OU on the BBC: Writing the Century - About the series

BBC

Writing the Century provides an insight into the twentieth century through the lives of ordinary people.

Focusing on an individual’s experience helps in understanding how social change and national and world events affect them.

There is a natural fascination in reading other people’s diaries and letters; they provide an intimate insight into another world. But, as Writing the Century demonstrates, everything is not exactly as we collectively remember it!

The late 1940s and 1950s were a significant historical period. The war had just ended and people were entering unchartered territory. The Cold War was unfolding, the sun was setting on the British Empire, and Britain was still trying to find its place in the new international order.

Despite this, as Writing the Century shows, life went on as before. The ordinary Briton was as much concerned as ever with family concerns, day-to-day living, love, and mortality.

A significant feature of a diary is that writing it can be a cathartic process. Diary entries are personal accounts of everyday life, rarely written with any expectation of them being published.

The level of detail recorded can vary considerably, from simple references to meetings and activities to a more detailed account of events that the individual experiences either directly or indirectly.

Importantly for historians, diaries differ from memoirs, which are written at a later date and are subjected to modification and self-censorship.

Writing the Century combines the skills of creative writing with historical analysis. Each series is from the perspective of an individual person, based on events recorded in their diary for the period in question.

Using the diaries as the basis of the subsequent storyline, the writer seeks to dramatise the recorded events. Additional knowledge and research of the period allows the writer to provide the details that the diary merely hints at. This biographical/autobiographical process is referred to as Life Writing.

Writing the Century in more depth: