The Wipers Times

SYNOPSIS

Just after World War I, Captain Fred Roberts (Ben Chaplin) goes for a job as a newspaper journalist and tells the sub-editor how, in the trenches in 1916, he discovered a printing press in working order. Helped by ex-printer Sergeant Harris (Steve Oram) and with his friend Jack Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt) as his assistant, he sets up the Wipers Times - the name coming from the soldiers' pronunciation of the town Ypres. Despite disapproval from officious Lieutenant Colonel Howfield (Ben Daniels), but with backing from sympathetic General Mitford (Sir Michael Palin), they produce twenty-three issues of a satirical magazine - its articles represented on-screen in black-and-white - which boosts morale and even gets mentioned in the Tatler. The press is destroyed by a German shell, but another is found and the paper's title changed to fit in with wherever the regiment is deployed. Pearson and Roberts are awarded gallantry medals, but when Roberts is only offered the job of crossword ...