Time Bracketed

We watched the last of the box set of Secret Army last night: the series was first aired in the the late 1970s, from 1977 to 1979, and was repeated on Freeview recently. The very last track on the set comprised a series of interviews with some of the cast filmed in the very early 2000's. The box set itself was published in 2018, some forty years after the original TV transmission, which itself was thirty-nine years after the events portrayed in it: a fictionalised portrayal of the resistance and [particularly] evasion lines in action in Belgium during the Second World War, that was later lampooned in the sitcom '''Allo, Allo'".

What made me think on was the interleaving of all the different timelines between the real and the fictional. Dramatising events of the 1940s in the 1970s, and being watched by us in the 2020s, wrapped up in interviews from the turn of the century. The character of Natalie, for instance: nineteen years old at the start of the story in 1941 or '42, was played by Juliet Hammond-Hill, the actress being twenty-four at the time of the show's release. At the time of the filmed interviews, she was forty-nine or fifty. By the time we viewed the series again this winter, she was seventy-two. The psycho-temporal disjunct this induced in my mind was quite startling: a bit like a waking lucid dream, in fact. Curious...