The Passing Bells: Eastenders writer Tony Jordan on writing a First World War TV drama without the gore

The BBC1 drama treats both boys’ stories - one German, one British - as equal, and neither side as good or bad

The Passing Bells, with Michael (Jack Lowden) and Thomas (Paddy Gibson) ((C) Red Planet/Ola Grochowska/BBC)

Back in 2012, Tony Jordan decided that he wanted to write a First World War drama to mark the 2014 centenary.

The question was how to make it stand out from all of the other documentaries and dramas that would be treading a similar path.

“I think that to tell this story in a different way is very difficult,” Jordan admits. “My original vision was for 61 hours of television. I thought it would be great to have 13 episodes running every year for five years, echoing the length of the war. Then I realised that was complete nonsense, and that I would have died trying to do it.”

Instead, Jordan – a former EastEnders lead writer, the co-creator of Life on Mars, and the creator of Hustle and an acclaimed 2010 take on the nativity story – was inspired by Wilfred Owen’s famous line in “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?”, to craft a family drama focusing on two boys, one English and one German, with each 30-minute episode spanning a year of the war. “The BBC already had a lot of heavyweight stuff about the misery and pain of the Great War, so I wanted to do something a bit different,” he explains. “Something that could run pre-watershed and was accessible to a mainstream audience.”

German soldiers marching on (Red Planet/Photographer: Ola Grochowska/BBC)

He was also determined that The Passing Bells, which airs on five consecutive nights beginning on BBC1 on Monday, wouldn’t boil down to a tale of heroes and villains. “I wanted to write something where war was the antagonist. My main theme was that, as adults we sent our children to fight each other in the middle of nowhere. We sent boys to die.”

Notably, the series features no officers or politicians. There is no attempt at a wider political vision, and only one onscreen battle. As such, it feels less like a standard First World War drama and rather closer to a dramatisation of Eric Bogle’s haunting ballad “The Green Fields of France”, with its furious conclusion: “The killing, the dying was all done in vain. For young Willie McBride, it’s all happened again and again and again and again.”

“It would have been easy to do the big battles but this is really a drama about the minutiae of life,” Jordan explains. “My research was entirely through first-hand accounts, and the only battle featured is the Somme, because we couldn’t do this without mentioning that in order to give some sense of the scale of death.”

The drama treats both boys’ stories as equal, and neither side as good or bad. “I don’t believe German mothers’ pain was any less than the pain of French or British or Russian mothers,” says Jordan. “That’s just not true. These boys didn’t know the ins and outs of what was happening in Serbia, or even why they were there. Some grown-up basically said to them: ‘The Germans are bad. We must fight them and defend the Empire.’ Or if you were in Germany then you were told: ‘The world’s against us, will you protect the Motherland?’” He pauses. “I was just so aware of those boys when I was writing. I felt them with me, leaning over my shoulder as I wrote in the shed.”

Jordan, who has six children of his own, says he is particularly keen for a younger generation to tune in. “My generation are fascinated by the Great War, but younger generations don’t really know what the poppies are for,” he says. “They’ve seen the images of the white crosses but it seems so far removed from today. I wanted to try and say ‘Look, this could be you and your brother’. That’s why there are no officers swanning in on their horses, because this isn’t about their world. And there’s no real gore, because what I wanted was that a 17-year-old sitting with his mum would suddenly understand what it was like to be sent to fight in that war.”

Susan (Jennifer Hennessy) and Michael (Jack Lowden) (Red Planet - Photographer: Ola Grochowska/BBC)

That said, Jordan is aware that there will be those who feel his treatment of the Great War is not sufficiently serious. “There will be people who are very specific, and say that people couldn’t have done this in 1914, or that the trench formation in 1917 was completely different. And there will probably be critics who say it’s not serious enough. But you know, those people, they’re the officer class who drove the boys in the trenches mad so I’m quite happy to drive them mad with this.”

Connecting to the viewing audience has remained Jordan’s primary concern throughout his 25 years in the ever-changing broadcasting industry. A former market trader who kick-started his new career when, aged 32, he sent a spec script to the BBC and was asked to join EastEnders, he remains entertainingly exasperated by the industry’s obsession with ratings and focus groups. “The reality is, we’re all the audience,” he says. “When I write something, I ask: ‘What would I like to watch? What would my wife or next-door neighbour watch?’ Sometimes I think we forget that, and we shouldn’t. Look at Gogglebox, that’s why it’s such an amazing show, because it taps into that.”

The critical success of Jordan’s 2010 Nativity, which somehow managed to make the story of Jesus’s birth seem like a tale you’d never heard before, led to a commission to apply the same lightness of touch to the story of Noah. The resulting 90-minute drama will screen in the near future. “It’s not about the animals coming in two by two,” Jordan says. “It’s more like, hang on, this is the story of a man who built a boat in a desert, that’s interesting.”

He is currently juggling multiple projects from the upcoming Dickensian (“It’s this really weird concept in which all the characters from Dickens are in the same world, so Scrooge can talk to Fagin – I’m really excited about it”) to a musical series, Stop in the Name of Love, which sounds like The Singing Detective by way of Motown: “I’ve just delivered the first scripts. It’s amazing, ambitious, a full musical – yes, people will sing mid-scene.”

Jordan remains confident that, whatever technological or social changes we might see, television will thrive. “No matter how things change, talent will out. I’m testament to that. I didn’t even start writing until I was 30,” he says, and then adds fervently: “You know, you could go back as far as you like and you’d find someone like me sitting in the middle of the desert, with maybe four other people around, telling them a story. We all need stories. That shared experience brings comfort, and that doesn’t change whether you’re in a desert or watching on Google Glass.”

‘The Passing Bells’ starts Monday, 7pm on BBC1