Catch up TV

Episode 20 September 2023

Lucy Worsley explores the lives of six real people who lived, worked and volunteered during the Blitz. Using the same style as Lucy's film about the Suffragettes, the film shows their remarkable resilience, as well as the terrible suffering they endured, shining a light on the role of the front-line workers and volunteers at the heart of it all.\n\nThe six lives at the heart of the film are 17-year-old Jewish shopgirl Nina Masel, from Essex, who reported for Mass Observation; Frances Faviell, a Chelsea artist and socialite who received just a week’s training to become an auxiliary nurse and would end up treating a dying victim in a bomb crater; Ita Ekpenyon, a Nigerian teacher who moved to the UK to study law but who took on the role of an air-raid precaution warden to rally the people of his central London patch; Barbara Nixon, an out-of-work actress who worked long hours as an ARP warden, expressing her outrage at judgemental attitudes towards East Enders who had lost everything; Frank Hurd, a full-time fireman whose day job was to keep the raging fires of the bombing raids under control; and Robert Barltrop, too young to enlist, who worked as a porter in a Sainsbury's warehouse and volunteered as a firewatcher.

Source: BBC 1