THE BBC’S NEW WAR OF THE WORLDS BRINGS THE STORY HOME…
Everything is red. Thick smoke chokes the air, but the ground underfoot is covered with red sand, red weeds, red rocks. Small Screen is in a ruined red graveyard, with what’s left of a red church tower looming overhead as we pick our way through the darkness, trying not to trip over piles of red bones. Chuck Berry plays on a crackly radio as a girl sits on the floor wearing a gas mask, slowly spray-painting the floor. This is what the apocalypse looks like – and this is what happens when The War Of The Worlds comes home...
First serialised in 1897, H.G. Wells’ seminal sci-fi novel has been adapted countless times by everyone from Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg. Bizarrely, however, a version has never been made in Britain before – and few have been set in the period that Wells actually wrote about. Now getting a three-part BBC adaptation, The War Of The Worlds is finally being told the way Wells wanted it – which is why we’re standing in a disused shipyard outside Liverpool, surrounded by set decorators and spray-painters trying to make it look like a very British nightmare.
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