Interview with producer of The Wipers Times, David Parfitt

How did you get interested in Wipers Times?

I’ve been involved with Wipers Times on and off for a little while. Ian and Nick came up with the idea about 10 years ago when Ian did a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the Wipers Times and thought, oh, there might be a script in this. They first talked to me about it a couple of years ago and then came back to me about a year ago when it was commissioned and asked if I could come in and help put it together. So I’ve been with it for a year or two now.

Did you help with developing the script?

Yes, although I have to say we did very little script development on this. They delivered a pretty fantastic first draft and we did a second draft with some minor alterations but very little changed – unusually. So we were very pleased with that.

For the casting and director, where you involved in that?

I tend to always get involved with the casting and the hiring of the director, but we knew Andy De Emmony and he had a lot of experience and some great comedy credentials. He was the first and only director we offered it to, so we were very lucky to get him.

Did you have specific ideas about the cast?

We did, we talked a lot about the casting and again incredibly luckily got pretty much got all our first choices. It’s one of those things I think, that once a couple of key people come on board everyone else follows. So Ben and Julian were our first two bits of casting, then Michael Palin and everyone else followed, so it worked very well.

What do you think the audience can expect from The Wipers Times?

I hope that it’s a different take on the First World War. We do know about the tragedy, the slaughter, the seeming ineptitude of the Generals and the officer class.  I think this is a whole different take. It is a black comedy, I hope it’s got its poignant moments but there is also some out and out farce there too. So I’m hoping people will be surprised.