A Family at War Season One

A FAMILY AT WAR

Released by Acorn Media UK . Available as a 6 disc box set or as 3 separate double disc sets. Also available on VHS.

Acorn Media are certainly coming up trumps with their releases in the first part of the year, not content with bring out the fantastic Dangerous Davies the company now also give us one of the golden age of TVs best loved series A Family At War.
All 13 episodes of season one are released in a very nice 6 disc set set. First seen in 1970 and at the time Granada TVs most expensive ever series A Family At War charts the second world war years of the Liverpudlian Ashton family. Very quickly the show captured the nations interest hitting number one in the ratings beating the all poweful
Coronation Street
in the process.

Large by todays standards the family of 7 was headed by no nonsense Edwin (Colin Douglas) who worked in the printing works run by his arrogant and pompous brother-in-law Sefton Briggs (John McKelvey), wife Jean (Shelagh Fraser) did her best to instill the proper values into their five grown up children, eldest of whom was David (Colin Campbell), trapped in marriage to Sheila (Coral Atkins), ends up joining the air force by the end of the first episode.

Their other kids were the idealistic Philip(Keith Drinkel), schoolteacher Margaret (Lesley Nunnerley) who quickly gets married to John Porter (who is still very much under the influence of his domineering mother, leading to problems in the marriage), the just heading out into the world Freda (Barbara Flynn) and youngest son Robert (who is away much of the time at nautical school and is played by a very young David Dixon.)
Much of this first series is concerned with the coming of world war two, it is May 1938 when the series begins but already the dogs of war are mustering themselves, episodes 2 sees Philip going back to Spain (he had been there the year before) to help the fight in the civil war then.

Created by John Finch the show is a real classic and contains many of the things that have been lost from todays quick fire, fast cut, every scene has to have diverting background music TV world, Family At War takes time to set scenes, is heavy on the dialogue and has that classic mixt of video tape interior scenes and shot on film exteriors. Definitely a must have release, roll on series two.

Extras are all text based apart from the photo gallery and include a biography of the great John Finch, production notes (A Family At War was once voted Norways most popular series ever!!), a quotes section and the usual scene indexing.