Hosted by Ian Nathan, this series features the cinematic stories of the Cold War era: propaganda, nuclear fear, a change in the US society; the spy games; and the rise and fall of the USSR and East Germany (and everything in between). Film critics and historians examine the industry both as it was happening in real time, and how films from this period have become seminal classics.
The Missiles of October is a 1974 docudrama made-for-television play about the Cuban missile crisis. The title evokes the book The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the missteps among the great powers and the failed chances to give an opponent a graceful way out, which led to the First World War. The teleplay introduced William Devane as John F. Kennedy and cast Martin Sheen as United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The script is based on Robert Kennedy's book Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
During World War II, a passenger ship travelling from Britain to the USA is torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Eleven children survive the wreck and are swept to a small uninhabited island. Miraculously, they are able to establish radio contact with none other than the grandson of the US president.
Terror of the World: The story of a deadly war that intertwines Germany, Poland, Japan, Italy and Spain, and the remorseless development of weapons and bombers.
A shepherd who is the son of a fugitive and killed scribe of the court of Mu'awiya, came to see and write about the encounter between Shimr and Umar ibn Sa'd's forces with the army of Imam Husayn on the afternoon of Ashura.
The Devil's Crown was a BBC limited series which dramatised the reigns of three medieval Kings of England: Henry II and his sons Richard the Lionheart and John. It was broadcast in thirteen 55-minute episodes between 30 April and 23 July 1978.
Henry Plantagenet (latterly Henry II), sees his opportunity to seize the crown of England and create a kingdom of law and order. He cuts a deal with King Stephen in which Stephen will name him his heir, excluding his sons Eustace and William in exchange for a fragile truce. Stephen's sudden death elevates Henry to the throne. He may have been King of England, but the bulk of the Angevin Empire was in France, and it was this that Henry regarded as the Jewel in his Crown, maintained through a series of political marriages and complex allegiances. Henry pays homage to Louis VII, King of the Franks, for these lands, but it is clear that Henry is the shrewder and more ambitious of the two kings, having married Louis' ex-wife Eleanor of Aquitaine.