The mere existence of The Wipers Times (2013) sounds like a sketch by Richard Curtis or Joan Littlewood: a satirical newspaper written, published, and distributed entirely from the trenches of the Western Front, mocking the entire business of war from the Germans to the General Staff with spoof advertisements, literary lampoons, and a miscellany of in-jokes, gallows humor, and silliness to the point of surrealism. Between February 1916 and December 1918, edited and sub-edited by Captain Fred Roberts and Lieutenant Jack Pearson of the 12th Sherwood Foresters, this fascinating artifact ran for twenty-three issues under the accumulating titles of The Wipers Times or Salient News, The "New Church" Times, The Kemmel Times, The Somme-Times, The B.E.F. Times, and finally, optimistically, The Better Times. Much of it is still very funny today, its ironic, anarchic style recognizable from generations of later comedy. The fact that so much of its war humor hasn't dated is its own kind of grim joke. The official motto of the paper was supplied early on by the rhetoric of the top brass: "Am I as offensive as I might be?" The unofficial one might have come from a later issue's parody of Kipling: "Through dread of crying you will laugh instead."
Dramatizing this poignant, subversive history for BBC Two, co-writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman and director Andy De Emmony make the clever and crucial decision to take the prevailing tone of their film—and a substantial percentage of its dialogue—directly from the paper, steering clear of miserabilism without trivializing the conditions that led the staff of the Wipers Times to advertise cures for optimism, offer regular odds on the chlorine forecast, and try to sell the Ypres Salient for charity. The film's best joke, in fact, may be how indistinguishably from an ordinary newsroom the dugout of the Wipers Times operates, give or take the interruptions of heavy artillery, divisional inspections, and the necessity of leaving the latest edition half-set to go over the top. There are relentless deadlines, a dearth of copy, too many contributors who fancy themselves poets. The original platen press whose discovery in the bombed-out remains of a printing house in Ypres inspired the whole endeavor suffers a direct hit from a five-nine and a replacement hand-jigger can be salvaged only from the notorious bombardments of Hellfire Corner. When the paper finally rates a mention in the Tatler, its enterprising wit is inaccurately credited to the 6th Division. "Damn journalists, can't they get anything right?" The script is especially good at observing without strain the ways in which the paper is simultaneously a coping mechanism and a form of truth-telling. Confident assertions of British superiority in the field are overtaken by the lectures of "Belary Helloc," who can mathematically prove that the fighting strength of the Imperial German Army maxes out at sixteen. Specious foreign correspondence meets its match in the vass-you-dere-Sharlie journalism of "William Teech Bomas, writing exclusively from the middle of the bottle—sorry, battle." Nothing in their satire can exceed the absurdity of the war itself. Two Battles of the Somme? Eighteen months of maneuvers just to return to the even more rubble of Ypres? "How can you accuse me of going too far when the entire 24th Division has gone precisely ten yards in the last six months and that was sideways?" After a while, the lines between hilarity and horror, pathos and farce blur so inevitably that of course the somber interment of a soldier accompanied by the artless, affecting eulogy of "To My Chum" ("Our hearts were light; but now—you're dead / and I am Mateless") ends when the whizz-bangs start dropping and the burial detail has to run like hell. A bayonet charge into a German trench takes the cake for pointlessness when it is discovered after the first few shots and lunges that its defenders are already dead, self-gassed by a change in the wind: "I thought they were a bit . . . passive." I am not normally a fan of desaturating the past onscreen, but the hand-tinted earth tones favored by DP Mark Garrett effectively convey the general atmosphere of mud and unreality which seems to seep even into the characters' eyes and expressions as the war wears on, Christmas after Christmas and not over yet. Contrasting sharply and delightfully in ink-crisp black-and-white is the Jarmanesque device of staging the editorials and advertisements of the Wipers Times like concert party sketches intercut with historical footage—it's a neat way of transferring the jokes off the page as well as an opportunity for the cast to show off their range in comedy and song. Originally performed directly through the fourth wall, as the paper's circulation grows, an audience of servicemen becomes visible beyond the footlights, first at the Cloth Hall in Ypres, then the "Neuve-Église Hippodrome," and finally the "European Theatre" where Roberts presides as an enticing and seedy master of ceremonies in cracked whiteface and a greasepaint mustache. "Yes," he promises ominously, "this show is going to run, and run, and run, and run . . ."
