COUNTRY File was there. Antiques Roadshow was there. And maybe there were other programmes, besides those two that I happened to see, filmed at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

It’s a magnificent tribute to all the members of the Armed Forces killed in service since the Second World War. Surrounded by individual memorial trees, its centrepiece is the curving memorial wall, engraved with more than 16,000 names. So much for the “peace” of the last 66 years.

Rightly, this memorial has become a major place of pilgrimage. It deserves to be as well known as the Cenotaph. And yet, last week, a national spotlight ought to have fallen on a brand new memorial wall, bearing just 20 names.

As one community’s salute to its post-Second World War dead in the armed services, Sunderland’s new memorial wall surely can’t be bettered. No praise can be too high for this inspired addition to Sunderland’s civic scene.

Especially imaginative is the division of the granite wall into sections, each devoted to a separate conflict, introduced with a crisp description.

We now know why our servicemen – and women – died in Sierra Leone or the Congo.

Amazingly, it took just two years to create this memorial, from its inception by a local group, the Brothers in Arms. Wotton Bassett is now Royal through honouring the war dead as they passed through its streets. Sunderland’s wall easily bears comparison with that homage. Following its dedication Sunderland’s citizens can stand tall and say with pride: we know how to honour our war dead in Sunderland.

REPORTED on Armistice Day last week was the discovery of poems glorifying the First World War by the celebrated antiwar poet Siegfried Sassoon.

No poet more graphically catches the hell of the trenches than Sassoon, who served as an officer. He wrote of seeing his men “in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats”. He savaged the generals who when the war is done and youth stone dead”, would “toddle safely home and die – in bed”.

But in newly-found diaries are poems treating war as a heroic adventure. Typical is: “A host of swords in harmony/ With the whole loveliness of light flung forth to lead you through the fight.”

Does this mar Sassoon’s high reputation?

No, for he chose not to publish these poems.

It’s often overlooked that Sassoon, who lived until 1967, wrote anti-war poems throughout his life. Anticipating “the first bacterial bomb”( yet to fall, though it assuredly will) he said the world might then find “That all the aspirations of the dead/ Had been betrayed and blotted out.”

Sassoon despised the very first memorial wall, the famous Menin Gate, engraved with 55,000 of what he called “these intolerably nameless names.” He observed: “Well might the dead who struggled in the slime/Rise up and deride this sepulchre of crime.”

Though few have ever shared that view, the intoned solemnities of Remembrance Day sometimes grate. Perhaps the most telling feature of the national memorial wall is the sculpted figure of a sculptor, hammer and chisel poised. There’ll be new names to engrave, eventually requiring a new wall. Same at Sunderland – unless we ditch what another poet, Cecil Day Lewis, called “that stale imposter – a cut-throat world for the living, a poppy wreath for the slain”.