Excellent, with one pedantic caveat

Enjoying this series very much - but Churchill died January 1965, not 1964. No big deal, but fact check important in series asking how far we can trust the record of the past?

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Excellent

You do expect experts to be telling you the truth and you take it at face value... unless it’s political obviously, then you’re a sceptic at best!

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Would it be possible to keep the agitprop out?

Look, before I start, I voted Remain. That said, would it be possible to keep these otherwise excellent episodes free from partisan politics? Of course people co-opt patriotism & use it to further various political agendas, & while that’s something to be aware of, it’s not worth worrying about until it looks as if that political agenda is at risk of veering off into the realms of extremism, & a decision to leave the EU, while hugely unpopular with middle class historians, is not extremism & can never seriously be described as such. This episode was somewhat ruined by the clear & obvious political bias it decided was relevant, when it simply wasn’t. I don’t care what these historians think of Brexit, & I don’t care for their thinly veiled criticisms of people they see as pig headed nationalists & nothing more. Remain leaning historians seem to take a particular glee in trashing the views of patriotic leave voters, as if having a positive, romantic view of oneself & ones country is a thought crime. Noakes repeatedly points out that Britain was not alone in it’s decision to fight Hitler because her empire was mobilised to assist, but this is disingenuous. Hitler was not threatening to invade Canada, India, Australia or Jamaica. He was just weeks away from invading Britain, & if he had successfully invaded Britain, none of the support the empire could offer would have been if any use at all, & the world would be a very different place. The Empire’s weaker nations would have been subdued & it’s stronger nations would have had to adapt to living in a world where the whole of Europe was under Nazi rule. It’s even possible that if Britain had fallen, Japan might even have won its campaign against the US. Yet Noakes seems to think that having an Empire makes the motherland immune from harm. It’s a wonder why Noakes even thinks the British people of 1940 had any legitimate anxieties at all, until we realise that her commentary is aimed more at belittling Leave voters than it is about accurately & dispassionately examining historical evidence.
The irony here is that the exact temporal bias being warned of through the episode was oozing from every sentence.
Other than me preferring for history content to be about history & not agitprop (call me old fashioned), this series of programmes is excellent. It’s an absolute gem. But that makes it more of a shame that this episode was so careless & undisciplined in its script.

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