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CNN Saturday Morning News

British TV Show Mimics Life in WWI Trenches

Aired March 16, 2002 - 08:51   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We're in B control right now. This is really the nerve center of our reality program; and when we talk about reality here at CNN, we mean the real thing.

There is a program in London right now that is a reality show much like "Survivor," for example. It's called "The Trench Show" and it's causing quite a stir over there because it aims to recreate conditions inside a trench during WWI.

CNN's Matthew Chance has our story.

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MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Not a real war, but a TV reenactment of perhaps the world's most brutal. Noise of constant bombardment has been faked. So, too, the smells of deadly gas and rotting corpses. Even death will be simulated. Occasionally one recruit will be pulled from the show and sent home.

It is as close as a reconstruction can get.

PENNY RITCHIE CALDER, IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM: You can show how people might have survived. You can show them what the food was. You can show them how they coped with daily life, the importance of letters from home, a lot of sort of insight into the soldier's mind at the time, what kept him going.

CHANCE: At the Imperial War Museum in London, another reconstructed trench opened for public view. The exhibition accompanies the television show. Here, the uniforms, the equipment and the food rations used by the original First World War soldiers and their latest television counterparts. Organizers say their minute attention to detail took months of research.

(on camera): Well, like the television series, this exhibition aims at putting across the conditions in which many soldiers found themselves in the trenches of the First World War. Take a look at this, a reconstruction of a dugout where soldiers may have tried to get a few hours sleep or perhaps sheltered from the appalling weather in the trenches.

But, of course, any attempt to recreate the horrors of the First World War are incomplete without the most important factors, the fear, the disease and the killing. (voice-over): On the battlefields of Belgium and northern France, hundreds of thousands of men died between 1914 and '18, fighting what was labeled then the war to end all wars. Many survivors were left traumatized by life in the trenches. Veterans like Doug Roberts, now 102, says their true suffering can't ever be accurately portrayed.

DOUGLAS ROBERTS, WWI VETERAN: You can't react to it, can you? Shells firing all over the bloody place. Shells dropping here, there and everywhere. And then you open up with small arms fire to upset them, make sure you were going to do A, B or C. So it's, I don't think you can portray it at all. That's why up at the museum everything seems so clean and tidy. It wasn't clean and tidy in my time.

CHANCE: Of course, no one expects a recreation for the cameras to fully embody the dangers and the suffering that originally occurred. The question is does this exhibition or the television series that accompanies it somehow lessens, even trivialize the horror of war?

Matthew Chance, CNN, London.

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