For reasons of both narrative convenience and historical necessity, the majority of the ensemble cast is either composited or invented, but the story is anchored dramatically and nonfictionally in the double act of Roberts and Pearson, played by Ben Chaplin and Julian Rhind-Tutt with the catalytic intimacy of people who don't just finish one another's sentences, they set each other up for jokes. Informed early on that there is a slight problem with potential advertisers for the paper, e.g. local restaurants, theaters, hotels, Roberts naturally inquires as to what it is and receives the bad news from Pearson: "They've all been blown to buggery." Without missing an equally straight-faced beat, he comes back, "Is that anywhere near Poperinghe?" Visually as well as verbally, they play well off one another with Chaplin's dark strong-boned face that can flip from forbidding to mischievous with nothing more than the tug of his brows or a corner of his mouth, Rhind-Tutt more creased and nervy, a demurely dry sense of insubordination in reserve under the illusion of being the more sensible one. When it isn't enough to play the gramophone during a barrage and Roberts takes to the piano to drown out as much as he can, Pearson lets him bang out a verse of music-hall doggerel about Dutch courage and then joins in. He cheers up the captain in hospital with his impersonation of the celebrated Teech Bomas; Roberts returning from leave in Amiens makes him a present of fancy cheese to which he gravely responds, "Merci buckets." The occasion of receiving letters from their wives becomes the excuse for a brief contest of alliteration. At zero minus one of the Battle of the Somme, they collaboratively improvise a limerick. War-wearied as they are by 1916, it doesn't take much to imagine them as a pair of schoolroom troublemakers—a dark head and a ginger one bent over some scheme best illustrated by Ronald Searle—and they are viewed in something of the same light by the brass hats whom they send up as cheerfully and often as violently as "the Boche." The degree to which any official oversight would have killed the spirit of the paper stone dead can be judged by the advertisement for the booby-trapped duckboard guaranteed to get a company commander out of a harassed subaltern's hair or the editor's assurance to an anxious correspondent that the death penalty is never invoked in cases of fragging an adjutant on the grounds of extenuating circumstances. (Advertising an anti-war demonstration at Passchendaele in November 1917 would also not have passed the censors.) The casting of Michael Palin as the tolerant General Mitford is a nice meta-tip of the hat to the lineage of comedy in which both the Wipers Times and the Pythons coexist, mildly and immovably reminding his bristling junior that "humour . . . is what separates civilisation from incivility." Ben Daniels' Lieutenant Colonel Howfield works less well for me, so officiously insistent that the paper is at worst treasonous and at best undermining morale that he must be meant to represent the disapproval of more than one member of the General Staff, but concentrated all in one person it makes him as complete a caricature as the paper's famous motif, which he personifies when he demands of a mortally deadpan Roberts, "Are you being offensive enough?" Josh O'Connor as Private Dodd is so young and so much the baby of the battalion that I feared for him right up through the Armistice; Steve Oram's Sergeant Harris may not outrank his editors according to the British Army, but since his civilian experience was in printing, he might as well be Kitchener where the press is concerned. As the near-cameo of Kate Roberts, Emilia Fox has little to do beyond listen to her husband in a context that makes it clear both how thoroughly he has been disabused of any illusions he might once have held about the war and how poorly he now functions away from it, but his monologue paraphrased in part from the final editorial of the Better Times is so eloquently bitter that I was glad he had someone to deliver it to. "It all helps to pass the time till Christmas when the war's going to end . . . We just don't know which Christmas."
Despite its pretensions to anti-journalism, the Wipers Times by its ephemeral, aggregate nature couldn't help but serve as a snapshot of the attitudes of its contributors before they could be molded into national myth and The Wipers Times honors this fact with its own complexity. To his wife, Roberts can describe a battle as "an epic of futility" and war itself as "the vilest disaster that can befall mankind . . . nothing more than wallowing in a dirty ditch." Demobbed and looking for a job on Fleet Street, he bridles immediately at the noncombatant editor played by Patrick FitzSymons who compacts the totality of his experience into the platitude that "it must have been hell," firmly correcting the man's well-meaning incomprehension, "But we had some good times, too." The publication of his newspaper may have been the strongest or the sole example, but he will not have it erased by someone who wasn't there. "This was my truth," he states in a rare moment of unadorned gravity, indicating the thin, weather-stained pages with their painstakingly set and sometimes patchily printed type: not the desired narrative of cynicism or sentiment, but something more complicated, about surviving with humor when there's nothing else to hand, being proud of art wrestled out of a time of nightmare even or perhaps especially if it wasn't serious high culture, it was fun and idtastic and occasionally so private that unless one of the editors annotated his personal copies, a century and a bit later I have no hope of getting some of the jokes. ("The celebrated infantry officer who appears daily in the trenches disguised as a Xmas tree" is an item in the regular column of "Things We Want To Know" and believe me, I want to know, too.) "It's important to me," Roberts explained once in Flanders, "because it's not important." We should all leave such unimportant legacies. By any name, the Wipers Times would still be funny and I don't see how it can't have influenced Blackadder Goes Forth (1989). This offensive brought to you by my civil backers at Patreon.
