Sometimes airplanes suggest features of personality. The massive P-47 has always looked pugnacious to me. The Me-109 looks like somebody's final project for a Masters in engineering. The Supermarine Spitfire has always suggested grace. It might have been designed by a sculptor and was arguably the most beautiful fighter of World War II. In the Battle of Britain, the Spitfire was about evenly matched with the Me-109 "Emil." To say that, is to say a lot, because while the RAF was still using biplanes until the late 1930s, the Germans were already perfecting the Luftwaffe.
The narration traces the development of the airplane, through its designer's death just before it went into production. And the narration does more than honor the airplane and its pilots. "Mitchell's 'pretty little toy' was about to teach the Germans a new game." Well, not really. Maybe the other way round. The pilots flying the 109 were highly skilled and had had combat experience, while Britain was rushing to catch up. Some in the RAF had only fired a few rounds into the ocean. And they flew in a V formation, elegant to look at but inefficient in battle. They learned from the Germans to fly in the more effective "finger four" formation.
The narration is misleading in other ways. It's true that during the Blitz, the Luftwaffe outnumbered the RAF two to one, but that count included German bombers as well as fighters. And limitations of fuel limited the 109s to about twenty minutes of flying time over England before the red light went on and they left the bombers to carry on without escort. The USAAF was to run into the same problem over Europe until the introduction of the P-51.
The glamorous Spitfire was everyone's idea of a great airplane, and boys whittle models of them out of balsa wood. At the same time, the Hurricane was cheaper to build and had gotten an earlier start. Although the Hurricane's performance was inferior to the Spitfire's, there were more of them and they brought down more bombers. To point out the limitations of a device is to take nothing away from its virtues.
The program consists mainly of newsreel and combat footage, interviews with one expert and several English pilots of the period. It's quite well done, a tribute to a splendid machine.