On her Architectural
Looking back, looking back on the work of some of those often brilliant movie-making propagandists
of World War II, the way we have been doing over the past few weeks in this Friday night
movie season that's called Britain Goes to War, looking back you see how they occasionally
really missed out on a great story. And tonight, to close this season, we've got surely one
of the most mysterious misses of the movie War. It's a story that seems to have stayed
tucked away among the bureaucrats' files in the Air Ministry until the author Paul Brickhill
made a book out of it years and years after the war. Maybe the bureaucrats felt that it
would never be a real goer because it was about an Air Force flier who lost both legs
and how much inspiration was that going to be to possible new recruits. But it just happened
that this unlucky flier was a wartime friend of Paul Brickhill and so the story did get
written. It was the story of Tin Legs Bader. So hello and welcome to a film that swept
the box offices of the world in the late 1950s called Reach for the Sky. Douglas Bader lost
his legs while he was stunting in an RAF plane well before World War II. They gave him a
pair of tin legs and he learned to walk again and to fly again and he joined, rejoined the
Air Force. He became a wing commander. He became one of the aces of the Battle of Britain.
He was shot down and taken prisoner. He tried to escape, escape after escape on his tin
legs. And all the real story I'm going to leave to you now. Kenneth Moore seems almost
to have been born especially to play the Bader role. It's a long movie by the way, a bit
more than two hours so if you don't want to sit up late set the VCR but don't miss Reach
for the Sky.