Dramatizing this poignant, subversive history for BBC Two, co-writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman and director Andy De Emmony make the clever and crucial decision to take the prevailing tone of their film—and a substantial percentage of its dialogue—directly from the paper, steering clear of miserabilism without trivializing the conditions that led the staff of the Wipers Times to advertise cures for optimism, offer regular odds on the chlorine forecast, and try to sell the Ypres Salient for charity. The film's best joke, in fact, may be how indistinguishably from an ordinary newsroom the dugout of the Wipers Times operates, give or take the interruptions of heavy artillery, divisional inspections, and the necessity of leaving the latest edition half-set to go over the top. There are relentless deadlines, a dearth of copy, too many contributors who fancy themselves poets. The original platen press whose discovery in the bombed-out remains of a printing house in Ypres inspired the whole endeavor suffers a direct hit from a five-nine and a replacement hand-jigger can be salvaged only from the notorious bombardments of Hellfire Corner. When the paper finally rates a mention in the Tatler, its enterprising wit is inaccurately credited to the 6th Division. "Damn journalists, can't they get anything right?" The script is especially good at observing without strain the ways in which the paper is simultaneously a coping mechanism and a form of truth-telling. Confident assertions of British superiority in the field are overtaken by the lectures of "Belary Helloc," who can mathematically prove that the fighting strength of the Imperial German Army maxes out at sixteen. Specious foreign correspondence meets its match in the vass-you-dere-Sharlie journalism of "William Teech Bomas, writing exclusively from the middle of the bottle—sorry, battle." Nothing in their satire can exceed the absurdity of the war itself. Two Battles of the Somme? Eighteen months of maneuvers just to return to the even more rubble of Ypres? "How can you accuse me of going too far when the entire 24th Division has gone precisely ten yards in the last six months and that was sideways?" After a while, the lines between hilarity and horror, pathos and farce blur so inevitably that of course the somber interment of a soldier accompanied by the artless, affecting eulogy of "To My Chum" ("Our hearts were light; but now—you're dead / and I am Mateless") ends when the whizz-bangs start dropping and the burial detail has to run like hell. A bayonet charge into a German trench takes the cake for pointlessness when it is discovered after the first few shots and lunges that its defenders are already dead, self-gassed by a change in the wind: "I thought they were a bit . . . passive." I am not normally a fan of desaturating the past onscreen, but the hand-tinted earth tones favored by DP Mark Garrett effectively convey the general atmosphere of mud and unreality which seems to seep even into the characters' eyes and expressions as the war wears on, Christmas after Christmas and not over yet. Contrasting sharply and delightfully in ink-crisp black-and-white is the Jarmanesque device of staging the editorials and advertisements of the Wipers Times like concert party sketches intercut with historical footage—it's a neat way of transferring the jokes off the page as well as an opportunity for the cast to show off their range in comedy and song. Originally performed directly through the fourth wall, as the paper's circulation grows, an audience of servicemen becomes visible beyond the footlights, first at the Cloth Hall in Ypres, then the "Neuve-Église Hippodrome," and finally the "European Theatre" where Roberts presides as an enticing and seedy master of ceremonies in cracked whiteface and a greasepaint mustache. "Yes," he promises ominously, "this show is going to run, and run, and run, and run . . ."
