Secret Army is a television drama series made by the BBC and the Belgian national broadcaster BRT (now VRT) created by Gerard Glaister. The series tells the story of a fictional Belgian resistance movement during the Second World War dedicated to returning Allied airmen, usually having been shot down by the Luftwaffe, to the United Kingdom. The series was made in the UK and Belgium and three series were broadcast on BBC1 between 7 September 1977 and 15 December 1979.
Fay Weldon said of the series, "There is, in the making of such programmes, a level of professionalism, and sheer patient, largely unacclaimed, hard work from producer to script editor to writer to designer to vision mixer to editor by way of sound and lighting engineers that is probably equalled only in a heart transplant theatre."
Series overview
Series One
Lisa Colbert (Jan Francis) runs 'Lifeline', a Brussels-based resistance organisation that helps Allied aircrew to evade capture and return to Britain via neutral countries such as Switzerland or Spain. She is helped by Albert Foiret (Bernard Hepton), proprietor of the Cafe Candide, his mistress Monique Duchamps (Angela Richards) and waitress Natalie Chantrens (Juliet Hammond-Hill).
Henderson's Boys is a series of young adult spy novels written by English author Robert Muchamore. The series follows Charles Henderson, the creator of the fictitious CHERUB organisation. The novels are set between 1940 and 1945, during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Throughout the novels, Henderson leads a series of war missions, aided by children.
Henderson's Boys is a spin-off of the CHERUB series, which centres on the peacetime version of the organisation during the 2000s and 2010s. Henderson's Boys reveals various features of the CHERUB organisation's origins.
Books
The Escape
The Escape is the first book in the Henderson's Boys series. It was published on 5 February 2009 by Hodder Children's Books.
The novel is set in France, from 5–15 June 1940, at a time when Hitler's Nazi armies are invading and forcing civilians to flee. Meanwhile, German agents are tracking two British children, 11-year-old Paul and 13-year-old Rosie Clarke. Charles Henderson, a British spy, finds himself trying to reach them before the Germans can. He enlists the help of 12-year-old Marc Kilgour, a French orphan, in order to save the pair. He soon realises that children will be essential recruits if the British are to win the war. Meanwhile, Paul and Rosie find a six-year-old called Hugo, who is later killed by Herr Potente, a German posing as Henderson.
Following the defeat of Belgium in the 18 days' campaign of 1940, many former soldiers and officers from the army formed the Légion Belge in the spring of 1941. The Légion was greatly weakened by political squabbles amongst its members and was reluctant to work with the government in exile.
After the arrest of one of the leaders of the Légion, Charles Claser, the movement reformed with the name Armée de Belgique. The Armée was hit by a wave of arrests in 1943 after it was infiltrated by undercover Abwehr agents.
From 1943, many former members of the Armée de Belgique and Légion Belge reformed into a new group, with the support of the government in exile called the Armée Secrète (AS).
History
As in it predecessors, many of the founders of the AS were former members of the Belgian Army and so the group followed a more traditional military structure than other resistance groups in the country. Its objectives were not exclusively military; many of the founding members of the group predicted the need for a national force to police the country after liberation as well as providing an organization which the Government in Exile could negotiate with.
If the 1970s was a key decade for Second World War TV series — and SecretArmy surely deserves a repeat run — more recently there has been a resurgence ... TV & Radio.
The Comedy That Changed Television is a treasure trove of secrets of M*A*S*H, a classic TV series based on the novel of the same name about three army doctors by Richard Hooker... live TV channels ... TV ... TV.
