The weekend's TV

Powerful and moving, this film about fallen soldiers was a portrait of war, loss and grief
The Fallen
'The families shown all have one thing in common: they've lost a lad' ... The Fallen (BBC2) PR

There was really only one TV event at the weekend, and I don't mean the resurrection of Dani Behr in the Australian jungle. I'm talking about The Fallen (BBC, Saturday), an amazing achievement and a beautiful film.

There's always something very powerful about a list of names of people who have been killed. And at the heart of this film is just such a list - of the 300 (and counting) British troops who've been killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Every single one of them is remembered here.

But this film is more than a memorial. It's a portrait of war, and of loss and grief. Each name comes up on the screen. Then, every so often, the list is paused and we go in to hear the story of the boy who died, to meet his family, his parents, brothers and sisters, sweethearts, and kids. I like the kids best. Do you know what Daddy was doing in Iraq? "Yes, he was shooting people."

In many ways, the families shown are all very different. Rifleman Aaron Lincoln's mum and dad drink themselves to oblivion on their rough old estate, while the parents of Lieutenant Alexander Tweedie flick through photos of their boy at Eton, biting their lips and doing their best to put a brave face on the situation. But they all have one thing in common: they've lost a lad, and even Alexander's father can't hide the pain of that, his great square chin wobbling as he says something mundane about the "terrific attendance" at the funeral.

One family still give their dead boy a Christmas present (an iPod last time), another lays an extra place at the table. There are unopened boxes, unaltered rooms, a few shrines, and - most worryingly - a face that appears at the bottom of a mug when hot water is added. There are lots of tattoos, too - from a name to a full-colour portrait, so a son can live on, wrapped round a parent's upper arm. I don't think the Tweedies have had themselves tattooed; they've had a portrait done instead, by a friend, of Alexander in his uniform. But it's the same thing - oil paintings are just posh people's tattoos.

Heaven comes up a lot, too: he's up there now. There's a surprising amount of faith out there in the real world, though I suppose death does bring it on. And heaven has been given a makeover. It's a place where James Blunt sings, and where crispy duck is always on the menu. In heaven Daddy wouldn't have to share his crispy duck with anyone.

We see them when they were alive as well, larking about in home videos, and, terrifyingly, on helmet-cam battlefield footage. "I want him, he's still there, I want him," shouts Private Chris Gray's commanding officer, after the 19-year-old has been shot in the head in a pretty Afghani orchard. But he's not still there for long. Private Gray, like the others, comes home in a box.

That's when it really hits home, when the family has to go to RAF Brize Norton, or elsewhere, to meet their son. "Plane's coming in now," they told Marine Benjamin Reddy's mum, as it appeared out of a misty sky. "And they're bringing your boy home."

Ben's mum has a letter from Tony Blair, which is nice, she says. Another mum carries a sign saying: "My son died because Tony Blair lied." The film is not political, though; it's about the human side of war, and the sadness of loss. I wonder if Tony watched it, though.

Morgan Matthews, whose film this is, seems to be a very good interviewer: someone all these people trust and like and are happy to talk to - everyone from the Lincolns to the Tweedies. There must have been hundreds and hundreds of hours of film from dozens and dozens of interviews. And then came the difficult job of turning it into a single cohesive entity.

The result is not short - three hours long, in fact. (I thought I'd work out how long the film would be if Matthews did the same for the British casualties of the first world war, getting through them at the same rate, and came up with 418 days.)

But it needs that bold scale to get across the scale of the loss, to tell all the stories, to breathe life into a long list of names, and not just chisel them into stone. It is an extraordinary, ambitious and very human piece of work.