Cold War Britain, "Red Dawn"

Some interesting film footage in this new BBC series (iPlayer)

"Historian Dominic Sandbrook takes us back to the strange years of the Cold War. 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 we realised our democracy was facing a new totalitarian enemy: Soviet communism".