Documentaries
First there was The Seventies. now Prime goes back in time to The Sixties (Tuesday, 8.30pm), a 10-part CNN series about the decade that changed America and, by extension, the rest of the world.
The series looks at the Cold War; the war in Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the space race; television; the “British invasion”; sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; and the year of huge tumult, 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
The first episode features the event that still reverberates: the assassination of John
F Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas, Texas. However, the doco delves into the aftermath – the immediate confusion, the search for the shooter and the Dallas police investigation.
It also covers the 1964 Warren Commission that concluded that both Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer, nightclub owner Jack Ruby, had acted alone. As any conspiracy theorist knows, there has been scepticism about the
report’s findings.
The day after the royal wedding, it’s back to the usual horror with Doctor Death (TVNZ 1, Sunday, 9.00pm), an ITV documentary about Britain’s worst serial killer, Harold Shipman. He took the lives of at least 218 of his patients, possibly more. Marking 20 years since he was discovered, the doco features police interrogation tapes, and interviews with officers and witnesses.