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Days That Shook the World Season 1 Episodes
Season 1 Episode Guide
13 Episodes 2003 - 2003
Episode 1
Wright Brothers First Flight/Apollo Moon Landing
Profiles of two ground breaking days in aviation. The first powered, manned flight by the Wight Brothers in Kitty Hawk North Carolina and the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon.
Episode 2
The Coronation/The Death of Diana
The coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth on June 2nd 1953, the first coronation ever to be televised. Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation went ahead, as Mary had asked before she died, taking place as planned on 2 June 1953. On 31 August 1997, Diana was fatally injured in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, which also caused the deaths of her companion Dodi Fayed and the driver, Henri Paul, acting security manager of the Hôtel Ritz Paris. Millions of people watched her funeral.
Episode 3
The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand/The Death of Hitler
WWI broke out as the result of the Assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire carried out by Serbian nationalists. The first half hour of this documentary tells the unbelievably unlikely story of what happened that day.
Episode 4
The Assassination of Rev Martin Luther King/The Release of Nelson Mandela
4 April 1968 and February 1990 How tow men - both intellectuals and determined opposers of racial oppression - came to symbolise the fight for equality as their lives for their cause.
Episode 5
Hiroshima
At exactly 5.32am on August 6th 1945, a B29 Bomber, The Enola Gay, took off from a small island in the South Pacific on a clandestine operation. It's mission? To drop a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, a bomb unlike any other that would change the world forever. This film dramatises the minute by minute events leading up to the world's first ever atomic bombing. Based on extracts from President Truman's personal diaries which show the decision-making process reflecting America's real fear that the Japanese would never give up, Japanese eyewitness accounts of the tragedy in Hiroshima, diaries written on board Enola Gay, and the personal testimony of Colonel Paul Tibbets, the man who led the mission so secret not even his crew knew the enormity of what they were doing. One millionth of a second after detonation, Hiroshima ceased to exist as a city. As estimated 100,000 people were killed and 47,000 buildings flattened. Nobody knows exactly how many civilians died in Hiroshima but its impact will be felt forever.
Episode 6
The Romanovs/The Berlin Wall
The era Communism is bookended by the Russian revolution and the murder of the Romanov family in the early days and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in the last days.
Episode 7
Kristallnacht/The Birth of Israel
9 November 1938 and 14 May 1948 Just ten years after the Nazis openly attacked Jews and their property - a huge step on the nightmare spiral to the Holocaust, the 2000 year old dream of a Jewish homeland becomes a reality and the state of Israel is Born.
Episode 8
Tutankhamun's Tomb/Deciphering the Rosetta Stone
26 November 1922 and 17 September 1822 Two days that brought ancient Egypt dramatically to life. In 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion cracks Egyptian hieroglyphs. One hundred years later, Howard Carter reads the name on a tomb and makes an amazing discovery.
Episode 9
First Nuclear Reaction/Chernobyl
2 December 1942 and 26 April 1986 The first controlled nuclear chain reaction heralded the atomic age, but Chernobyl's runaway chain reaction was the first warning. How did the most exciting scientific breakthroughs ever lead to the disaster that the world had dreaded?
Episode 10
Black September Hijackings/Lockerbie
In September 1970 Terrorists hijacked a number of jetliners, flew them to Jordan and kept numerous hostages to enforce their demands. In December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 was blown from the sky killing all aboard and a number of Lockerbie Scotland residents.
Episode 11
The Assassination of JFK/The Resignation of Nixon
No one could have dreamed or anticipated the seismic shocks America suffered in the 20th century with the assassination of its youngest-ever leader and the disgrace and expulsion of its most successful election winner
Episode 12
Marconi's First Transatlantic Radio Transmission/Concorde's First Transatlantic Flight
It is 19th October 1977 and Concorde taxis onto the runway at Toulouse Airport. Onboard, the crew are preparing for an historic day - the first supersonic test flight to New York. At JFK airport, protestors are waiting with a hostile welcome, but for the Concorde team and the French and British governments it is a moment that represents the end of an exhausting struggle.
Episode 13
Faster than Sound: Chuck Yeager and Donald Campbell
Chuck Yeager attempts to break the sound barrier in Bell's SX1 jet and Donald Campbell attempts to set a new water speed record in his own jet propelled boat.
Episode 13
Faster than Sound: Chuck Yeager and Donald Campbell
Chuck Yeager attempts to break the sound barrier in Bell's SX1 jet and Donald Campbell attempts to set a new water speed record in his own jet propelled boat.