video games yeah i mean um that's a massive massive subject and the fact is there's different types of video games you get grand strategy ones first person shooter tends to come to my mind and actually when it came to the second world war i'd probably say one of the first big ones that i remember was the medal of honor game which came out you remember there as well um which came out shortly after saving private ryan i think spielberg was involved with and possibly time hanks uh and i was really excited it was like wow a game that obviously history nerd then folks but i i i played it and it's evolved massively since then and you can see it and the nature of gaming with online play and and such like um has changed the nature of it and there are massive massive questions over how it's handled and how that memory because i could write the greatest history book ever um and never reach the audience of games like battlefield five so i think that as historians we need to take that very very seriously what is it showing how is it portraying things um and it's a really exciting opening field of academia i feel uh and we should be having those conversations yeah john as an actor were you interested in aviation like playing that video game or you know all kind of video games were you ever interested in military history or aviation more specifically or do you think it came from this project um well i'm i'm from an m.o.d family so like my father was in the the army my mum and the navy stepdad in the army my mcglendale was in the r.a.f so um yeah i've always i've always been a fan of the military and war films and history in itself and i love call of duty and things like that but this show yeah took aviation to a whole new level i think um just figuring out like the flying fortress and figuring out how they were left up there and then the like p50 or mustangs and it's just like i would i couldn't i didn't even know that something like that was possible in the war or how significant it was to winning the war you know so the show has definitely made me a bit of a um like an aviation fan i'm sure and do you think that's something you'll follow up with in the future i think it's um it's it i'll always be i'm always going to be interested in war and other projects that i'll do history so yeah oh yeah oh we want you um guy and i just wondered if you could say a bit about so i'd say the show really plays into our kind of cultural knowledge of the second world war and i wonder if you could just speak to that a little bit and how important shows like this are to challenge that kind of cultural knowledge that we hold uh yeah i mean i suppose i'd want to answer that from a sort of film perspective because i think the film it's incredibly sort of faithful with almost sort of um perfectly emulates world war two propaganda um made during the war um i mean there were films i've got a list of some of them here aerial gunner 1943 bombardier 1943 air force 1943 then a very famous non-fiction film by william weiler called mentally spell 1944 and these films shaped attitudes at the time there are also films that the producers spielberg and hanson goodsman would probably have grown up watching i mean spielberg talks about being enthralled by these second world war propaganda films um and you can just see the influence of them so there's some sort of relay of you know hardcore propaganda filmmaking just being just confidently reproduced in the present and we might say well that's a bit strange to to be to you know that this is something that we're just consuming straightforwardly um in the 21st century and you'd imagine that there had been some development often propaganda in understanding the war and i think there's another thing going on which is that the film the series also seems to also engage a sort of more hollywood um glossy epic sense of war war two and i'm thinking of like eighties mini series like wings of war i mean some people weren't be old enough to remember that um but these were you know they had big style on them they had a sort of um hollywood aesthetic um so i think that this is a sort of combo of those two things like propaganda from making anything this sort of more overblown big budget epic um sense of war war two um i mean there was some heavy listening to do with the propaganda films because they needed to pivot away from the way world war one had been depicted with these sort of heroic fighter pilots they needed to move to depictions of heavy bombers which they did by sort of displaying the crew is this organic patriotic sort of unit um but that was not necessarily easy um the US popular culture tended to celebrate heroic individuals so you know fighter pilots worked you know bomb crews didn't work so well so making that pivot was was quite difficult and also aerial bombing as america entered the war was a difficult sell because up till then the western demotion had been very critical of aerial bombing in relation to the spanish civil war i mean we might think castles guernica but also japanese bombing of chinese civilians so it had to sort of do a sell on heavy bombers and it did so through this sort of aircrew sort of heroic aircrew who came together um i suppose in bringing together like the propaganda films and then the 80s films they this has left gaps there's blind spots you know that there is there is a sense by the cinema of world war two which it could also have called on which it chooses not to and films that i really value i think are amazing at the catch 22 the adaptation of the joseph heller novel from 1970 slaughterhouse five the adaptation of the kurt vonnegut novel from 1972 i mean they show the idiocy of military bureaucracy they show the effects of large-scale outland