Interview with Ben Chaplin

So you play Captain Roberts and he is quite a complex character really isn’t he?

Yes he is; he was the Captain of a regiment, and ended up being Lieutenant-Colonel. For this story he’s Captain of North Midlands Derbyshire Regiment, otherwise known as the Sherwood Forresters. I think he was a very happy person, ebullient, quite clever, fun loving, and it was his idea to write this satirical newspaper The Wipers Times from which the film gets its name.

He did that, has lots of fun and lets the troops have fun in this ghastly time, and yet he still won the Military Cross.

It’s strange because I thought that if you were an officer and you went over the top at the Somme your chances were pretty slim. But he went over the top three times and won a Military Cross for valour, so he was obviously a brave and great soldier. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman did have Fred Roberts’ biography to work from which was never published. Interestingly it doesn’t mention The Wipers Times at all, so it made me wonder how much that was just a moment in time, something that they did to get through the horror of the war.

When the writers are watching, do they want to have any input?

They’ve been very supportive and amenable. I met them at the read through and there were slight nervous about that as they’d spent 10 years writing not just this, but also a book about compiling The Wipers Times. It’s their baby in a way, so there is always a bit of feeling of responsibility, but I tried to minimalise that by sheer denial. It’s great having them around, there’ll be an incident and - ‘oh, can I say something here’ - and they’ll help come up with a line. They’re fun and the script is fun. Above all else the script is touching and human; there is nothing cynical about it. It’s a difficult one not to like, I think.