For reasons of both narrative convenience and historical necessity, the majority of the ensemble cast is either composited or invented, but the story is anchored dramatically and nonfictionally in the double act of Roberts and Pearson, played by Ben Chaplin and Julian Rhind-Tutt with the catalytic intimacy of people who don't just finish one another's sentences, they set each other up for jokes. Informed early on that there is a slight problem with potential advertisers for the paper, e.g. local restaurants, theaters, hotels, Roberts naturally inquires as to what it is and receives the bad news from Pearson: "They've all been blown to buggery." Without missing an equally straight-faced beat, he comes back, "Is that anywhere near Poperinghe?" Visually as well as verbally, they play well off one another with Chaplin's dark strong-boned face that can flip from forbidding to mischievous with nothing more than the tug of his brows or a corner of his mouth, Rhind-Tutt more creased and nervy, a demurely dry sense of insubordination in reserve under the illusion of being the more sensible one. When it isn't enough to play the gramophone during a barrage and Roberts takes to the piano to drown out as much as he can, Pearson lets him bang out a verse of music-hall doggerel about Dutch courage and then joins in. He cheers up the captain in hospital with his impersonation of the celebrated Teech Bomas; Roberts returning from leave in Amiens makes him a present of fancy cheese to which he gravely responds, "Merci buckets." The occasion of receiving letters from their wives becomes the excuse for a brief contest of alliteration. At zero minus one of the Battle of the Somme, they collaboratively improvise a limerick. War-wearied as they are by 1916, it doesn't take much to imagine them as a pair of schoolroom troublemakers—a dark head and a ginger one bent over some scheme best illustrated by Ronald Searle—and they are viewed in something of the same light by the brass hats whom they send up as cheerfully and often as violently as "the Boche." The degree to which any official oversight would have killed the spirit of the paper stone dead can be judged by the advertisement for the booby-trapped duckboard guaranteed to get a company commander out of a harassed subaltern's hair or the editor's assurance to an anxious correspondent that the death penalty is never invoked in cases of fragging an adjutant on the grounds of extenuating circumstances. (Advertising an anti-war demonstration at Passchendaele in November 1917 would also not have passed the censors.) The casting of Michael Palin as the tolerant General Mitford is a nice meta-tip of the hat to the lineage of comedy in which both the Wipers Times and the Pythons coexist, mildly and immovably reminding his bristling junior that "humour . . . is what separates civilisation from incivility." Ben Daniels' Lieutenant Colonel Howfield works less well for me, so officiously insistent that the paper is at worst treasonous and at best undermining morale that he must be meant to represent the disapproval of more than one member of the General Staff, but concentrated all in one person it makes him as complete a caricature as the paper's famous motif, which he personifies when he demands of a mortally deadpan Roberts, "Are you being offensive enough?" Josh O'Connor as Private Dodd is so young and so much the baby of the battalion that I feared for him right up through the Armistice; Steve Oram's Sergeant Harris may not outrank his editors according to the British Army, but since his civilian experience was in printing, he might as well be Kitchener where the press is concerned. As the near-cameo of Kate Roberts, Emilia Fox has little to do beyond listen to her husband in a context that makes it clear both how thoroughly he has been disabused of any illusions he might once have held about the war and how poorly he now functions away from it, but his monologue paraphrased in part from the final editorial of the Better Times is so eloquently bitter that I was glad he had someone to deliver it to. "It all helps to pass the time till Christmas when the war's going to end . . . We just don't know which Christmas."
Despite its pretensions to anti-journalism, the Wipers Times by its ephemeral, aggregate nature couldn't help but serve as a snapshot of the attitudes of its contributors before they could be molded into national myth and The Wipers Times honors this fact with its own complexity. To his wife, Roberts can describe a battle as "an epic of futility" and war itself as "the vilest disaster that can befall mankind . . . nothing more than wallowing in a dirty ditch." Demobbed and looking for a job on Fleet Street, he bridles immediately at the noncombatant editor played by Patrick FitzSymons who compacts the totality of his experience into the platitude that "it must have been hell," firmly correcting the man's well-meaning incomprehension, "But we had some good times, too." The publication of his newspaper may have been the strongest or the sole example, but he will not have it erased by someone who wasn't there. "This was my truth," he states in a rare moment of unadorned gravity, indicating the thin, weather-stained pages with their painstakingly set and sometimes patchily printed type: not the desired narrative of cynicism or sentiment, but something more complicated, about surviving with humor when there's nothing else to hand, being proud of art wrestled out of a time of nightmare even or perhaps especially if it wasn't serious high culture, it was fun and idtastic and occasionally so private that unless one of the editors annotated his personal copies, a century and a bit later I have no hope of getting some of the jokes. ("The celebrated infantry officer who appears daily in the trenches disguised as a Xmas tree" is an item in the regular column of "Things We Want To Know" and believe me, I want to know, too.) "It's important to me," Roberts explained once in Flanders, "because it's not important." We should all leave such unimportant legacies. By any name, the Wipers Times would still be funny and I don't see how it can't have influenced Blackadder Goes Forth (1989). This offensive brought to you by my civil backers at Patreon.
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