Timely reminder of where it all began
FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR YESTERDAY CHANNEL, 8PM TODAY
ARE we entering a new Cold War, as people seem to be saying, or are we embarking on an entirely new period, called a Hot Peace, as some strategists have suggested?
If we want to know where we’re going, it’s usually a good idea to first find out where we’re coming from and the Yesterday channel has run some brilliant historical documentaries in the last few months.
In fact, they recently ran a series about the end of the Cold War and it caused an existential crisis in some people I know when they realised that their still-vivid teenage memories have now become fodder for historical programmes. From World War To Cold War brings us back to when it all began, at the Yalta conference in February 1945 between the soon to be victorious Allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
Some of the mistakes made at that meeting would reverberate down through history and, you could argue, we’re still trying to pick up the pieces.
As relations between the West and Russia fall to their lowest point since the 1980s, this comprehensive two-parter examines the power games and mind tricks played by these very reluctant partners.
There is the unmistakeable feeling that Vladimir Putin is the only player who understands history in the current game of global brinkmanship being played out on the news channels every evening. From World War To Cold War provides a timely reminder of how the decisions made back then still affect the decisions made today...
History of a different, rather less terrifying, sort comes in the shape of When Football Changed Forever
(UTV, tonight, 11.45pm), a look back at the last season of what was then known as
Division One before the Premier League arrived in all its bloated, unloveable glory in 1992.
Apart from the appalled fascination that the players’ fashions of the time are likely to provoke, it also delves into the murky dealings and boardroom shenanigans which helped to usher in what is now the richest, but not the best, league in the world.
Tomorrow’s best documentary is undoubtedly Missing – A
Prime Time Rewind (RTÉ One, tomorrow, 10.15pm) which looks at the awful case of undercover British intelligence officer Robert Nairac, who was abducted and killed by the IRA in 1977.
One of the murkier cases from that bleak and unpleasant period, there were all sorts of rumours spread about Nairac and his activities at the time, to the extent that, even today, people remain unsure of the exact details. This is a worthy last episode for the
Prime Time Rewind series.