Guy Martin's Battle of Britain, episode 1 review: stonking fun, despite the Top Trumps-style history
Guy Martin’s Battle of Britain (Channel 4) was history strained through a giant, yellowing stack of Biggles books. And it was all the better for it. “July, 1940, the Battle of Britain begins,” intoned the narrator in the sort of gravelly tones usually reserved for film trailers featuring CGI monsters lunking each other. “It was a genuine turning point in world history.”
The show’s wheeze was to illustrate this turning point by putting Martin through his paces as a wannabe RAF pilot. He would be trained on the same planes, manuals and airfields as the thousands of young men who rushed to join up when, only 10 months into the Second World War, the Nazis looked poised to hopscotch over the Channel and into Blighty. Their average age was 20, and the training took more than 120 hours. Martin is considerably craggier and had only two episodes to master the basics so he would survive the series' grand finale – an aerial dogfight in a Hawker Hurricane against a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt 109.
It was stonking fun, even for those whose Airfix has long since gathered dust. Martin, a mechanic and motorbike racer, all sideburns and Jason Statham stubble, was a breezily chipper host. He was, you sensed, only seconds away from spiraling away from the camera, arms outstretched, making engine noises. “We were always going to smash 'em,” he enthused early on, which just about set the level for the show's discussion of tactical nuance.
Yet his progression up through the ranks of training planes, from the Tiger Moth bi-plane via the American Harvard to the mighty Hurricane, was genuinely thrilling. Cameras on the wings and in the cockpit showed just how rackety and dangerous it was to be strapped into what was, in effect, a massively overpowered glider travelling at 230mph towards the ground. On his first solo takeoff, Martin nearly buried a wingtip into the runway. “Fair play, I won’t do that again,” he laughed when shown the hair-raising footage.
Alongside this, we got some historical context. Martin visited the observation posts and control centres where Britain’s air response was coordinated. Twenty-minute radar warnings and a 30,000-strong army of observers meant the RAF stayed one step ahead of the technologically superior Luftwaffe. “This was our secret weapon,” reflected Martin. The accompanying archive footage of boyish pilots being trained was unexpectedly affecting; the average life expectancy for these men was just four weeks. Most were called out two or three times a day to respond to raids. The reality of constant, vomit-inducing nerves was a far cry from the jolly-good-chap jingoism of the RAF propaganda films.
There could have been more of this shade to contrast the spirit of derring-do. Quite why the RAF were the first line of defence against Operation Sea Lion – Hitler’s plans for an amphibious invasion of Britain – could have been more clearly explained. And some of the research seemed culled more from a Wikipedia skim than a lengthy session with Max Hastings’s The Battle of Britain. Hermann G?ring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe was, we were told, “a notorious morphine addict and lion owner”. All true, no doubt, but occasionally a less Top Trumps approach would have been welcome.
Still, Guy Martin’s Battle of Britain was well worth the time. It amply showed Martin’s charm and extraordinary abilities – and his deep affiliation for the tremendous men, and machines, which kept Britain safe during one of its darkest hours. His instructor, Anna Walker, compared him to the RAF’s celebrated ‘sergeant pilots’: “They didn’t go to the right sort of schools, but they had an empathy with the machine. Guy is the same sort of pilot.” There can be few higher tributes than that.