Over the past few weeks, Alastair Nisbet has explained how the Children of World War II project was born, researched, and marketed. In the final part of this small series, today he explains what the legacy of the project has been…
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In her stories Jean talks about dancing the Palais Glide along the promenade on VE Day, celebrating arm in arm with hundreds of people through the day.
We brought in professional actor Tamsin Fessey to be a WWII dance teacher in costume and role to introduce the iconic dance to all 100 children with additional singing from the older Puddletown group.
At the same time, the Nothe opened four listening posts each playing a 90 second clip from four drama episodes and we gave out project postcards so visitors could scan the QR code and click to play at their leisure.
By the end of June, 2300 episodes had been streamed and by the beginning of November it was more than 5000 or 850 hours of streamed episodes .
Another listening post – solar powered – came in August on loan from Weymouth Museum as long as we could find a location and the money to install it in the tarmac. After discussions with Weymouth Town Council, the Harbourmaster and Dorset Council, our swanky new electronic bollard was installed on the quay near Weymouth Pavilion, playing the same four extracts as Nothe Fort making them accessible to anybody on the waterside. Teenage performers Rose and Rowan joined co-director Sharon Hayden and harbourmaster Ed Carter to be filmed and photographed talking about the project for the BBC website and others.
Finally we put the series on Apple podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Audible and Pocket Casts.
Life as a child on the Dorset WWII home front was now on the world stage…
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Thank you Jean, Roy, Geoff, John and others for your amazing stories, and all those who helped bring them to life.
Can’t wait to listen? Click here for episode 8 on the dedicated web player: https://screen-play.co.uk/urlplay/?songid=8 or click here for the project on Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/podcast/Children-of-World-War-Two/B0FMPTS8PD?qid
And if you’re hungry for more, head to the DHC catalogue for all of our oral histories, pictures, videos, scripts and more!