bombings of dresden in the case of slaughterhouse five so they that complex sense of world war two established in the 1960s and 70s is not to be found in this and so i guess there's some sort of erasure or lighting of an understanding there so that i think that sort of indicates how sort of this is playing a part in cultural memory and its formation and you touched on the kind of hollywood aspect there john i was just wondering kind of when you were filming if that was how aware you were of that whether you know this big american production telling a big story how that kind of changed how you approached the filming oh yeah um yeah you i was made aware of it so i think everyone was like the first day on the set they um like they create a whole barracks do you know what i mean like all the flight gear was genuine dialect coaches the captain dale and i was in there um and he's worked on all the saving private ryan's and the pacific and he was like the minute we had like a two-week boot camp um yeah it they didn't make it hard for you to get into character and they tried to drop you back in time i think so when your question did i realize the hollywood film yeah you'd have no reason to ask again yeah yeah and do you think because in the show we see a lot of the kind of camaraderie between kindness do you think that was kind of what you were most trying to convey or do you think there were other qualities that you thought were important to get across um well it was interesting because my character's bombardier so the pilots were kept they their relationships were a little bit different to the rest of the crew um just because they everyone kind of wanted to be a pilot they were the cool ones you know um but when you talk about camaraderie i think on that had happened on set anyway i think everyone knew that they were doing something that was bigger than them and we i've made friends for life on the job for sure you know um and i think like you said we were playing real people and it got quite emotional at times and it was hard work and the camaraderie just came through the screen because we all became like about like brothers on set because we filmed such a long time and just you mentioned the kind of pilots being cool ones james i was just wondering um with kind of discussions of the raf we see the inla of the flyer coming out and i was just wondering in the show what you thought about kind of portrayals of the heroic um and and if you could just speak to that a little bit yeah i mean being a pilot as you said was was cool to use a really really um uh descriptive word there but it was there was an alert to it it was the peak of modernity flying the first world war you had the the birth of the fighter ace and such like but the second world war was as rightly pointed out it was a bomber's war um so a lot of people that volunteered to fly in these bombers wanted to be fighter pilots they wanted to be aces and i know certainly with the raf a lot of them you know were inspired by the battle of britain wanted to fly spitfires and ended up being tail gunners on on land casters and yeah it was a completely different war but that was what was needed that's where the resources were these young men as well were young they were the fittest they were bright they were yeah really unique you had to really go through a vigorous process to get that far into an airport um and one thing that i i do think i would have liked to have seen touched on a little bit more is when people did break down it did inevitably happen uh there were some questions there were some queries that there was a scene where i think it was the monster raid where they're talking about but they're going to church there's going to be you know not factory people there there's going to be women there's going to be children there's going to be yeah um and also after one of the raids where the only crew comes back someone says i'm not going up again i'm not going up again i would have liked to have seen that followed up what happened to that person what was the stigma about that you know and say recruits were keen when they started up there is this this alert of being a flyer uh but the harsh realities do hit and let's just say we talk about the air war there is this this gradual um the scale is absolutely incredible what started war a big raid of like 20 bombers you've got thousand bomber raids by 1942 and the numbers are and the size of the aircraft the bomb loads being dropped and of course the terror on the ground and one thing actually that i i did think that is important that should have been included in was was seeing what was happening on the ground and you had the scene with the the terror flies the terror fleegers um and i thought that was incredibly powerful um and that that of course that is in the book and and such like so yeah and you mentioned kind of things you would have liked to have seen i wonder a question to all of you how much scope do you think there was in a show as big as masters of the air to cover kind of lesser known stories i know in episode eight you saw the Tuskegee airman um yeah i'm just wondering if you had any thoughts on that i mean from from a actress perspective i know that every person has a story do you know what i mean like every character in that show had a story and there's only so much time yeah you know and we're obviously basing it from that book but if they could that series could go on grab like to tell you stories so i also think there's a little bit of restriction and sense of there is some box sticking to be done so one of the things that i saw some people moaning about online was oh d-day was just absolutely skimmed past and said well we've had quite a lot of d-day there's a lot of films