Testament of Youth

Between approximately 1974 and 1983 (or 1987), Britain produced a number of impeccable, superb history-based or biographical miniseries. This is one of them.

Based on Vera Brittain's memoir of the same title, it follows her life from 1913 to 1925. It covers her young ambitions under the stifling control of her provincial parents; the war years of struggle, maturation, and loss; and her life and ambitions and successes after the war.

Cheryl Campbell is outstanding as Vera.

If you have enjoyed the other outstanding history or biographical British miniseries produced during this golden age -- Fall of Eagles, Jenny Lady Randolph Churchill, Edward the King (aka Edward VII), I Claudius, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (fiction but still one of the golden-age miniseries), Brideshead Revisited (ditto), Churchill: The Wilderness Years, Reilly Ace of Spies, and Fortunes of War -- and are longing for more, do check this out.

Superbly done miniseries based on the book by Vera Brittain. Autobiographical look at Brittain's life as a young woman during World War I.

Vera's comfy middle-class life is shattered by the outbreak of war. He father loses his business and she watches as her brother, friends, and fiancee march off to France to fight the Kaiser.

She gives up her studies at Oxford to become a nurse and eventually serves on the front during the endless war years. By the end of the war, her brother, friends, and fiancee are all dead and she struggles with what to do with her empty life.

Eventually she goes back to Oxford and meets the radical Winifred Holtby (Joanna McCallum) and moves toward a life as a writer and pacifist. Vera publishes her first novel, THE DARK TIDE in 1923 and eventually becomes part of the living world again.

Devastating look at the war and its effects on women and the families back in England as seen through Brittain's eyes. Co-stars include Emrys James as the father, Jane Wenham as the mother, Rupert Frazer as Edward, Peter Woodward as Roland, Rosalie Crutchley as Miss Penrose, and Frances Tomelty as Sister Hope.

Cheryl Campell won a well-deserved BAFTA for her superb performance as Brittain. An unseen narrator reads bits of poetry by Wildred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ezra Pound over the grim footage of the war.

In one scene a horrified Brittain reads an article in the London Times encouraging the "generation of spinsters" to emigrate from England and go to Canada or Australia or South Africa, as though the unmarried women were at fault for being too grim a memory of the war that wiped out a generation of young men.