Order in Ruins: British Society and the Media Assemblage of The World at War c. 1970-1975

This thesis studies a period of intense crisis and creativity in British media, society, and culture, when the settled outcome of the Second World War (WW2) was perceived to be disintegrating. The post-world-war order was becoming an ‘order in ruins’. The thesis centres on a far-reaching analysis of the making of The World at War (WAW) in the early 1970s. A hugely popular televised documentary series produced in London as the UK entered the European Community amid the Cold War, WAW was a seminal and celebrated attempt to produce a challenging ‘people’s history’ of WW2 with global scope.

This is the first full-length academic study of WAW and the first fully comprehensive examination of the production’s key aims and intended outcomes. It shows how WAW was influenced by and sought to intervene in five era-defining developments that upset the presumed status quo: the emergence of media technology as a topic of mainstream intellectual and political debate; the supposed decline of class as a determinant of social relations; the ambivalent second wave of women’s resistance to gender hierarchies; the contradiction of globalist ambitions to surpass cultural barriers amid continuing post-world-war nationalism, post-colonial racism, and economic rivalries; and the sense of a profound gap between pre- and post-world-war generations that exposed an underlying crisis of faith in historical progress. Prior research has tended to concur with claims made on behalf of WAW with regard to these issues or leave
key areas overlooked.

This study uses an innovative framework of ‘media assemblage’ derived from critical engagement with contemporary efforts by philosphers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to address the above issues under the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas also influenced the milieu of WAW. The framework provides a method for enumerating a multiplicity of media assemblages that constituted WAW and its roots in wider society far beyond reductive notions of ‘television’ or ‘film’. This approach is applied to extensive empirical research of the WAW production archive, the series as first broadcast from 1973 to 1975, independent interventions by its contributors in contemporary issues, and a range of contextual sources.

This thesis concludes that WAW was not the landmark of democratised history its popular and scholarly reputation suggests. It fell short of its aims to challenge intended British and global audiences on matters of historical representation and memory, social hierarchy, cultural division, and their own behaviour as historical actors. Yet, the construction of those issues both behind the production scenes and on screen was often more complex, sophisticated, and significant than previous studies suggest. This thesis finds the question of how and why WAW took its eventual form was deeply entangled with anxieties, claims, and counter-claims about media, as well as being bound up with the emergence of Thatcherism amid debate over the merits of philosophical introspection versus ideological certainty in disordered times.