The Passing Bells the conclusion of the war. The series was announced by the BBC in October 2013, along with other programmes that played a part in the BBC World War I centenary season. It was a Red Planet Production with BBC Worldwide as the distributor. Filming took place in Poland. Telewizja Polska and Apple Film Production were co-producers. The series aired in the pre-watershed time-slot of 7pm, and the script was written for a younger audience and family viewing. The title was taken from the first line of Wilfred Owen's 1917 poem, "Anthem for Doomed Youth": "What passing-bells for these who die
Tithonus poem or deny this. However, other scholars, including Gronewald and Daniel, who originally published the Cologne fragments, believe that the poem did continue for these four lines. Lardinois suggests that there may have been two versions of the poem current in antiquity, one ending after the twelfth line, the other continuing to line 16. Gregory Nagy agrees, arguing that the two versions were appropriate for different performance contexts. If the four contested lines were part of the Tithonus poem, the poem's tone would have changed significantly. The sixteen-line version of the poem has a much more optimistic ending than the twelve-line