Thursday, May 1, 2014

* Strange Days - Cold War Britain (2013)

In this three-part series screening as part of BBC Two's Cold War season, historian Dominic Sandbrook takes us back to the strange years of the Cold War in Britain.

Part 1: Red Dawn
For Sandbrook these are the years in which we were both more secure and prosperous that we had ever been - and at the same time, lived everyday with the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation. This is not just a story of the superpower arms race or daring spies, real and fictional, it is a story in which all we played a crucial part. In the first episode, Dominic brings his trademark mix of great archive and surprising storytelling to the first chilling years of the conflict, when western democracy identified a new totalitarian enemy: Soviet communism.

Part 2: The Looking Glass War
Dominic looks at the frontline of the conflict as a newly prosperous Britain of consumerism was pitched against the Soviet ideal of communism.

Part 3: Two Tribes
He plunders the archive and music of the late 1970s and the '80s to bring to life an era in which the end of the world seemed a very real possibility, years in which our leaders crusaded as never before against a struggling Soviet empire and everything from sport to shopping to British pop music became potent weapons in the life and death struggle with communism.

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