FILMING WITH CHANNEL 5
Hitler's Britain
May 31st – June 7th
Once
upon a time the membership would get all excited about the prospect of the magic
words “ Film work “ but now it’s old hat to most of us and the thought of
standing around for days on end waiting to be called certainly isn’t fun.
Organising these things is an even bigger nightmare and I think I can say that
this particular project gave the SBG the biggest headaches we’ve ever had.
Right up until the last minute the itinerary was changing and we were contacting people literally the same day with new instructions. Also Stscha. Siegel had his fair share of problems with the vehicles. The filming followed a story about “ Hitler's Britain “ and the working title says it all, another invasion series. The full collection of the SBG was bought into play from the Blitz down to original Pfennigs and German WWII bank notes. The first scenes were shot in London around the Cabinet office where our own Rttf. “ Wolfie“ Grabner played Churchill whilst Oscha. Stoewer played an SS Officer and Stein and Dietz were Guards. The action then moved to Norfolk where some 12 SBG, our Opel Blitz, Stscha. Siegels Zundapp combo and a Kübel owned by a friend of the SBG’s invaded the village of Heyden.
The
filming went on for the whole week and basically the story involves how the
occupying German forces makes friends with the locals and everything is very co-ordial
with German troops drinking in the pub and chatting with the locals. Some of the
troops have English girlfriends but this is where everything takes a nasty turn.
An SS Officer ( played by Strm. Böcker ) get his brains blown out by a partisan
sniper as he chats to his ( English ) Girlfriend. Things get worse as two of
our soldaten are then stabbed in the back as they leave the pub.
Then
next, our main force enters the village for retaliation. After a drive through
the village the troops disembark, do a house to house search and generally round
up the locals. They’re marched onto the village green where a firing squad is
ordered and the civilians are dealt with forthwith. There were a few calls from
the director that the SBG refused to comply with and of course we weren’t happy
with having to re-enact a firing squad scene, especially with civilians but we did it quickly, cleanly and humanely with the minimum of
distress to the civilians (that *was* a joke by the way). And after
all, they had shot our Officer and stabbed two of our guys.
As a follow up the film was shown on channel 5 on **/**/** and was actually a very good and very popular program that was repeated on channel 5 and some satellite TV channels. So, the effort put in by the SBG was well worth the trouble.
