By Ian Burrell
10 March 2008
The Independent

Given the pain suffered by the BBC over its previous attempts to decipher the events that led to the invasion of Iraq, some might be surprised by its plans to produce a series of dramatic reconstructions of some of the critical stories in the days prior to the war.

Yet Newsnight viewers remain so fascinated and exercised by this period that the writer Ronan Bennett was hired to make 10 Days to War, a series of eight short films that will attempt – through the medium of drama – to enhance understanding of what actually went on.

The production team felt that there was little to be gained by featuring the best-known political protagonists. "From an early stage, we decided we weren't going to dramatise Blair or Bush or Saddam, people with high public profiles," says Colin Barr, executive producer. "We wanted to find the stories that were backstage, personal dramas that people wouldn't necessarily know about."

So Juliet Stevenson plays Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a Foreign Office lawyer concerned by the legality of the war. Harriet Walter plays Anne Campbell, the Labour MP who had to wrestle with her conscience at the crucial House of Commons vote on the war.

Patrick Malahide plays Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN, and Kenneth Branagh appears in the final short as Colonel Tim Collins as he addresses British soldiers before battle began. These are all events not previously captured on film.

"The most important thing, from my point of view, was to deliver stories that could not have been delivered by documentary or news cameras at the time," says Barr. "There was no point simply dramatising events that people had already seen in another form."

With the backing of the director of BBC Vision, Jana Bennett, the production team was able to draw on half-a-dozen researchers seconded from Newsnight and Panorama. "The films have an essence of Newsnight in terms of the journalistic research that went into them, and Newsnight is quite keen on the idea of being able to spring off the drama," says Barr, who also stresses that the films, all 10-12 minutes long, are not intended to be informed by hindsight.

"It's tricky trying to shed yourself of five years of subsequent knowledge, but these films will only work if you are taking people back and making them feel what it might have been like for people living through it at that moment," he says, adding: "These films won't work if they tell people stuff – that's the job of current affairs and documentaries. They will only work if they make people feel things, if they are moved one way or the other."