Pick of the day: Dominic Sandbrook explores the history of the Cold War
Strange Days: Cold War Britain at 9pm on BBC2
In this new three-part series Dominic Sandbrook takes us back to the Cold War. For the historian these are the years in which Britain was more prosperous than ever.
Yet it lived every day with the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation. Sandbrook looks at the cinema and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to find out how the Cold War seeped into our culture and examines the impact of Cold War anxiety on one of Britain’s greatest film stars, Charlie Chaplin. He also explores the great scandal of the era, the Cambridge spy ring, and sees how anxiety about national security became intertwined with homosexuality.
He also looks at the extraordinary postwar tour of Britain by the Soviet Union football team Moscow Dynamo.