WWII

Sam Mendes’s first documentary to tell story of men who captured footage of Bergen-Belsen

In a grainy black-and-white photo, a man in army uniform extends a hand to a woman who has pressed it against her face and is crying. A woman looks on behind both of them

The documentary will tell the story of Sergeants Mike Lewis and Bill Lawrie, who helped document the horrors of the Holocaust. The pair worked in the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit, and were embedded with troops in North West Europe. A mission into Germany took the group to what they thought was a typhus hospital; none of them could have imagined what awaited in Bergen-Belsen.

The documentary uses both the footage and words of Lewis and Lawrie to tell an intimate, moving story of documenting atrocity.

Comfort classic: Dad’s Army

The cast of Dad's Army

The year 1968 was marked by student unrest on British campuses, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham. It was also the year that, on a midweek night in late July, saw the debut of a deceptively unassuming and nostalgic English TV sitcom. Dad’s Army was destined to become a classic of the genre. Even at the time, the show seemed to belong to a totally different and more reassuring world to the one erupting outside our front doors.