Thank you for your informative post, airsound, welcome as always. I intend to watch this prog yet again via BBCi, in the light of your comments. As regards the points you make, is it not likely that Prospect-UK made this programme to appeal to their idea of what the BBC wants? In the light of "Dresden", "Bomber Harris" and similar precedents it takes little thought to achieve such appeal. Is it not more likely that better balance might result from in house productions for no other reason than to at least attempt the notion of aiming for non-bias? When you say that:
it came over as clever, artistic and rather well-themed.
my impression was that it was too clever by half, but that is not important. As to artistic you are better qualified to make that judgement and I defer to your better understanding in these matters. The interesting comment is that it was well themed. I have already mentioned that I found dual contrasting themes, of light (Hendon, Battle of Britain, Typhoons at Coningsby, and the pilots of such from past and present). Intertwined were the forces of darkness (Hull, Trenchard and the raison d'etre of the RAF founding, bombing Kurdish villages, ominous lurking Zeppelin over the 1935 Cup Final, WW2 and the Bombing Offensive with striking colour footage and the ever belligerent and defiant voice of Harris both during and after the event, Grapple and the H bomb, our Cold War preparedness to use it as testified to by John Peters, with other "Bombers" from the past trying to explain their historic roles). Now that seems to me to be a very powerful and effective theme, heavily biaised against Strategic Bombing, the very reason of the RAF formation 90 years ago, or am I in error? You were honest enough to fess up to your own connection with the Beeb. My interest is with the provision of a National Memorial to Bomber Command's 55,573 Aircrew that died in WW2. I feel that it is a national disgrace that well over 60 years after the event, the survivors are still waiting for that. As a major opinion former over that period it seems to me to have consistently portrayed that campaign not as a vital ingredient of final victory, but as needless death and destruction as in this programme, or am I again in error? I know that this thread is concerned only with the programme, which will result in as many opinions as there are posts, but the elephant in the room is the BBC and the agenda it brings with it when portraying the RAF, particularly in WW2. Isn't it time we acknowledged the presence of this pachyderm?