In the first world war, members of the 12th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters found an abandoned printing press near the front line at Ypres, Belgium by . One of the soldiers had been a printer in peacetime and he salvaged the press and printed a sample page. With Captain F. J. Roberts as the editor, the satirical trench newspaper, the Wipers Times was born.

In January I spent several days in Ypres filming at the Menin Gate, in war cemeteries and on the old battlefields with Nick Roberts, F.J. Roberts’ grandson. We filmed interviews with soldiers, serving and retired, all of whom read passages from the newspaper. We also filmed an interview with Ian Hislop, at his Private Eye office. He was behind a recent BBC film about the Wipers Times. I was filming for Visit Flanders on behalf of MeridianAV, a production company based in Greenwich. They put together a series of ten edits using my footage and archive footage and it makes for fascinating viewing. The rest of the series can be viewed online here.