Nope it was programmes like Paxman's who went in depth into why men joined up - and that's part of history

What Paxman actually said.

"Don't insult my Uncle Charlie or his comrades. Their sacrifice in WWI foiled Germany's plan to rule the world,"

"Yet we are stuck with the default conviction that the First World War was an exercise in purposelessness. That was not the prevailing view at the time. On the contrary, Lord Kitchener's appeal for volunteers in the early days of the war had been so successful that lines at recruitment offices snaked for blocks down city streets.
The great harvest of anti-war memoirs and novels did not appear until ten years after the Armistice. Throughout it all, the resolve of the British people did not weaken."

"What aggravates our ignorance is the false assumption that we do understand the First World War. We need to cast ourselves back into the minds of these men and their families, to try to inhabit the assumptions of their society rather than to replace them with our own.
How, one wonders, would the teacher explain to her students that after writing his celebrated denunciations of battle, Wilfred Owen returned to the Western Front to continue fighting and, furthermore, described himself in his last letter to his mother as 'serene'? It was, he said, 'a great life'."

"The retrospective narrative of innocent conscripts, dullard generals and boneheaded battle plans has become tiresomely familiar. It is precisely because the Great War changed so much that we understand it so little."