This was an enjoyable watch but history it ain't.The content, as well as the promotional material for this film, are seriously misleading. The idea that the hierarchy was upset with The Wipers lacks evidence. Scholars who have written about trench journals have long established that they were an important part of the official strategy for the maintenance of troop morale, and actively encouraged.Wipers was not subversive of authority. Herbert Jenkins (publisher of the first 1918 edition) was an informant to the Official Press Bureau (the government's censorship body) from the beginning of the War. When he applied for a license to publish he assured the OPB that it had been cleared by the censors in France before its original appearance. So acceptable was it to High Command that it was agreed that General Haig would write the foreword. SOURCE: Archive of the Official Press Bureau.It is suggested in the marketing publicity for the film that The Wipers Times has, until now been lost to obscurity. There were hundreds of such publications in WW1 but Wipers has always been BY FAR the most celebrated. It was published in London for the home market in 1918, since which time it has been reissued in no fewer than 7 editions. Rarely, in histories of WW1 culture, is it NOT mentioned.All in all, it seems that many of the original intentions and much of the irony of the paper's first contributors and editors have been lost on the writers of this play/film. Even more troubling is the fact that the authors have faked 'extracts' from the journal and included in the script elements that are simply not there in the original.In other words, a great deal of liberty is taken with content as well as context throughout. One strange moment in the film is when the young Churchill appears in a cameo and commends the paper's editors for being a pain in the side of the leadership, telling them to keep up the good work. This was not Churchill's style. When he was Commander-in-Chief in WW2 he in fact reprimanded Field Marshal Montgomery for encouraging such publications which Monty felt were nevertheless a useful 'escape-valve' for the Eighth Army. It was something over which he fell out with Churchill.One final observation: In his introduction to a recent edition, Ian Hislop has tried to claim The Wipers as a predecessor of Private Eye. It was NOT. The Eye is a gadfly publication that gets itself into genuine scrapes with authority. The Wipers, on the other hand, was (like many other trench journals)sanctioned by the authorities, edited and composed by officers, and seen as part of the official campaign to keep up morale on the Front. Its own predecessor was the Tatler and both had running sport with each other in their pages throughout the war.All in all the play and the film tell a nice story, but offer a limited understanding to anyone who wants to know about the real history of this remarkable newspaper.

This interesting true story deserved better handling. The script of this BBC film is inadequate and uncinematic, and the direction is poor. I did not bother to watch that much of it on the DVD and did what a Dalek would do: 'terminate!' The name 'Wipers' is the pronunciation which the British troops used during the First World War to mis-pronounce the name of the French town Ypres, which they could not pronounce correctly. And 'the Wipers Times' is the name of a newspaper printed by an enterprising officer and his team, for circulation in the trenches at Ypres, after he found a printing press in the rubble of the bombed-out town together with a supply of paper and ink. His trench newspaper was very irreverent and funny, and a forerunner in its way of today's Private Eye. One can therefore understand why Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, jointly wrote the script. There were a couple of very funny lines in the bit I saw before I turned it off, and they must have come from him. It would not be fair of me to comment on the performances, because I did not see the whole film, so I shall not discuss them. Teacher's report: 'Could try harder.'

I can only think that the reviewer who thought that this should have been more like The Hangover has little to no knowledge of the First World War, let alone of conditions in the trenches. Maybe diffusing unbearable situations with humour (and much of the humour that emanated from those trenches was actually blacker - and bluer - than that portrayed here) is one of those Very British Things. That was certainly brought up in this film, when the contrast was drawn between the Germans' "Hate Song" and the British soldier's humour and irreverence.Personally, I really enjoyed the way that the sketches were shown: much about them was true to the time period and yet they were presented with a touch of the surreal to remind the viewer that what you saw on the screen was only a stylised representation of the written word.I thought the actors were very good; the subject matter bittersweet, and overall it was an excellent representation of a fascinating story. There were one or two moments when I felt that the smooth, sarcastic, off the cuff exchanges between the major characters was a touch too smooth, but overall it fitted the period, the story and the way the screenwriters and directors chose to present it.If you don't already know anything about The Wipers Times or about the Trench Warfare of the First World War then you may, indeed, not enjoy this as much as someone who does have a little bit of prior knowledge.

In a world wherein we are all too often confronted with the tragic waste that is warfare, this heart-rending and thought-provoking treatment of our world's first war stands tall amidst a cohort of war films that glorify war while trivializing the loss it represents. An entire generation of Englishman were lain down in the mud of the European theater, and while many poets, writers and historians have made much of the tragedy of this affair, few have the courage to satirize it. As only the men who witnessed its absurdity could tell us, this is the relation of Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, two men among many who were forced to endure a what was at times a senseless conflict. Their only hope for sanity in an insane situation was to cling to that which humanizes us all; our sense of humor.If you have ever considered the pointless nature of large-scale conflict, the tragedy of war itself, or the despair of the man as he returns home from the front to a people who do not grasp the enormity of what he has faced, then you must see this film.