and and such like i i i was seeing Operation Dragoon and the Tuskegee airman and i thought yeah we've had redtails the film but i thought yeah that's that's good um so i like in that sense yeah it did encourage sort of some fresh stories but there were ones that it had to talk about i mean the whole episode on raigingsberg and schweinfurt um which probably for me it was a really really incredible episode um you had to have that if you're going to talk about the eight therefore you've got to talk about that raid um so yeah that's i mean some some things are restricted but there were there were these opportunities to bring in uh these other stories which i thought was good yeah um yeah i mean a film i really like um also directed by william weiler who you know director of this propaganda film and the spell which was actually quite close to master the air is a film he made just after the walk of the best years of our lives and it's about servicemen returning home from war and it's got soldiers and sailors and and struggling um to sort of return to normality one of the characters has both of it has had both of his hands burnt off in the naval battle and is played by a disabled veteran but they're also psychologically harmed um and there's some amazing scenes of the sort of graveyards of decommissioned war planes in the film that give a sense of scale that's similar to this the way cgi conveys a sense of scale in the masters of the air but i think that why this film is sort of indeed any one eight academy was there was a hugely popular successful film it wasn't a sort of niche marginalised film after world war two audiences cope with some difficult facts you know they were living through it um and for me i think masters of the air could have found more space for those kinds of stories so you've mentioned you know psychological and difficulty space where people return to home and you mentioned to me before that your the character you played had a ptsd after the war um yeah well i mean well what i think back then ptsd was a really thing you know people weren't discussing mental health uh you had a job to do but and that was it no one that i didn't get the impression from the research that we did that yeah people would have been scared but it wasn't a thing to discuss that you know you had a job to do and a lot of people they were fighting fighting for their country and something they believed in and a lot of them weren't happy to be there you know and i know they got asked to do a lot but um when you talk about i don't think that i'm not sure obviously you have to portray that and only the other shows did but this bit from the eight therefore so i think they just they had a duty to do and it wasn't something that they had the opportunity to discuss all knowledgeable about at that time so there are a few things i noted down which are just from the book really which i think would have just given a greater complexity and some sort of nuance and and also a bit of dramatic tension i saw dialectic in the in the film which i think is missing because it just makes it so manichean between good and bad so here's the few things we haven't mentioned yet which are in the the book um so we've said you know the civilian bombing of Hamburg and Berlin and so on and we've mentioned psychological consequences of consequences of flying these missions with such short odds of surviving those are quite phenomenal but widespread disabilities as a result of injuries they're really sketched over they're struggled to rehabilitate those injured airmen there's nothing i mean we see people blown apart or losing guns but then they just shipped off in the series we don't know what happens next i mean the circumstances of segregation of the of the of the US armed forces is really interesting the Tuskegee airmen story does allay that criticism somewhat but you know there were auxiliary auxiliary black troops supplying the airfields with bombs and fuel there were race riots in english villagers there were armed firefights with MPs trying to break up the race riots people were killed so there's some internal fighting struggle around the racism of american society and of the military and that's i think it's redeemed by the Tuskegee airmen story it's like too too neat um alcoholism virulent outbreaks of venereal disease these are not facts that sit with the propriety required of the greatest generation you know bookie is just sitting looking chastity at the picture of a girl back home i mean that was not the common behavior of american troops stationed in England um friendly fire incidents so the imprecision of the air war you know the cost of orbit um even to the point of killing your own troops so i think there's lots there you know that i'm not i'm not suggesting that what's there is not true um it mostly does seem to correspond to the historical account of the book it's just about which bits you leave out that would layer in sort of complexity so i i think it would have made it a better series myself thanks well thank you for that um so we'll move away from my questions now i'm sure people have lots that they want to ask um if you're in the room julia and linus will have roving mics if you're online please do put your questions in the chat box and Aaron will read them out thanks julia thank you sophie um yeah the team are seamlessly moving around i'm sophie antropas i'm a research fellow at the freeman air and space institute so these are my colleagues uh just for full disclosure i i wanted to ask um sort of about contemporary um depictions um that you might have opinions about i'm thinking of top gun maverick um which has just come out on netflix not that long ago i've watched it about five times i mean i've watched it