Piece of Cake (TV series)
| Piece of Cake | |
|---|---|
Masterpiece Theatre DVD edition
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| Genre | Drama |
| Based on | Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson |
| Screenplay by |
Leon Griffiths Derek Robinson |
| Directed by | Ian Toynton |
| Starring |
Tom Burlinson Neil Dudgeon Boyd Gaines Nathaniel Parker David Horovitch Richard Hope |
| Theme music composer | Chris Walker |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 6 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Linda Agran |
| Producer(s) | Andrew Holmes |
| Cinematography | Peter Jessop |
| Running time | 51 minutes (including commercials) |
| Production company(s) | Holmes Associates LWT |
| Distributor | ITV Studios |
| Release | |
| Original network | ITV |
| Original release | 2 October – 6 November 1988 |
Piece of Cake is a six-part 1988 television miniseries depicting the life of a Royal Air Force fighter squadron from the day of the British entry into World War II through to one of the toughest days in the Battle of Britain (7 September 1940). The series was produced by Holmes Associates for LWT for ITV and had a budget of 5 million pounds.
The series is based on the 1983 novel Piece of Cake, by Derek Robinson. In the book, the squadron is equipped with Hurricanes. The relative rarity of airworthy Hurricanes in the late 1980s precluded their use in the television series.
The squadron depicted is the fictional Hornet Squadron, which is equipped with Supermarine Spitfire fighters, and deployed to France, where it waits out the Phoney War in comfort and elegance, until the German attack on Western Europe in May 1940. One by one, nearly all of the original pilots are killed and as losses mount, the character of the squadron changes from a casual nonchalance to a fight for survival. By the end of the series, only four of the original fourteen officers have survived.
Some of the major themes explored in the script include: the snobbery and class-consciousness that existed in the RAF during the era; the belief cherished by many of the pilots that the war would be fought as a sporting gentleman's contest; the inflexibility and ineffectiveness of the tactics used by RAF Fighter Command in early 1940 and the poor gunnery skills and inadequate training of many of the British pilots in the early days of World War II. Like Robinson's original novel, the story spans the first year of the war, from September 1939 to the German Luftwaffe's first massed aerial assault on London on 7 September 1940.
The series (in its complete original format of six episodes) was released on Region-1 DVD through BFS Entertainment in a 3-disc set in 2000 and has been re-issued in a new edition (also via BFS and in Region 1) in March 2011.
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