12 episodes · 6th January 1988
Three films examine the ways our historical record is under attack. In fireproof vaults, millions of feet of film shot on nitrate stock in the first half of this century are decomposing - their images in danger of being lost for ever. In publishing houses, the paper deliberately chosen to print the written word since the end of the last century is destroying itself at a steady rate. In dealers' galleries, maps and the historical record which accompanied them have been systematically separated to satisfy enthusiasts, collectors, and the demands of the marketplace. Where will the destruction lead?
The control of national television is seen by regimes the world over as a necessary adjunct to their survival today. Peter France presents two films about the control and effect of mass communications in other times. The first tells the story of the financial control of the political press by the establishment in early 19th-century Britain, and the second the psychological power of a dramatic radio broadcast in the USA 100 years later, when the young Orson Welles petrified a nation.
Henry Lincoln investigates the story of the 'Man in the Iron Mask' and - using evidence which only came to light last year - separates fact from romantic myth.
In September 1944, in retaliation for Dutch support of the Arnhem landings, the Nazis cut off all food supplies to the population of western Holland. Stocks fell through the following winter until by March 1945 the official ration was down to 500 calories a day. As four million people faced death from starvation, the only hope of relief lay in persuading the Germans to negotiate an unprecedented truce.
Christopher Andrew presents two stories from the darker and more secret side of British history over the past 150 years. THE DIARY OF A VERY ENGLISH SPY is an insight, based on a unique document, into the training and instruction given to secret agents at a British spy school during the First World War where elements of present spycraft were first perfected. '... AND ONE LAW FOR THE POOR': How the 1832 Anatomy Act denied the poor and the destitute the freedom to bury their dead but supplied anatomy schools - previously reliant on stealthy body snatchers - with a regular and legal supply of human cadavers.
How old is the Shroud of Turin? To millions of believers it's the burial cloth of Jesus, to sceptics it's a clever medieval fake. Recently the age of the shroud was finally determined by radiocarbon dating. A Timewatch team went to Turin to follow the preparation of the shroud for the scientists, and to Zurich to film the actual tests.
Bizarre theories have surrounded the unexplained killings in Whitechapel since they hit the headlines in 1888. This film dispels the grisly fiction, revealing for the first time the true contents of the police and Home Office files on the case, drawing on the expertise of historians and of those who have encountered today's killers - on the street or behind bars. Revisiting the sites of the crimes, piecing together evidence from Victorian locations across London, the invention of the legend becomes clear, as Christopher Frayling unravels the circumstances which turned a killer into a Gothic hero.
One hundred years after the matchgirls strike, this dramatised documentary looks at the life of Annie Besant, strike leader, pioneering 19th-century social reformer, and campaigner for the use of contraception who towards the end of her life turned towards theosophy.
Peter France examines the Glorious Revolution of 1688 from the perspective of William of Orange, unearthing the real motives behind his invasion.
Fifty years ago, Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin's right-hand man and favourite of the Bolsheviks, was shot by Stalin's henchmen after the last of the infamous show trials in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev recently proclaimed his death a travesty of justice and his trial a farce. Granted special permission to cover the story and the first interview with Bukharin's widow Anna, Timewatch accompanies Sir Fitzroy Maclean back to the city where he attended Bukharin's trial in 1938 to find Russians eager to talk for the first time about the terror of the '30s.
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