Kate Chisholm

Tapestry of war

As the epic, 600-episode series nears its conclusion, Kate Chisholm speaks to the creators of this extraordinarily ambitious four-year project

It feels like a long time since the launch of Home Front on Radio 4 back in June 2014, retracing day-by-day events of 100 years ago as Britain went to war. It is a long time. Yet still the violence in Europe rages on while back home the families of the men and boys in trenches carry on as normal, putting on plays at the local theatre, selling toys, running art classes, working the trams. A new season (number 13, with two more to go before the series ends on 9 November) starts up again on Monday.

It may be an everyday story, says its editor, Jessica Dromgoole, but it’s most definitely not a soap. Every episode has been recorded for broadcast in the same studio in Birmingham where The Archers is made. ‘We’re using the same Aga and Belfast sink as Jill Archer,’ says Dromgoole. But there are no cliffhangers, no shocking endings, such as last week’s swift, sharp execution in Ambridge of chirpy Nic Grundy.

‘We wanted Home Front to be a tapestry,’ says Dromgoole. A wide variety of characters (this latest batch of episodes has 86 of them, played by 60 actors) get on with their lives while representing, or rather reflecting, aspects of the war that challenge our perceptions. Each season of 40 episodes (broadcast across eight weeks) illustrates a theme, such as spiritualism, conscription, espionage, xenophobia. We are now into morality and sexuality and how the disruptions of war are affecting some of the characters we have come to know. Ivy, who runs the theatre in Folkestone, meets the real-life writer F. Tennyson Jesse (author of A Pin to See the Peep Show), who was sent out to the front to report on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps because the big chiefs back in London were worried about battlefield behaviour.

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