in the cinema um but also um the warship documentary um the Royal Navy one um that covered the carrier strike group and vigil for those of you who saw it was saran jones which was setting the middle east and was around jones i just perhaps not all of you have watched all of those but what do you enjoy those sort of contemporary depictions do you think they're realistic i actually and just for my point of view um i do think vigil was actually fascinating in terms of um the uh concepts it's threw up and i don't think it's that far from you know current truth if you just want to revert to talking about blackadder that's fine too i'm going to have a horrible confession i haven't seen any of them um and i haven't seen the original top gun even though i'm an aviation you know i know just i'm sorry so i haven't really got a comment to be honest i'm sorry your nice viewing is sort of about that yeah i've got thanks so much now i haven't um i love all three to be honest i think it opens up a whole new audience as well like it's not just people who need to be interested in history it could just be your average viewer at home and i know people can be quite critical on um how realistic it is from the truth or what actually happened but i mean it's it's entertainment and it also allows people to have an understanding of what has happened so um i'm all for it um yeah i think on top gun um well i was expecting to be asked about top gun i mean obviously the the original top gun is simpatico with a sort of 1980s musculos or cold war anti-communism um it does want to imagine the cold war as reducible back to sort of dogfighting um and in that sense it's sort of prepos it's a preposterous film but the sort of fantasy of it is really powerful and chimes with the times really really well it's a question of genre there because even that top gun doesn't take itself that seriously compared to masters of the air which is presented as like culturally and historically um accurate important received by the reviewers of the new space because of record in the usm here as something very serious and important and so i think in a way you because it presents itself that way it kind of demands that we take it to task i wouldn't be quite so hard on top gun um you know is more pure entertainment but i think you know it's it's a debilitatingly um simple minded vision of the cold war in its initial incarnation and then to reproduce it now is like a nostalgia for that debilitatingly simple individual um so you know maybe that's that's worse but then it's also takes itself even less seriously um and can be consumed as just sort of kitsch really and a sort of postmodern artifact the fact you have to in you know unearth this older jet um you know uh and then use use it as the tool to defeat the you know the newer the newer version i don't need to say it there's a spoiler that or does he defeat it i you know i guess you'll find out so yeah i mean i think it's an exercise and both both are an exercise in nostalgia one is like a sort of compounding the early nostalgia um but maybe we don't have to kind of worry about quite so much as this um because it's not given the same kind of cute or some credibility in the in the wider culture but you're like i'm only halfway through um but i think you know in its engagement of sort of drone technology and and sort of contemporary murky difficult complexities of sort of nation states and their vested interests and the way the arms industry sort of will provide certain you know um dubious nation states with weapons i mean it's engaging the kind of train i would like to see in a sort of representation of war yeah we enjoyed it um yeah so um the barracks a lot of the grounds have been Ellsbury we had an airstrip in Oxford where the b-17s would would be um on the airstrip with actual aircrafts and to your question about how much of it was like real how much it wasn't it was a it was a solid mixture because we used technology called the volume and i believe that technology was only used by one other one other series and more be using it now but it means the airport could be on a rig essentially and you broke up into three different compartments of the plane so you'd have like the nose the tail top turret gunner etc and we would be in the actual part of the aircraft led screens around us and if Luftwaffe were going past or flat was blowing up we'd all be able to react to it at the same time so yeah it was a lot of it you were in the aircraft but you know it was on a rig so that's how you answer your questions you know that's it yeah the flight gear on the parachutes it was all there like the stationary was all accurate um yeah it was quite an experience no i wish i wish um this is perhaps a a guide question but it's really open to everybody um i was thinking i was i was trying to take in what you were saying about um a sort of ideological service that the second world war's narrative serves for particularly america and i mean there's something evergreen about this story it seems to happen a lot in our media but um maybe this series was commissioned about two or three years ago and apple decided to put on an enormous amount of money um could you speculate a little bit about what i mean how market forces and audience expectations have sort of converged into some sort of someone guessing what the zeitgeist was and what was a way to sell this as a sort of you know it's an ideological mission why that was important three years ago to apple yeah that's a good question um and i think it is genesis is longer than that in fact because it was delayed by covid right no so it's been quite slow to arrive um and it wasn't initially i think a streaming project um well i think that the great generation sort