NATIONAL POST ARTS

The ladies of Bomb Girls ‘went from baking pies to making bombs’

Michael MacLennan, the head writer of a new miniseries centred on the women who worked in Canadian munitions factories during the Second World War, gives a succinct explanation for what is one of Bomb Girls’ most striking, immediate features: “It can be difficult finding conflict today,” he says.

Sitting in the office of a 1940s-era furniture factory in southern Etobicoke that was converted to an expansive set for the Global series, MacLennan talks about how Bomb Girls, which deals with characters who risked their lives for the war, didn’t know if their husbands and sons would return home alive, and even wondered if Hitler would bring the fighting to North America, doesn’t have to stretch the imagination to create drama. “It’s a relief, so to speak, to write where the issues are so starkly drawn,” he says.