At one point, this documentary sees the presenter left almost speechless as she faces the reality of life for new army recruits. It shows you the conflict’s awfulness like never before
Did you know the UK runs a scheme that flies Ukrainian civilians here, gives them intensive military training, then sends them back as rookie soldiers with the basic skills they need to fight Russia? Stacey Dooley: Ready for War? assumes you do and pitches us straight into an aircraft hangar full of blinking new recruits, somewhere in Britain. Like the young Ukrainian men who have just stepped off a plane, we are tossed in and must quickly adjust.
Dooley lurks on the periphery as the men spend just more than one month trying to learn what new British army recruits would cover in six. Her challenge as a documentarist is that, once we have acclimatised to the scenario, the basic conclusions that Ready for War? will draw risk being obvious. Almost every week there is a programme about Ukraine on British TV, asking what it is like to have your every day life destroyed in an instant and replaced with the fearsome danger and dreadful obligations of war.