of theme is traceable to sort of the late 90s um and it's really read as a as a a key um way in which america sort of relocates itself at that time and sort of finds a sort of narrative that can generally be held and a consensus can sort of commit to uh believing in and obviously then we see in the 21st century that that that really breaks apart and fractures and that there is no sort of consensus now in the u.s um you know the political um the political scene is incredibly fractured um as we're running into an election we'll see that more and more and the film is about to map the civil war um you know that that sort imagines america you know literally kind of falling apart and fighting itself so i suppose you can you can see that if you keep telling the greater generation story it's a sort of desire to knit things back together um but it perhaps is increasingly um unable to do that and put them back together but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who want to try um i mean the stuff that's been produced by michelle and barack obama's production company is sort of doing that cultural work um documentaries that they've made in the feature films they've made are trying to sort of point to the problem and look for consensus and connection across this sort of tribal politics um so i think apple i think spielberg and hanks and apple tv and and apple tv is a bit of a sort of liberal enclave a liberal democrat enclave you know it's a sort of up market sort of profession of professional class um streaming service um some some would accuse it of being woke i think there's some you know potentially woke elements that could be pointed out in masters of the air um i think they're still trying they're still hopeful this might be the thing but it probably isn't the thing does that answer your question what's the thing the thing is consensus and americans actually been able to decide on something that they can all collectively agree to believe in um you know the the collective project of fighting against fascism was something that americans believed in and that the whole war economy geared itself up and pursued and achieved um so it's a very powerful story about america american exceptionalism the ability of america to to sort of become a world power um and you're telling that story in a moment when america is actually in crisis economically you know there are competitors in the world now um china in particular and you know its politics are a ragged you know things cannot be done politically speaking everything is deadlocked and then you've got trump biden the election going so yeah do you guys want to come in sorry no no i just thought that came to me as it's a little bit digressing slightly but it's the nature of how we we watch these shows as well so thinking about the comparison of brothers and even before that what watching something on television was an event you know i'm sure there's people here that could remember getting the radio times and circling what you were going to watch that week you'd ask whether you could watch it because you couldn't watch it again you might not have a video recorder you had a video recorder you couldn't allow it working because you were out having sunday lunch with your man or whatever that's the sort of thing that with me um now you can stream at any time you want and it's a fast paced sort of thing now television you're watching things from the 60s and 70s and the pace is much slower um and there are there are pluses to that i guess there's more character development there's there's more screen time for the actors which i'm sure that they they liked um but that's the thing to remember and as well as it's you know the general cultural change towards it even the cinema isn't the event that it used to be you know the numbers people going to the cinema it isn't isn't the thing the thing to do we wait for it generally to come out but we and a lot of things are streamed straight away and also on top of that that there comes initial sort of reaction and criticisms we have the podcast we have the youtube channels that are jumping onto this um so the nature of how it's digested culturally has changed a lot especially when we start comparing it to previous things but that's just the thought that came to me yeah do we have any online questions that we we do by uh mike harwood asks a somewhat existential question for us at the university but anyway uh so he asks uh picking up a on a comment made by uh james earlier uh he says uh where james says i could write the best history book ever but i would never but he would never compete with a game and then he confesses to be he's forgotten the actual uh name of the game but anyway uh the question is if we wish to explain air power should we be investing in the gaming industry and uk-based filmmakers more than historians and researchers at universities this answer could really dictate my career now a couple of them um both uh no um yeah video games it's it's very very difficult isn't it um and i think the way that the air war has been portrayed one of my probably one of the productions i'd hold up there was uh initially originally a book called Bomber by Len Dayton which i think was absolutely incredible and it dealt with um lmf lack of moral fire they're dealing with uh post-traumatic stress the nature of morality of bombing it also showed the story from the ground it had Nazis in it but it also had Germans that were caught up in it that were questioning um and i it's not really been repeated and there was a there was a wonderful uh bbc adaptation i think in 1995 um do watch it uh to do listen to it i should say um if you if you can it's absolutely incredible uh starring sam west and um yeah incredible