PREVIEW: Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley, BBC One

Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley sees the presenter and historian exploring six real people’s lives, who lived, worked and volunteered during the Blitz.

Eighty years ago, between 7 September 1940 and 11 May 1941, the suburbs, streets and homes of ordinary British people became a battleground, as German planes dropped 32,000 tonnes of bombs on British cities - from Clydebank to Coventry, Liverpool to London, in an eight month onslaught now known as the Blitz.

44,652 people would perish beneath the rubble, in tube stations and bomb shelters, in their back yards and in their own beds. The resilience of the British people in the face of this horror would become known as Blitz Spirit, an idea often held up as a benchmark of Britishness, one we call upon whenever we face a crisis.

This new feature length special uncovers and focuses on the real-life stories of those at the frontline of a bloody and terrifying period of our history. The programme follows the same style as Suffragettes, using archive footage and actors reading powerful and emotional first-hand accounts, which are all taken from biographies and oral history collections, Mass Observation records and private, unpublished diaries to tell the stories of six real people who lived through it all.

Lucy also reports from Senate House, the original Ministry of Information building as well as visiting key locations including the Imperial War Museum archive in London and the Mass Observation archive at The Keep in Sussex.

Using incredible colour archive film capturing ordinary moments of people on the streets, Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley shows the remarkable resilience as well as the terrible suffering that people endured, crucially shining a light on the role of the front-line workers and volunteers at the heart of it all.