RECORDS: Finest Half-Hour

I have not always been wrong about the future of events and, if you will permit me. I shall inscribe some of these words as my testament because I should like to be held accountable for them in years which I shall not see.

With that request of Winston Spencer Churchill, taken from a wartime speech. ABC this week began a television series worthy of its subject and his words. Called Winston Churchill—The Valiant Years, its 26 half-hour segments will draw material from all six volumes of Church ill’s World War II memoirs, using film clips made on both sides of battle to provide—if all episodes prove as excellent as the first—a graphic and unforgettable text in modern history.

Skillfully selected and edited, the series’ opener traced both Churchill and his country through the years that bridged the wars, from bursting shells among the trenches of 1918 to the first aerial bombardments of 1940. One fine vignette followed another: Churchill sitting in a wheelchair in Manhattan, bandages on his nose and forehead, after an automobile nearly ended his life on Fifth Avenue in 1931; Hitler barking Sieg, Sieg, in antiphony with the full-throated Heils of massed Germans; the odd and sinister British-Nazi faction of Sir Oswald Mosley goose-stepping in Hyde Park; the garden walls hand-built by Churchill during his enforced retirement at Chartwell; later shots of Winston Churchill walking the deck of a British battleship, wearing bow tie and bowler and carrying a cane. First Lord of the Admiralty once more, after the message had gone out to His Majesty’s fleet, “Winston is back.” What really put the ABC series in flight were the words behind the pictures, the prose of Churchill spoken in the Elizabethan voice of Actor Richard Burton, an apt combination that gives The Valiant Years the ring of a historical drama, whether describing prewar England as a “fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beast of prey” or Hitler as a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe” who would be “sponged and purged and blasted from the surface of the earth.”

If the story has dramatic continuity and a controlled sense of authority, it is because the producers have hired an impressive list of expert writers, from Quentin Reynolds (The Battle of Britain), William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary) and Richard Tregaskis (Guadalcanal Diary), to Hollywood Scenarists Beirne Lay Jr. (12 O’Clock High) and Robert Pirosh (Battleground). And firmly but unobtrusively in the background is a suitably martial, original musical score written by Richard Rodgers.

Although in later installments (previewed last week for the press) the program fills the air with Messerschmitts and Supermarine Spitfires, shows Panzer tracks across the tulip beds of The Netherlands and bomb explosions muffled in the soft sands of Dunkirk, the series is much more than newsreel shots and selected quotes. Its staff of nearly 250 has also collected brief, extraordinary commentaries from the low and the mighty of the Churchill years—housewives. Tommies, Clement Attlee, Eisenhower, Truman, De Gaulle. One of the best offers a light footnote to dark tension. A Thames boatman remembers his Channel crossing for the Dunkirk evacuation 20 years ago, says he finished off a bawtla whisky on the way ‘ome. “The wife said, ‘Are you tired or drunk?’ I said, ‘Both.’ “