ABSTRACT
When laser-guided missiles fired from RAF Tornadoes destroyed a series of military installations in Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya in March 2011, the Sun’s lead story screamed: ‘Top Guns 1, Mad Dogs 0’. Thus, more than 50 years after the British public had experienced the depredations of total war, the chaos of combat was, once again, being packaged for the front page in the language of the back page. Yet, for most of the population, the half century following the Second World War had been a period in which both the military and the warfare had become ever more removed from everyday life. Increasingly sophisticated weaponry had served to reinforce the sense of distance between military and civilian worlds. Thus, in the age of television, war had, for many, become little more than a spectator sport. This chapter, therefore, reveals how sporting motifs continued to be used to reimagine combat for an ever more media-literate domestic population. In particular, the focus falls on cinematic and televisual representations of warfare to uncover the extent to which the familiar landscape of sport was employed to sanitise conflict in the age of smart weaponry.