brilliant cast how would you do that with a video game is a really really interesting question um i don't know where to begin with that in all honesty do you go from the grand strategy point of view do you go from on the street points of view i don't know that's up to the game developers to decide what way it's also what's going to be markable uh markable as well if we and again this sense of realism comes into it if you're going to have an absolutely realistic bombing war there's a lot of sitting there bored scared staring looking for little dots in the corner there could be a mission smith that's something in your base 30 seconds later for hours upon hours um and feeling the frostbite and your suit not not be heating up properly so you've got one leg or one leg that's far too hot all of these things yeah that's the realism that you couldn't ever hope really to get in a video game it's um a tricky question i think there's still lots to digest uh academically um otherwise i wouldn't be doing this um and looking at how it is and the other thing is with the generational changes the way that these events are looked at is obviously going to change and we are entering a phase we've had it with the first world war where it's now out of living memory for combatants that is going to be the case with the second world war so there's still a lot to discuss as we approach that and obviously afterwards the consequences of it so yeah i think we probably have time for one very quick question um okay sub cox um i run the rfs history office just to explain some background uh my question really is about um i mean it's very easy to pick out all sorts of missing dimensions from the film very obviously but i think one missing dimension which they could and probably should have covered which i think was much better covered oddly enough in the gregory peck version of the hundreds bomb group is uh is the problems of leadership at that level so the leadership that the two bucks buck and bucky are sort of betrayed as as obviously heroic which clearly they were um but the the real pressures on them seem to me to be missing and the level above them uh is completely almost completely missing um whereas of course one of the things about the 100 the bomb group was um basically the some of the commanders get fired um precisely because they're not they're not achieving what the highest levels of leadership want them to achieve so uh those sorts of pressures uh other than the the sort of standard oh well we're never going to survive uh seem to me to be utterly absent whereas they could very easily have been injected into that film yeah i totally agree with you i mean but obviously that would absolutely cloud the greatest generation interpretation of world war too because you'd have petty bureaucrats and middle managers you know um self-aggrandizing and and tactically kind of positioning themselves in a way that isn't the way a citizen soldier behaves um and then you've got leaders with very difficult decisions to make um sometimes changing their minds sometimes improvising sometimes fighting against other ask other parts of the army or you know the rf fighting with the us air force and then you get just a complex picture don't you get a complex messy contingent picture about what war is um there's some real gray dark areas in there um and you spoil the you spoil the sort of narrative framework yes but that's what i mean and it there's there's the propaganda which is very close to this and then there's actually some much more nuanced films which address the complexity but they're they're forgotten you know they're dropping away and so that that project of just remembering via a certain framework is really powerful um and obviously you you remember top of kai but it's not in the common currency of our popular culture um yeah so i agree with you today i think i'm i'm really intrigued to see what we'll be saying about this in 20 years time i think that's going to be incredibly interesting when you look back i mean my introduction probably to the 8th air force i grew up in east anglia so i visited a lot of air bases obviously oldest raf um that was my main sort of interest but i grew up around the 8th air force and places like thought aberts and box did else co um and yeah it was really incredible learning about it um and one of the first big films i watched was uh i think it was 1990 mentis bell don't know people have seen that yeah uh that was my introduction really to sort of like the flowing fortresses and such like um and rather interesting i i think about that film is um the scene where there's the letters being read out they're actually from our air bomber command families which i thought was incredibly moving at the end it's dedicated to all allied aircrew which i thought rounded a sort of round the narrative personally i think when it comes to the strategic air war i'm not just saying this as a disgruntled grit um we need to talk about more more rounded narratives that includes the role air force and explaining um a lot of what happened not just bombing indiscriminately which uh wasn't the case um and raise an excellent point there about what was happening in the pacific as well bombing of rushmer nagasaki fire bombing of tokyo yeah they're not really in discussion at all um there's a there's a lot when it comes to this topic so yeah okay well i'm afraid we are going to have to stop there um thank you for your wonderful questions and for coming to support the event and thank you to our online audience for supporting us wherever you are um i'd like to give a massive thanks to john guy and james um for taking the time to be here and for sharing your experiences and expertise so if we could give our panel a round of