Revealed Back with Nazi Titanic and Sir Peter Jackson's Stunt Pilots
Channel 5 today announced the spring run of one of its longest-running and most successful fixtures: the Revealed historical documentary strand. March 2012 will see the channel broadcast four powerful stand-alone stories, each with a brand new discovery at its heart. The year’s first batch of new Revealed documentaries launches with the bizarre tale of the forgotten propaganda film made by the Nazis about the sinking of the Titanic, and goes on to cover: an investigation (by the production company that made The King’s Speech) into the birth of the RAF that uses Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson’s fleet of replica WWI aeroplanes for spectacular airborne experiments; shocking new evidence of a cover-up following the massacre of hundreds of US troops on the Devon coast during WWII; and – on the eve of its 30th anniversary – a new and very personal insight into just how close we came to losing the Falklands War.
The run kicks off a great year for history on the channel. Spring’s Revealed series will be followed by Rory McGrath’s Pub Dig, in which Rory and archaeologist Paul Blinkhorn unearth massive Roman buildings, Neolithic hunting camps and Tudor dockyards beneath the picnic tables of the nation’s beer gardens. Two more major history series and several anniversary-related specials will be announced in coming months, and Revealed will be back for another run in the autumn.
John Hay, Commissioning Editor for Factual at Channel 5 comments, “History programming is absolutely central to Channel 5, and Revealed defines our approach to the genre. This run is full of simple, strong, unspun stories that deliver all the pleasure of a thriller or an action film while being packed full of proper scoops and shocking revelations along the way.”
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More about the programmes:
Nazi Titanic: Revealed tells the story of the forgotten 1942 blockbuster in which Nazi propagandists recast the famous disaster as a story of German courage and Allied weakness. If the script was far-fetched (it features a heroic German first officer whose warnings about an iceberg are foolishly ignored…), the story of the film’s production was more extraordinary still: a tale of power, betrayal, and perhaps even murder, which saw essential wartime resources diverted to the production, the director jailed and possibly executed on Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ orders, and – in the last days of the war – the sinking of the ship used for the filming. More died in that disaster than on the Titanic itself. Using Goebbels own diaries, unseen home movies shot behind-the-scenes during the production, the original production design book, the art director Maurischat's personal diary - also unpublished - this will be one of the year’s more surprising and unexpected ways of marking the original disaster’s 100th anniversary.
WWI Top Gun: Revealed reveals how aeroplanes won the First World War for the allies and marks another 100th anniversary – the foundation of the Royal Flying Corps, precursor to the RAF. But rather than focusing on the showboating pilots, this film uncovers how rival backroom mechanics battled to invent aerial warfare from scratch in just four years – a deadly race that rivaled the computer age for sheer speed of innovation. A bemused military establishment didn’t always realize their worth: a year before war broke out, the British turned down an approach from Anton Fokker, whose invention went on to put the Germans on top for most of the fighting. But these neglected geniuses set the template for all modern conflict. The film is being shot entirely in New Zealand in collaboration with The Vintage Aviators – Oscar-winning director Sir Peter Jackson’s fleet of replica WWI aircraft – by the production company that made The King’s Speech. It’ll tell its story, and do its historical detective work, through a series of dazzling airborne experiments.
In The Secret D-Day Scandal: Revealed, we uncover how a rehearsal for D-Day on a sleepy stretch of the Devon coast turned into a bloodbath resulting in the death of hundreds of allied soldiers – and uncover evidence of a cover-up that persists to this day. Exercise Tiger was the Allies' worst training disaster of the 20th century – a tragic combination of allied incompetence and enemy infiltration that was hushed up until 1984. But even the admissions made then may conceal the real truth. The official death toll remains 749. But in this film, we follow historian and retired policeman Richard Bass as he uncovers inconsistencies in the documentation and the official memorials, and talks to UK and US servicemen who survived and civilian witnesses – many of whom have never spoken before. Bass uses recently discovered top secret documents and film archive as well as underwater excavations to show that the official secrecy surrounding the disaster could conceal a death toll far higher the authorities have ever admitted.
Finally, in the run-up to the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, we revisit the conflict through one man’s shocking experience in The Great Falklands Gamble: Revealed. Royal Marines company commander Ian R. Gardiner has never spoken publicly about his war but to see it through his eyes is to realise the enormous risk we ran in the South Atlantic, and to appreciate afresh the courage and resilience of the troops who ensured eventual victory. Appalling weather, patchy air defences, poor communications and even incompetence sometimes stacked the odds heavily against the British in an operation that the Americans had already decided was a military impossibility. But this very personal account will reveal how Gardiner and his colleagues overcame them. By explaining hair-raising realities of individual battles, it’ll shed new light on the victory that we all remember.
Notes to Editors:
Production credits:
The Nazi Titanic: Revealed is a Blink Films UK production and the Executive Producers are Stephen Marsh and Dan Chambers.
WWI: Top Gun: Revealed is made by Bedlam Productions and the Executive Producers are Simon Breen and Simon Egan.
The Secret D-Day Scandal: Revealed is made by Liverpool Street Productions and the Executive Producers are Alex Sutherland and Tris Payne.
The Great Falklands Gamble: Revealed is a Quickfire Media production and the Executive Producer is Mark Fielder.
About Revealed:
Revealed was launched in 2002 and quickly became one of the channel’s best-loved strands. These four films follow a successful autumn 2011 run that included Quickfire’s Mysteries of the Vampire Skeletons: Revealed and a series of one-off specials including Testimony Films’ Bomber Boys: Revealed, broadcast as part of the channel’s Remembrance Week.
About Channel 5 Factual:
Channel 5 attracts over 45m viewers per month and regularly outperforms its terrestrial competitors. Indeed, across the peak hours of 8-11pm in 2011, Channel 5 outperformed BBC TWO on more than 50 occasions and Channel 4 more than 60 times. The channel’s factual output commands particularly strong audiences. Recently, World’s Scariest Plane Crashes pulled in 1.9 million in the 8pm slot. 2011’s Royal Navy Caribbean Patrol averaged 2.1 million viewers at 9pm. Two parter Jack The Ripper: The Definitive Story averaged 1.8 million whilst Red Sea Jaws pulled in an average of 1.8 million and Amy Winehouse: The Untold Story averaged 1.4 million at 10pm. Long-running strand Extraordinary People also remains hugely popular – Losing One Of My Giant Legs delivered 2.1 million viewers in August 2011, beating BBC TWO and C4 across the hour, while The Woman Who Lost Her Face pulled in 1.9 million last October – again beating BBC TWO.
For further information, please contact Lesley Land or Carly Coughlan at The Outside Organisation on 0207 436 3633 lesley.land@outside-org.co.uk or carly.coughlan@outside-org.co.uk
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