ABSTRACT
On 21st February 1962, he listened to a radio broadcast by Charles Chilton called A Long Long Trail, in which Bud Flanagan narrated a history of the Western Front from an ordinary soldier's point of view, interspersed with popular songs from the First World War. Oh What a Lovely War captures a spirit of oppositional defiance and as Paget points out 'The play's essential line of argument will always tell us something important about the time in which it was written'. In terms of the wider political climate, Oh What a Lovely War clearly engaged with the prominent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that arose in the late 1950s supported by many Theatre Workshop members, including Littlewood. The early 1960s saw numerous works about the First World War thrust into the public arena: autobiographies and biographies of leading figures, radio programmes, anthologies of poetry and BBC2 ran a six-month documentary series, The Great War, in 1964.
