England's Screaming

THE BBC’S NEW WAR OF THE WORLDS BRINGS THE STORY HOME…

- Paul Bradshaw

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.