World on Fire was supposed to return a little sooner than it did, but the pandemic meant that its second series has arrived four years after the first. The idea that real-world events might intrude on its storytelling is apt, given that much of this sweeping, epic war drama is concerned with how conflict affects everyday life, and how adaptable people can, and must, be when everything is turned upside down.
Writer and creator Peter Bowker (Blackpool, The A Word) has moved the action forward just slightly to 1941, and translator Harry Chase is temporarily back at home in Cheshire, having brought his new wife, Kasia (Zofia Wichlacz), back from Poland with him. Lesley Manville continues to play Harry’s waspish mother Robina with a hint of the Maggie Smith/Dowager Countess to her; her compassion is not entirely absent, but it is buried deeply in the weeds of propriety and blunt proclamations about the state of things. “I doubt that the Germans are interested in Cheshire,” she says, drily, as bombs rain down on Manchester. She claims to be unafraid of strong emotion: “I just disapprove of it.”
Manville’s uptight snobbishness provides some great acidic balance. Harry (Jonah Hauer-King) doesn’t have much to do as the series begins, other than mope around at home, but he is soon off to play his part once again, dispatched to north Africa by the episode’s end. “Mother, I have no choice but to fight for my country,” he says, as she explains that he is leaving quite the personal mess behind him.
After fleeing her country and her role in the resistance to travel to Britain with Harry, Kasia is traumatised and struggling with what would now be identified as PTSD. She has nightmares that wake the house – Robina is not happy about this – and cannot work out where she fits into the war now that she is a refugee. “I am a soldier, not a sister or a wife,” she tells Harry, while wondering if fighting is the only thing she is good at. Kasia, with all of her flawed complexities, is one of the show’s best characters.
Lois, Harry’s former flame and the mother of his child, Vera, is also grasping with the notion of what her role should be. She is an ambulance driver, dodging bombs to get victims to hospital, but taking increasingly reckless risks, unable to grieve properly for those she has lost. When her brother, Tom, returns he accuses her of not staying at home where she “should” be. This is one of the many grains of sand in the “we’re all in this together” narrative; Kasia, too, finds that not all Mancunians have open arms when it comes to refugees, particularly if they insist on “speaking foreign”. As is often the case here, one needn’t look far for contemporary parallels.
It sometimes leans towards the soapy side, such as in an awkward family gathering between Harry, Kasia, Lois and Robina, filled with pining looks. But its occasional soapiness works in its favour: it juggles its elements well, never seeming crass or imbalanced. It is compelling storytelling that flies by quickly demanding – and earning – the viewer’s emotional investment in its characters almost immediately.
As in the first series, it casts its net wider than the home front. In Berlin, it tells the story of schoolgirl Marga, recruited to the horrific Lebensborn programme, in which young women with Aryan qualities were selected to have children with SS officers, in the pursuit of “racial purity”. The tension is chilling, as her friend and teacher try to quietly intervene; everyone is afraid of their neighbours, or their children, reporting them to the authorities.
It also spends time in Egypt, where British and Indian army regiments are supposed to fight as one against the Italians, who have snipers in the hills and have laid landmines on the road. The Indian soldiers are given the most dangerous tasks, and again, there is a sense that not everyone is in this together, even if they are on the same side.
World on Fire is an ambitious series. It is multinational, multilingual, and treats the personal and political as one and the same. The idea behind it has always been to tell the story of the war through the lives of ordinary people, and it certainly provides a sense of how every single aspect of life must have been disrupted. I have been slightly spoiled for second world war dramas by the gregarious SAS: Rogue Heroes, and this does not share that bounce or spirit. But it does have an immaculate grasp of tension and character. As this is war, people come and go; they live and they die. By the end of the opening episode, I was fully invested in their fates.
World on Fire aired on BBC One and is available on BBC iPlayer.
