by Oliver Wake
Every major conflict in living memory has become the subject of drama almost the moment it was over. The Falklands war, which this month reached its thirtieth anniversary and is again in the news due to renewed tensions between Britain and Argentina over the islands, is no exception. Numerous plays about the conflict reached the stage and radio in its aftermath, but none caught the attention of the public at large. However, when television tackled the subject for the mass audience, the results were frequently politically charged and contentious.
First was Don Shaw’s The Falklands Factor, for the BBC’s Play for Today, which was screened in April 1983, less than a year after the war’s end.1 Shaw dramatised a previous cold war for the Falklands from 1770-71 to illuminate the history of the conflict and draw parallels with the recent war. The play strongly hints at the role of political expediency in each response to a Falklands invasion and, by showing how diplomacy – narrowly – averted bloodshed, questioned whether the same could not have been achieved in 1982.
The use of picture book-style animation to depict events around the islands and an omniscient narrator, making clear the now-and-then parallels, prevented the play becoming simply a dull spectacle of middle aged men in period dress arguing. It also benefited from the highly watchable presences of John Bird as scheming Prime Minister Lord North and Donald Pleasence as the distant and distracted Dr Johnson, who helped subdue the public’s lust for war over the Falklands.
