The Great War bequeathed to British television an enduring historical and technological legacy. The series set the benchmark for historical television documentaries being remembered as ‘quite brilliant, utterly compelling […] the end of radio with pictures, and the herald of a new age in television.’ The Great War was the central component of the BBC's commemorative programme of the war's fiftieth anniversary alongside The Life of Wilfred Owen, Britten's War Requiem and Songs of the Trenches.

The first episode was broadcast on BBC2 on the evening of 30 May 1964. The series enjoyed high audience ratings which were measured by the BBC's in-house Audience Research Department, scoring an average reaction index of 80 out of 100 over all twenty-six episodes, putting it in the same league as two popular documentary series on the Second World War, Valiant Years (1961) and War in the Air (1954). Despite its impressive scale, importance, and popularity with viewers, however, the BBC's grand narrative of 1914–18 did not change the way the majority of the nation thought about the war. The overwhelming visual and emotional impact of The Great War cemented its own variations on the canon of war myths already embedded in Britain's cultural landscape by 1964.