Dr Roderick Bailey Historical Consultant for BBC’s ‘Living History’ Series

Dr Roderick Bailey, Pembroke Senior Associate and Departmental Lecturer in the History of Medicine, recently contributed his expertise to the development and production of a five-part BBC ‘living history’ series currently being broadcast on Mondays at 9pm on BBC2.

The series is titled ‘Secret Agent Selection: WW2’ and began airing on 9 April. Previous episodes are available to watch on iPlayer catch-up, here and the final two are scheduled for broadcast in the coming weeks.

The series resurrects the selection and training programme of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret organisation established early in the Second World War to work with resistance movements inside enemy-occupied territory. 

Shedding new light on the early history of psychological testing and personality assessment, the BBC series draws on Dr Bailey's recent research, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, into the pioneering techniques developed by the SOE for selecting and preparing men and women for its extreme line of employment. 

Speaking about his experience working on the programme, Dr Bailey said:

‘In a nutshell, the series takes a group of modern-day volunteers though a resurrected course of 75-year-old tests and training sessions. I was on set throughout the filming and it was thoroughly odd seeing my research come to life like that.’

‘It's a format designed to reach a wide audience but the production company took it seriously, as did the 'students' doing the course, and I'm pleased and relieved to report that the history bits (which are interwoven with the recreated bits) were handled properly.’

Dr Bailey, who is the series' historical consultant, specialises in the study of modern war and conflict, and his work has focused particularly on wartime medicine and mental health, the Second World War, and Allied interactions with enemy-occupied populations. His monographs include accounts of Allied contacts with resistance fighters in the Balkans and Italy, and he is currently involved with Oxford's international research project, 'Transnational Resistance, 1936-48'. He is also attached to Oxford's new Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, where he has embarked on a major study of Allied responses to outbreaks of epidemic disease in wartime Italy.