Strength lies in stories from the home front

By GREG DIXON

The Colour of War - The Anzacs (TV One, 8.30pm) is an interesting concept. Rather than, as is the case with most documentaries, being guided by the subject and then looking for words and pictures to construct a narrative, it does it in reverse. Pictures are its starting point.

But this method of storytelling means that some significant events in New Zealand's war history are missing from this three-part series, which began last week.

Our warship HMS Achilles, which helps to hound the German pocket battleship Graf Spee into a Uruguay port in the battle of the River Plate in 1939, rates no mention because there is no colour footage of the battle or of the damage the Achilles took during this successful engagement.

The New Zealand division's heavy involvement with the battle at Cassino in Italy is there but the limited amount of colour film means it is only briefly touched on in tonight's second episode.

There are other omissions and thin coverage of significant events. Do they hurt the series? The answer is yes, and no.

While it doesn't pretend to be telling the entire story of World War II (or the Korean and Vietnam wars), being so selective in recounting the Anzac story, on the basis of the film available, means the series risks being a colour curio rather than a contribution to the body of work on the Anzacs' history.

The decision to cover the wars after World War II up to and including Vietnam (in episode three) is also slightly puzzling. The British version, also a three-parter, sticks to World War II - a big enough story on its own. The Anzacs might have benefited from narrowing its focus.

There are a few other problems. The opening titles are heavy handed - "the colour is real" and so on - though the Australasian makers have simply taken this straight from the British series (screening on Prime) which was used as a model.

The narration is at times on the leaden side. Russell Crowe may have seemed, with his Australasian Anzac credentials, to have been a good choice for narrator, but hearing Maximus intoning banal lines like "this war will affect the Anzac nations like no other" can cause irritable bowel syndrome.

Yet the series is still a satisfying affair. Its major strength is telling the often neglected stories from the home front and showing us, in the strong primary colours of early colour film, a glimpse of the past in a way that we have not seen it before.

The footage of a Stratford school's re-enactment of the coronation of George VI in 1939 was fascinating for its inherent oddity (seen through older post-colonial eyes) and for its weird, vivid reds.

The Semple tank - New Zealand's secret weapon Crowe told us with tongue in cheek - was a classic case of the Kiwi number-eight fencing-wire approach. And, including this wonderful footage, (thank goodness it's survived) provided some light in the gloom of the war stories.

The most poignant footage in last week's episode, aside from the state funeral for Prime Minister Michael Savage, was probably that shot by Australian George Bolton in a park in Adelaide.

With their boys under the German boot at the siege of Tobruk, the film functioned as a sort of cheer-up message from home. It left you to imagine how it played when it was finally seen by those troops.

Yet ultimately - and oddly - for a series built on showing colour footage of war, it has so far been the words from letters and diaries that have moved most.

"This show is drawing to a close," said one soldier during the failed Greek campaign. "It's just a matter of the individual result: death, prison or escape." No footage, colour or not, can convey the same sense of what it means to be at war as those few words.