On the eve of the German federal elections, Andrew Marr looks at the enigmatic Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. She is the most important politician in Europe and the most powerful woman in the world. Yet she has been criticized by some for her lack of charisma and accused by others of trying to turn Europe into a Greater Germany. Andrew Marr delves into her childhood and background to discov
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel. Clarke concurrently wrote the novel of the same name which was published soon after the film was released. The story deals with a series of encounters between humans and mysteri
For the making of Martin Scorsese's classic Goodfellas, Scorsese collaborated with producer and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. Together they took credit for writing the script which had to go through 12 iterations before being considered finished.Scorsese persuaded Pileggi that they shouldn't follow the traditional narrative structure of having a start, middle and end but rather wanted to d
There is a new frontline in the war against organized crime. In southern Italy's rugged highlands a previously unknown criminal group know as the 'Ndrangheta meet, it's bosses are some of Europe's biggest cocaine traffickers. The police are fighting back forcing mafiosi underground into bizarre sophisticated bunkers. From here they run their criminal empires protected by a wall of silence. "They d
Ian Huntley, Stuart Hazell, Mitchell Quy and Karen Matthews are some of the notorious criminals of recent years, all convicted for different crimes but all with one thing in common, they all lied on camera about the crimes they themselves had committed. In this ITV special the lies of these criminals who managed to briefly fool Britain are put under the microscope whilst three of the nations
The far east saw some of the worst fighting and most appalling atrocities of the second world war, millions died but one young man managed to pull through the lot. He somehow survived a combination of catastrophes unlike any other. Torture and disease whilst a prisoner in a Japanese war camp, torpedo and shipwreck and most of all the Nagasaki atom bomb, each of these killed tens of thousands but s
This is the incredibly strange tale of Howard and his wife Kathy Walmsley, you see one day back in the late 90's Howard told Kathy a little lie, he claimed to have won an £8.9 million jackpot on the British National Lottery and Kathy believed him. As a result the two went on a shopping spree, buying fast cars, a dream home and a lifestyle fit for a multi-millionaire but it was all o
We like to think that humans are special, and we are but we are not one of a kind. The past thirty to frothy thousand years in human history have been really unique in the sense that we are alone on our planet. Earlier than this and there were always different types of humans around, those that we met and mixed with.Thanks to well preserved DNA we now know that there were at least four
The most famous death in history is the death of Jesus of Nazareth. 2,000 years ago in first century Jerusalem he was crucified by the Romans, the Gospels tell us he was buried in a tomb and two days later Marry Magdalene one of his closest disciples found the tomb empty.But according the Gospel of Mathew there was another story circulating after Jesus's death and though gospel calls it a lie